Poet John Yamrus grew up in Swoyersville and uses his memories as inspiration for some of his poetry.
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‘Present Tense’ by John Yamrus.
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‘The Street’ by John Yamrus
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‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’ by John Yamrus
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The day before a telephone interview, John Yamrus sent a short message to a reporter: “I’ll wear my clown shoes and a beanie-copter so you can pick me out of the crowd.”
Half an hour later, he continued joking: “Just to be clear, you’re calling me, and I’ll be sitting by the phone like it’s 2 weeks to prom and I still don’t have a date.”
Using words to create mental images comes naturally to Yamrus, 75, a Swoyersville native who now lives in Berks County. He writes every day, has had more than 4,000 pieces published, and takes pride in being able to say, “Never have I paid to have my work published. If somebody didn’t want to put up the money, I would figure it wasn’t very good.”
Anxiety Press from the Chicago area publishes his work now, and before that, it was Epic Rites Press from Canada. In a forward to one of his books, New Mexico Junior College professor emeritus Peter Mladinic, who has used Yamrus’ work as course material, wrote: “This poet on the page is as fluid as a dancer on stage, or on the dance floor. Everything flows, everything fits, so that readers, rightfully, cannot tell what passages were labored over more than others… He is precise and fluid… passionate about what he puts on the page.”
Some of the word pictures Yamrus has put on the page take the reader to his long-ago neighborhood, where to be a child during the late ’50s and early ’60s sounds a bit harrowing.
Consider the elderly man who used barbed wire to fence off part of his yard. Young John Yamrus and other kids trembled at the thought of sneaking in to rescue an errant baseball and maybe facing the old man’s daughters.
This is what Yamrus, who doesn’t use capital letters in his poems, recalls:
“the second a ball went over the fence … that barbed wire fence … like magic, one of those women would open the back door, run down the grey painted steps, grab the ball and take it away. gone. forever. they must have been watching us … standing on that back porch of theirs, looking out from behind the curtains.
in those few times that i can remember when a ball went into the yard and they didn’t come running right out – (those women – those crazies – those screaming, addled, wacky crones) – we’d muster up whatever courage we had in our 9 year old hearts and run like hell into the yard, ignoring the barbed wire, the ruts, and the bushes and the stones and grab the ball and run back, convinced those harpies were either running down the stairs after us or flying across the yard on hellish witches’ wings.”
So, did kids crawl under the fence? Climb over it?
“We’d run in through the driveway,” said Yamrus, who remembers that even if the barbed-wire family didn’t get you, another frightening figure just might.
She roamed the neighborhood dressed in black, complete with a veil. Kids knew her as “Black Mary” and, Yamrus writes: “when we saw her walking (always at night), we’d hide behind hedges and trees, trying to scoot down and get a look at her and understand the magic, hoping against hope that you could get a good look without her turning around and giving you the eye and turning you into stone.”
“She was probably just some World War II widow, maybe Italian,” Yamrus said in his phone interview. In our 8- or 9-year-old brains, we turned her into some evil thing. I feel bad about it now.”
Among his memories, there are also sentiments to feel good about, such as the admiration he had for his father:
“he’d step out of that coal truck and it was like god coming down from heaven. the door would swing open and he’d step out, real slow, like a gunslinger … like Gary Cooper in High Noon, slow and sure and deliberate. and then he’d kinda pose … one foot in the cab … one foot on the ground … and i thought no one ever had a dad cooler or stronger or wiser than me. no one.”
Yamrus, who makes sure to write something every day, said: “I got that work ethic from watching my father and uncles and other neighbors doing their work and doing it well.”
Those men were of Eastern European descent, and Yamrus surmises that could be the reason why a Europe-based translator named Fadil Bajraj, who has also translated works by Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings and Robert Frost, contacted the poet a few years ago and said he wanted to translate some of his work into Albanian.
“I think of my poems as snapshots,” Yamrus said. “All you can see is what’s going on in your point of view. What’s going on beyond your point of view is what I want the reader to imagine.”
That’s why the poet might write about the way he precariously perched on the handlebars as a friend zoomed down a Swoyersville hill on his bicycle — but he doesn’t tell you if they safely reached the bottom, or if they wiped out somewhere along the way.
“The reader’s imagination is a tool for me, the same way the blank spaces on the page are,” he said. And, yes, if you look at his books, you will see plenty of blank spaces, which he compares to periods of silence. “I learned the importance of silence by listening to jazz,” he said. “Specifically, Miles Davis.”
Yamrus’ books are available on Amazon.
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