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Blasphemer
76 poems.
152 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2015
1 person is currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Bill Yarrow
42 books92 followers
I am the author of the following books of poems: Critique of Pure Dreaming (academia.edu 2023), Flying Blind (Yavanika Press 2020), Accelerant (Nixes Mate Books 2019), Against Prompts (Lit Fest Press 2018), We All Saw it Coming (Locofo Chaps 2017), The Vig of Love (Glass Lyre Press 2016), Blasphemer (Lit Fest Press 2015), The Lice of Christ (MadHat Press 2014), Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku (Cervena Barva Press, 2013), Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012), Fourteen (Naked Mannekin, 2011), and Wrench (erbacce press, 2009). I have published widely in print and online journals such as RHINO, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Contrary, DIAGRAM, Thrush, PANK, Poetry International, Iodine Poetry Journal, and FRiGG. I am also professor emeritus of English at Joliet Junior College where I taught Creative Writing, Introduction to Film Study, and Introduction to Shakespeare.
Free download of "Critique of Pure Dreaming," "The Apnea Poems," "Fourteen," "100 Poems Under 100 Words," and other works at academia.edu
"Bill Yarrow hits new heights with this poetry book; it has his intellectual prowess coupled with a deep vulnerability...a breathless read that left me wanting more. Most highly recommended."
—Susan Tepper, Amazon and Facebook review of The Vig of Love
"I finished your new book, and it is excellent!!!! You have a wonderful handle on imagery and metaphor. The surrealists would include you as one of theirs. As you know, I don't like many modern poets, but you are at the top of my like list."
—Larry Mesirow Facebook review of The Vig of Love
"I was overwhelmed by the richness of this collection....Always a master of precision, Yarrow writes like silver lace on silver cloth of unpaid lovers’ debts, the past’s weight, and the sorrows of the present. There is incredible beauty in The Vig of Love, gorgeous imagery, and sinuous style. I felt the author had arrived at a place of perfect pitch, the high-wire walk between pleasure and pain as though the act of a mesmerist.."
—Stephanie Dickinson, author of Love Highway, editor of Rain Mountain Press
"Just finished Blasphemer. I love your sense of humor and your willingness to push the envelope by looking askance at sacred subjects. Good poetry helps us see something in a way that we've never envisioned it before. You succeed admirably in that respect. Yours is a book that I unreservedly recommend."
—Richard L. Hanson
Blasphemer is everything a worshiper of contemporary poetry is looking for. Thought provoking, experimental at times, complemented with a fair amount of humor and transformative language, Yarrow is a genius at exploring, and ultimately splintering, the root of our belief systems—religion, society, politics, family, and yes, the blessed writing community."
—Julie Demoff-Larson, Blot Lit Reviews
"Bill Yarrow’s very own brand of blasphemy often ends up sounding like an offbeat celebration of what Stevens called 'things as they are.' Yarrow’s complex view of reality owes a lot to his optimism and LOL sense of humor. You will find much to cherish in Yarrow’s new book, not least its range, its versatility."
—Jaime Reyes, Amazon customer review
"Yarrow's work questions traditional religion, love, and western culture in this shocking and inspiring work. 'There's No Crying in Poetry' was extremely well done and my personal favorite."
—dramaqueen17, Amazon customer review
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April 10, 20161. Review by Spencer Dew of Blasphemer. This review appears in the April 2016 issue of decomP magazinE.
As a legal term, blasphemy represents a privileging of sentiment over liberty. Blasphemy laws outlaw speech and other forms of expression that are or could be read as expressing irreverence toward what a given “religious” tradition claims as sacred. But as blasphemy is defined by those offended (or otherwise interested in employing “blasphemy” as a leverage of power) as irreverence, then iconoclasm and polemic can be described by this term, too. While rhetoric around such problematic laws frame the blasphemer as perpetrating something like a hate crime, motivated by disavowal of the tradition involved (i.e., a cartoon making fun of Muhammad drawn out of contempt for the whole history of Islam) the blasphemer could just as easily be invested in that tradition, a prophetic voice of protest rejecting certain trappings and interpretations while advancing claims of a more authentic, more pure religion.
Bill Yarrow is this second kind of blasphemer. He’s scourging the temple of what he takes to be destructive illusions: theology as determinism, ethics as a cover for a greedy model of reciprocity, empathy as a dodge from facing real evil (“Empathy results in exculpation. It results in: ‘O Doctor Mengele, you poor man!’”), and all those cereal box theologies wherein “God” is some fantasy father, author, or cop. “God can be seen in man’s ability to imagine God,” Yarrow insists. This is his religion, the “Powers of artistic emotion” and the work of real artists struggling to do the new and the true, from the formal experiments of Oulipo to Max Beckmann’s paintings and Hart Crane’s poetry. When he reimagines a traditional Passover song as a ditty about roadside bombs, the act might at first read like the first sort of blasphemy (pissing on tradition), but Yarrow’s piece forces the reader to stare at the horrifically human, and it acts, in its own words, as “the Realignment and the Knife”—art, jarring and slicing, reorienting and transforming.
So Yarrow’s ultimate target in this tract is what he calls “charlatan art,” and he tears into it with satire in “Poetry is Other People” and the stabbing “Overheard at the Open Mic” (“I’m not kidding: this actually happened to me”). This is “blasphemy” as a believer cleaning house, resacralizing by—as the term implies—setting apart, drawing a line between trash and art. And at the same time, Yarrow employs imagery and ideas from religion in order to express his own desires, clutching, for instance, the crucifix that is Ferlinghetti (pocket-sized, a ubiquitous trinket) while longing for the return of that transcendent force which is Pound. No doubt someone, somewhere, would call that metaphor “blasphemy.” Far more accurate, however, to recognize it as a prayer.
2. Review by Jaime Reyes of Blasphemer. This 5 star user review appeared on Amazon on May 20, 2015.
Bill Yarrow’s very own brand of blasphemy often ends up sounding less like conventional irreverence than like an offbeat celebration of what Stevens called “things as they are.” Yarrow’s complex view of reality owes a lot to his optimism and LOL sense of humor; he’s finally not a naysayer—let alone one of those increasingly numerous religious “nones” who cling to neither church nor belief in God.
Here’s Yarrow poking at the infirmity of his age—and at God; I quote the poem in its entirety:
CAR ALARM
Wire’s shot.
Timing’s off.
Plugs and points
need to be replaced.
Gaskets smashed.
Hoses rotted.
That’s the body for you.
Most mornings won’t start.
Dings, nicks, and scratches
on the exterior. Failing
internal combustion organs.
God the mechanic
is a little booked up.
He’ll see you after you’re dead.
Jesus! I hate poems like this!
Yarrow’s terse description of his decrepit body as a broken-down jalopy is funny enough to preface the ironic line about God’s being “booked up.” Despite the surprise power of what his indented punch line says, Yarrow loves poems like this, i.e., poems that dispel platitudinous pieties. His humor at times approaches that of the now 90-year-old, somewhat overlooked, New York City poet Edward Field.
Part Three of Blasphemer collects thirteen “found poems”; the book is a capacious 149 pages composed of six parts, each containing thirteen lucky poems. Yarrow’s found poems recycle original source material by such unlikely bedfellows as Jack Spicer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Sir Thomas Browne. Elsewhere, Yarrow commandeers Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound (in the blisteringly titled “The Pissant Cantos”!). Considering Yarrow’s fondness for refrain lines—anaphora—he cares about pantoums, ghazals, and sestinas. He’s also wondrously attracted to the length of lines increasing so as to create a visual image on the page. His preference for the “staircase stanza,”—which, so to speak, “steps down” line after line—as well as his occasional preference for poems with right-hand margins, suggest how, with classical training, he has smartly moved beyond knee-jerk formatting.
You will find much to cherish in Yarrow’s new book, not least its range, its versatility. Time and again Yarrow has fun, evoking an oy vey wisdom you won’t easily forget.
3. Review by Julie Demoff-Larson of Blasphemer. This review appeared on Blot Lit Reviews in Blotterature Magazine on May 19, 2015.
On the back of Bill Yarrow’s second poetry collection, Bud Smith states that “Blasphemer doesn’t fuck around.” And it doesn’t. Blasphemer is everything a worshipper of contemporary poetry is looking for and deserves a critical in-depth analysis. However, word count and a reader’s attention span limit me. Thought provoking, experimental at times with form and theme, complimented with a fair amount of humor and transformative language that cuts out all the bull. Yarrow is a genius at exploring, and ultimately splintering, the root of our belief systems—whether religion, society, politics, family, and yes, the blessed writing community. He plays with the work of others creating new statements and welcoming the reader to seek out the originals. Blasphemer is a full length collection containing 76 poems divided into six parts, all with catchy blasphemy subtitles.
Poems in each part are connected by theme, some adding context to earlier poems or feeding on meaning that reveals a greater complexity in Yarrow’s work. In Part 1: To Blaspheme or Not to Blaspheme, Yarrow depicts an America far removed from a global community or universal understanding of god in “Holy Week.” But the poem becomes so much more when the next poem, “Ribs” is read:
Man reached in the carcass of the Lord
and tore Satan from the rib of God.
The mountains of humility went silent,
the rain of regency dried its eyes,
and the clouds of unknowing began to know.
Snow masquerading as kindness ballooned
into bombast as the world washed its hands
of worldliness.
“Man reached” says so much here in that this discontent and disconnect from anything that is unfamiliar—the other—is created by man. Our reality fed to us via media, government, religious sects, and so on, as we accept the “indifference, stiff as a wombat penis” And it “takes all my strength not to worship it.” Yarrow is careful not to overwhelm the reader with heavy-handed dogma and breaks up the serious side with humorous pieces such as “”Jesus, Zombie” or tongue-in-cheek “Getting Goddless” where one of my favorite stanzas offers:
Jealousy is a cocktail made of equal parts insecurity and possession.
Before we can be jealous, we must make our mate our thing,
Our God is a jealous God. What an unfortunate idea.
Yarrow’s use of lists in Blasphemer stand out among the variety of forms used including cantos, pantoum, sonnet, ghazal, lyric, and others. In “The New Blurb,” he pokes fun at blurbs that always seem to indicate that the book is outstanding. These alternatives take on publishing norms—giant and small press—is quite hilarious and leaves me with the feeling that Yarrow does not take himself or the industry too seriously.
9. Don’t let the fact that the writing in this book is terrible dissuade you from buying it. Support independent presses!
But Yarrow doesn’t stop there, he also tackles the Bukowski’s in “There’s No Crying in Poetry” and even his own relevance as a writer in “What the Hell Am I Doing?”
Many poems throughout prove Yarrow’s knack for narrative and are among some of my favorite reads. “Etta Kapusta” remembers a love affair intertwined with an admiration for poets read during that time—particularly Ferlinghetti. However, at its end the poem reads more as a tribute to the forgotten poet. The memory of, or maybe the romanticized relationship that the reader originally had with the poet’s words diminished over time and only the popular remain (aka the Ferlinghetti’s of the world). Is this the blasphemy Yarrow is pointing out? Or is it blasphemous to say:
And now, it’s ten years after. And ten years after that. And ten plus ten years even after that. And all I have left is a shelf full of books that no one wants to read—Kesey, Paton, Kleist, Pound, Kosinski, Pavese, Kazantzakis, Pinter. But Ferlinghetti. People still read Ferlinghetti. They do. They hold on to Ferlinghetti, like he was a crucifix.
Blasphemer takes risks and questions norms, redefining them as absurdities. Bill Yarrow’s poetry makes you think about those hush-hush topics that ignite. However, this collection is more than an anthem against everything held dear. It is about opening up the possibilities to something new, something changed. There is a lot to this collection and it is almost impossible to comment on all aspects, but know that Blasphemer is a study in poetry—complex and thoughtful, entertaining and bold.
4. Review by Susan Tepper of Blasphemer. This 5 star user review appeared on Amazon on June 22, 2015.
In Blasphemer, a normal sized book with spreading ideas, poet Bill Yarrow invites the reader to examine the duality of nature, God, sex, and just about anything else a person might encounter, willingly or otherwise, during our short lifetimes. If that isn't provocation enough, this book's back cover questions the author's motivations by asking: "Is Bill Yarrow a blasphemer? You decide."
Well, besides being provoked and jolted and smashed around a bit, I was also mesmerized by the quick-fever aspect of Yarrow's presentation, of his thoughts set down in the form of poetry. Even this classical book cover (quite beautiful) presents a backdrop of bright pink building facade juxtaposed against a classical carved image. This pink could be a fabric used as a drape or a smoke-screen. Is this a book of smoke and mirrors? Is the poet tampering with the reader's self-imposed views? I don't know. But the ideas presented as poems kept me in position during one reading of the entire book. Most highly recommended.
As a legal term, blasphemy represents a privileging of sentiment over liberty. Blasphemy laws outlaw speech and other forms of expression that are or could be read as expressing irreverence toward what a given “religious” tradition claims as sacred. But as blasphemy is defined by those offended (or otherwise interested in employing “blasphemy” as a leverage of power) as irreverence, then iconoclasm and polemic can be described by this term, too. While rhetoric around such problematic laws frame the blasphemer as perpetrating something like a hate crime, motivated by disavowal of the tradition involved (i.e., a cartoon making fun of Muhammad drawn out of contempt for the whole history of Islam) the blasphemer could just as easily be invested in that tradition, a prophetic voice of protest rejecting certain trappings and interpretations while advancing claims of a more authentic, more pure religion.
Bill Yarrow is this second kind of blasphemer. He’s scourging the temple of what he takes to be destructive illusions: theology as determinism, ethics as a cover for a greedy model of reciprocity, empathy as a dodge from facing real evil (“Empathy results in exculpation. It results in: ‘O Doctor Mengele, you poor man!’”), and all those cereal box theologies wherein “God” is some fantasy father, author, or cop. “God can be seen in man’s ability to imagine God,” Yarrow insists. This is his religion, the “Powers of artistic emotion” and the work of real artists struggling to do the new and the true, from the formal experiments of Oulipo to Max Beckmann’s paintings and Hart Crane’s poetry. When he reimagines a traditional Passover song as a ditty about roadside bombs, the act might at first read like the first sort of blasphemy (pissing on tradition), but Yarrow’s piece forces the reader to stare at the horrifically human, and it acts, in its own words, as “the Realignment and the Knife”—art, jarring and slicing, reorienting and transforming.
So Yarrow’s ultimate target in this tract is what he calls “charlatan art,” and he tears into it with satire in “Poetry is Other People” and the stabbing “Overheard at the Open Mic” (“I’m not kidding: this actually happened to me”). This is “blasphemy” as a believer cleaning house, resacralizing by—as the term implies—setting apart, drawing a line between trash and art. And at the same time, Yarrow employs imagery and ideas from religion in order to express his own desires, clutching, for instance, the crucifix that is Ferlinghetti (pocket-sized, a ubiquitous trinket) while longing for the return of that transcendent force which is Pound. No doubt someone, somewhere, would call that metaphor “blasphemy.” Far more accurate, however, to recognize it as a prayer.
2. Review by Jaime Reyes of Blasphemer. This 5 star user review appeared on Amazon on May 20, 2015.
Bill Yarrow’s very own brand of blasphemy often ends up sounding less like conventional irreverence than like an offbeat celebration of what Stevens called “things as they are.” Yarrow’s complex view of reality owes a lot to his optimism and LOL sense of humor; he’s finally not a naysayer—let alone one of those increasingly numerous religious “nones” who cling to neither church nor belief in God.
Here’s Yarrow poking at the infirmity of his age—and at God; I quote the poem in its entirety:
CAR ALARM
Wire’s shot.
Timing’s off.
Plugs and points
need to be replaced.
Gaskets smashed.
Hoses rotted.
That’s the body for you.
Most mornings won’t start.
Dings, nicks, and scratches
on the exterior. Failing
internal combustion organs.
God the mechanic
is a little booked up.
He’ll see you after you’re dead.
Jesus! I hate poems like this!
Yarrow’s terse description of his decrepit body as a broken-down jalopy is funny enough to preface the ironic line about God’s being “booked up.” Despite the surprise power of what his indented punch line says, Yarrow loves poems like this, i.e., poems that dispel platitudinous pieties. His humor at times approaches that of the now 90-year-old, somewhat overlooked, New York City poet Edward Field.
Part Three of Blasphemer collects thirteen “found poems”; the book is a capacious 149 pages composed of six parts, each containing thirteen lucky poems. Yarrow’s found poems recycle original source material by such unlikely bedfellows as Jack Spicer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Sir Thomas Browne. Elsewhere, Yarrow commandeers Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound (in the blisteringly titled “The Pissant Cantos”!). Considering Yarrow’s fondness for refrain lines—anaphora—he cares about pantoums, ghazals, and sestinas. He’s also wondrously attracted to the length of lines increasing so as to create a visual image on the page. His preference for the “staircase stanza,”—which, so to speak, “steps down” line after line—as well as his occasional preference for poems with right-hand margins, suggest how, with classical training, he has smartly moved beyond knee-jerk formatting.
You will find much to cherish in Yarrow’s new book, not least its range, its versatility. Time and again Yarrow has fun, evoking an oy vey wisdom you won’t easily forget.
3. Review by Julie Demoff-Larson of Blasphemer. This review appeared on Blot Lit Reviews in Blotterature Magazine on May 19, 2015.
On the back of Bill Yarrow’s second poetry collection, Bud Smith states that “Blasphemer doesn’t fuck around.” And it doesn’t. Blasphemer is everything a worshipper of contemporary poetry is looking for and deserves a critical in-depth analysis. However, word count and a reader’s attention span limit me. Thought provoking, experimental at times with form and theme, complimented with a fair amount of humor and transformative language that cuts out all the bull. Yarrow is a genius at exploring, and ultimately splintering, the root of our belief systems—whether religion, society, politics, family, and yes, the blessed writing community. He plays with the work of others creating new statements and welcoming the reader to seek out the originals. Blasphemer is a full length collection containing 76 poems divided into six parts, all with catchy blasphemy subtitles.
Poems in each part are connected by theme, some adding context to earlier poems or feeding on meaning that reveals a greater complexity in Yarrow’s work. In Part 1: To Blaspheme or Not to Blaspheme, Yarrow depicts an America far removed from a global community or universal understanding of god in “Holy Week.” But the poem becomes so much more when the next poem, “Ribs” is read:
Man reached in the carcass of the Lord
and tore Satan from the rib of God.
The mountains of humility went silent,
the rain of regency dried its eyes,
and the clouds of unknowing began to know.
Snow masquerading as kindness ballooned
into bombast as the world washed its hands
of worldliness.
“Man reached” says so much here in that this discontent and disconnect from anything that is unfamiliar—the other—is created by man. Our reality fed to us via media, government, religious sects, and so on, as we accept the “indifference, stiff as a wombat penis” And it “takes all my strength not to worship it.” Yarrow is careful not to overwhelm the reader with heavy-handed dogma and breaks up the serious side with humorous pieces such as “”Jesus, Zombie” or tongue-in-cheek “Getting Goddless” where one of my favorite stanzas offers:
Jealousy is a cocktail made of equal parts insecurity and possession.
Before we can be jealous, we must make our mate our thing,
Our God is a jealous God. What an unfortunate idea.
Yarrow’s use of lists in Blasphemer stand out among the variety of forms used including cantos, pantoum, sonnet, ghazal, lyric, and others. In “The New Blurb,” he pokes fun at blurbs that always seem to indicate that the book is outstanding. These alternatives take on publishing norms—giant and small press—is quite hilarious and leaves me with the feeling that Yarrow does not take himself or the industry too seriously.
9. Don’t let the fact that the writing in this book is terrible dissuade you from buying it. Support independent presses!
But Yarrow doesn’t stop there, he also tackles the Bukowski’s in “There’s No Crying in Poetry” and even his own relevance as a writer in “What the Hell Am I Doing?”
Many poems throughout prove Yarrow’s knack for narrative and are among some of my favorite reads. “Etta Kapusta” remembers a love affair intertwined with an admiration for poets read during that time—particularly Ferlinghetti. However, at its end the poem reads more as a tribute to the forgotten poet. The memory of, or maybe the romanticized relationship that the reader originally had with the poet’s words diminished over time and only the popular remain (aka the Ferlinghetti’s of the world). Is this the blasphemy Yarrow is pointing out? Or is it blasphemous to say:
And now, it’s ten years after. And ten years after that. And ten plus ten years even after that. And all I have left is a shelf full of books that no one wants to read—Kesey, Paton, Kleist, Pound, Kosinski, Pavese, Kazantzakis, Pinter. But Ferlinghetti. People still read Ferlinghetti. They do. They hold on to Ferlinghetti, like he was a crucifix.
Blasphemer takes risks and questions norms, redefining them as absurdities. Bill Yarrow’s poetry makes you think about those hush-hush topics that ignite. However, this collection is more than an anthem against everything held dear. It is about opening up the possibilities to something new, something changed. There is a lot to this collection and it is almost impossible to comment on all aspects, but know that Blasphemer is a study in poetry—complex and thoughtful, entertaining and bold.
4. Review by Susan Tepper of Blasphemer. This 5 star user review appeared on Amazon on June 22, 2015.
In Blasphemer, a normal sized book with spreading ideas, poet Bill Yarrow invites the reader to examine the duality of nature, God, sex, and just about anything else a person might encounter, willingly or otherwise, during our short lifetimes. If that isn't provocation enough, this book's back cover questions the author's motivations by asking: "Is Bill Yarrow a blasphemer? You decide."
Well, besides being provoked and jolted and smashed around a bit, I was also mesmerized by the quick-fever aspect of Yarrow's presentation, of his thoughts set down in the form of poetry. Even this classical book cover (quite beautiful) presents a backdrop of bright pink building facade juxtaposed against a classical carved image. This pink could be a fabric used as a drape or a smoke-screen. Is this a book of smoke and mirrors? Is the poet tampering with the reader's self-imposed views? I don't know. But the ideas presented as poems kept me in position during one reading of the entire book. Most highly recommended.
May 2, 2016
Poems by Bill Yarrow.> Some dark > some deep.>>One little kid is tied up with explosives.>Man is the square root of God.> Jealousy is a cocktail made of insecurity and possession.> A religious leader is a vanity mirror for his congregation.> Cause marks morality.> An interesting read!!!! >>>> THANK YOU GOODREADS FIRSTREADS FOR THIS FREE BOOK!!!!
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