On March 4th there was a book launch for Fucking and Other Poems, the poems that I wrote in my twenties that was published by Indolent Books. It took place at the Poetry Project. The poet Mel Elberg read before me. Then Lonely Christopher introduced me. I am grateful that his insightful words follow:

You know Don Yorty. He recently told me, “I began to write poetry in the summer of 1965 after I heard Bob Dylan sing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard and I wanted to make something that beautiful myself.” He grew up in rural Pennsylvania but eventually took his enfant terrible act on the road to Temple University and eventually onward to New York City, where he’s been deeply ingrained in the local downtown poetry community ever since. Yorty disclosed, “I began to read Walt Whitman and John Keats, and the two of them showed me what a poet was, which is himself, just be yourself, and I fell in love with the both of them, they were so alive to me I sometimes talked to them and in my mind would hold them and kiss them.” The long poem “Fucking” is the major work of his 20s, written over the course of four or five years. Indolent Books has collected it alongside a selection of Yorty’s early work. “Fucking” is a post-Beat/proto-punk poem, a wandering and ranging screed spanning from antiquity to the early mid-70s, a molotov cocktail that’s always exploding inside a burning library. The poem’s motto could be, “What’s meant, let that be said.” The acerbic, blood-soaked satire from the tail end of the Vietnam War era translates unnervingly to now. “Fucking” features striking and provoking imagery and settings like the room where Sharon Tate was killed and a Tijuana donkey show where at the bar Socrates is arguing with William Burroughs over a cup of hemlock. The poet sings of “ugliness stripped naked dragged behind horses” because that’s what’s happening. With youthful rage, Yorty proves that digging in the sands and mud of history won’t yield us marble treasures but more dirt, older dirt, that’s been absorbing all the blood. Yorty’s form of dissent is the formation of radical sexuality in opposition to a hypocritically moralistic but exploitatively violent, suppressive, and assaultive culture. There’s a focus on the deaths, murders, and suicides of cultural figures, there’s genocide, war, the causes of genocide and war, and the systems that enable and profit from it, moving from a gut-wrenching immediacy to something like contemplation. Yorty is a poet who reminds you that the page is flammable and the word incendiary. There is a sense of something, let’s call it “love,” resisting the dark and deadly forces gnawing at us, which manifests amidst the chaos like a still life with penis in sunlight. The poet is not alone, there is another in the bed with “Raphael angel curls,” there are the books on the shelf that speak to the poet, those who came and fell before the poet, there’s Sappho, and Virgil, Keats, and Hart Crane. In his poetry, Yorty presents “an invitation to approach me across the impossible.” He believes that poetry shelters us. “Fucking” is a significant work of performance and literature that one may contextualize amongst the work of Ginsberg, Baraka, and di Prima. Yorty says, “I was a performance poet at the time so memorizing the work helped me revise and edit because when you’re reciting poems from memory, unnecessary words are like too much baggage during travel. Traveling, whatever you don’t need, you get rid of. You only carry what you can carry.” “Fucking” lived for decades as a spoken word experience, and has been excerpted in various forms, but here for the first time it’s collected in full thanks to the continued support of Indolent Books, which also published Yorty’s collection Spring Sonnets. “Someday there’ll be no words.” Until then, please welcome Don Yorty.

My reading at Saint Mark’s on March the 4th follows on the Vimeo below. Enjoy.

Don Yorty at the Poetry Project, March 4, 2026
For anyone who missed my reading at the Poetry Project on the 4th, the book launch for my recently published Fucking and Other Poems, it’s 41 minutes long, about 10 minutes of talk and 30 minutes of poem. Having been warned, just click on it and hopefully enjoy.