In the 2026 Blaney Lecture, “Poetry, Movies, and Identity,” poet, art critic, and writer John Yau considers the overlapping worlds of poetry and film and the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical.

Boris Karloff played between 170 and 200 characters in a career that spanned five decades, including Frankenstein, Dr. Fu Manchu, the aging horror film star Byron Orlok, and the voice of the Grinch and narrator in the classic animated film How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). In his poem “Ave Maria,” Frank O’Hara characterized movies as “some glamorous country.” French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard famously connected photography, cinema, and ideas of truth. Yet no Chinese actor ever played Dr. Fu Manchu, while Asian American actors frequently appeared in secondary roles.

Drawing these histories together, Yau explores their collisions in poetry and film. What is the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical? How can poets and artists connect the two without becoming didactic?

About John Yau
John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher. He has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems, 1974–2024 (Omnidawn, 2025). His books of art criticism include The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has also published a novel and edited Fetish (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), an anthology of fiction.

Yau is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Yau has taught and served as a visiting writer and critic at institutions including Pratt Institute, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California, Berkeley. From 2006 to 2011, he was the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He founded the nonprofit press Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic. Yau is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon, New York.

The Academy of American Poets' programs are made possible in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.