Dean Young
from Skid
Action Figuring
Maybe this is a guy thing but I find
pizza almost completely sustaining.
One does not have meals, one has pizza
and thus is able to work unimpeded
upon one's theories. One gunman,
definitely one gunman. Such simplicity,
however, can lead to murderous boredom.
In the last 3 days, I have rented 8 videos,
have seen explode: helicopters, satellites,
a bridge, flesh-eating puppets, heads,
hands, the White House, unclassifiable
weaponry, flora and fauna of distant worlds
and still within me some fuse burns on.
Love is not everything yet without it
one explosion is much like any other.
Monday, mine own true saboteur returns
to complicate my diet and napping
deliciously although there will be infinitely
more dishes, more fuzz. Sex isn't
everything but inside each of us is
a sort of timer, a sort of spring.
My one and only detonator comes with
many small accessories which, if she was
an army man, would be: grenades, bazookas,
flame-throwers, all in danger of being
sucked up a vacuum cleaner hose. I believe
everyone should have the opportunity
to sift through dust and hair and find
an emerald. On the whole, I am in favor
of the sense that "things are more complicated
than one at first thought" which makes one
nervous often in a good, young-in
the-fingertips way. You could be washing
your car, you could be gleaning naught
from the printed media while inside
is this flying then, gee, how did all
this fruit salad get here? But wait!
Can we ever be sure it is fruit salad
and not some sort of bomb? One gazes into
the other's eyes and sees the reflection
of one's regrettable nose but more importantly
a darkness that is seeing depth itself
unless one uses ophthalmological equipment
and then examines the retina and vascularization
and vitreous humor which in composition
is very akin to amniotic fluid. I can't remember
swimming without remembering almost drowning.
Either one is about to be frightened to death
or this is prelude to a kiss.
A Poem by Dean Young
Don't think for one fucking instant
that I don't have a broken heart.
The man in briefs in an infinite sea
believes there is no subconscious,
nor is he aware that tempora exists.
Don't think I have not eaten
in the most beautiful Chinese restaurant
in the world. Don't think I have not written
on the walls of my bathtub.
Don't think I haven't poisoned a snail.
Don't think I haven't ignited
the sulfur of the fortune teller.
Of course I have written a poem by Dean Young!
More than once I have written a poem by Dean Young.
More than once I have left them by your gate.
More than once I have stuffed the euycalyptus leaves
in your mouth. More than once I have lived,
more than once I have died because of it.
I love you. This remarkable statement
has appeared on earth to substantiate the clams.
Perhaps now we can reach an agreement in the Himalayas,
returning shortly thereafter as gods, the kind kind
largely ignored by larger and more sensitive organisms.
Don't think I wasn't shocked when
you were a traffic signal
and I a woodpecker.
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I Can Hardly Be Considered a Reliable Witness
First there was a raffle conducted by silhouettes
then some gaga clangor and the deflection
of not getting what I wanted probably never.
I was trying to write The Indomitability
of the Human Spirit to impress you but
it kept coming out The Undomesticated
Human Spigot, a blowhard stoned soap opera.
I couldn't understand anything and you
were my teacher. The rain bounced off
the upturned canoes by the man-made lake
and out of the man-made water small bodies
propelled themselves into the nevertheless air.
This I could not do.
I had been worn out by a lasagna.
A train had run through my almanac.
I had gone directly to the small screen.
It was only a couple times I leaned from the window
in that gorilla mask yet of all I have accomplished
and delayed, my deeds in the outback, cradling
the dying wombats, cataloging every wrong
ever done to me with innovative
cross-references, this is what I'm remembered for:
leaning from a window in a gorilla mask.
It's frustrating,
like hiding stolen jewelry in tubs of lard.
Sure, it works but have you ever tried
to get grease off a brooch?
Or geese out of a coach for that matter.
They have to be heavily sedated
and it's weeks before they can even float right.
Even Funnier Looking Now
If someone had asked me then,
Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's
dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner
of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said
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or No way! Never would I have said,
What could you possibly be talking about?
I had just gotten to the twentieth century
like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.
My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.
I knew I was made of glass but I didn't
yet know what glass was made of: hot sand
inside me like pee going all the wrong
directions, probably into my heart
which I knew was made of gold foil
glued to dust. It was you I loved,
only you but you kept changing
into different people which made
kissing your mouth very exciting.
Of the birds, I loved the crows best,
sitting on their lawn chairs, ranting
about their past campaigns, the broken
supply lines, the traitors. Some had bodies
completely covered with feathers like me,
some were almost invisible like you.
And of the rivers, I loved the Susquehanna,
how each spring it would bring home a boy
who didn't listen disguised as a sack of mud.
Everyone knew if you were strong enough
and swam fast and deep enough, you'd reach
another city but no one was ever strong enough.
Along the banks: the visceral honeysuckle.
That was the summer we tanned on the roof
reading the Russians. You told me
you broke up with your boyfriend I lost count.
Dusky, pellucid and grave.
In the Chekhov story, nothing happened but
a new form of misery was nonetheless delineated.
Accidentally, I first touched your breast.
Rowboat, I tried to think of rhymes for rowboat.
And sequins and yellow and two-by-fours.
In one of your parents' bathrooms,
the handles were silver dolphins.
My ears were purple.
The crayons melted in the sun,
that was one way. Another was to tear things up
and tape them together wrong.
That was the summer I lived in the attic
and the punk band never practiced below.
Your breasts were meteors, never meteorites.
There was something wrong with my tongue.
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There was my famous use of humor
that Jordan said was the avoidance of emotion.
I couldn't hold on to a nickel.
There was that pitcher on the mound,
older, facing his former team. He had lost
some of his stuff but made up for it with
cerebrum. Your breasts were never rusty.
Your breasts reflected the seeming-so.
Your mouth I wanted my mouth over,
your eyes my eyes into,
into your Monday afternoons I would try to cram
my Sunday nights, into your anthropology paper
I wanted to put my theories,
your apartment I would put my records in
and never get them back.
Here, you said: another baby avocado tree.
You threw your shoe. I broke
the refrigerator and the fossil fish.
I broke my shoulder blade.
I tried to make jambalaya.
To relax the organism, the cookbook said,
pound with a mallet on the head or shell.
Your friends all thought you were crazy.
My friends all thought I was crazy.
The names of Aztec gods were on one page,
serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other.
You fell in the street carrying a pumpkin.
I walked home alone in the snow.
I broke my hand.
Your light meter was in my glove box.
Lives of the Noncombatants
Poor Lorca, all those butterflies
in his bulletholes and there's only
one lousy stranger to throw dirt on him.
When the Falange threatened to set fire
to his home, the stranger volunteered
to save his children, each shovelful
doesn't fall on a daughter, each clod bouncing
in an open eye unearths a son.
There's a song that can't be translated.
The stars in it make no sense
but are very bright. We knock
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at the window, we knock at the wind.
God shoots up her hand then pulls it back,
the question's not what she thought
was being asked. We knock at the door,
the ceiling, the floor, the century.
Poor Lorca, what a sissy, his whole life
he knew this was coming and still
he looks like an idiot, suddenly
he stops defanging the piano in his underwear
and gets all morbid, embarrassing the diplomats.
He asks his parents for more money
for a silver pant leg, wristwatches
to fill a fishbowl and then he turns around
and puts tar in his hair. His stage directions
call for a rain of stiff white gloves.
You know what it's like to be wakened
by dogs, don't you? What it's like
to drop a couple thousand feet?
You know what a shovel is, don't you?
The only way we can withstand his berries
is by boiling them in an iron pot
then straining the mush through a cloth
and throwing away what comes through
and throwing away what's left then
wrapping the cloth around our heads
and even then our dreams will almost kill us.
Shamanism 101
Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.
I thought I wanted the strength
to eat the eyes first then tear
into the fuse box of the chest
and soar away.
I needed help because I still
cowered under the shadow of my father,
a man who inspected picture tubes
five out of seven nights,
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who woke to breakfast on burnt roast
except the two weeks he'd sleep
on a Jersey beach and throw me
into the gasoline-sheened waves.
I loved him dying indebted
not knowing to what,
thinking his pension would be enough,
released not knowing from what,
gumming at something I was afraid
to get close enough to hear, afraid
of what I was co-signing. So maybe
the elephant. The elephant knows
when one of its own is suffering
up to six miles away. Charges across
the desert cognizant of the futility.
How can I be forgiven when I don't know
what I need forgiving for? Sometimes
the urges are too extreme: to slap
on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch
of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal
is the tiger. Or shark.
Or centipede.
But I know I'm smaller than that,
filling notebooks with clumsy versions
of one plaint, one phenomenal call,
clamoring over a crumb that I think
is the world, baffled by the splotch
of one of my own crushed kind,
almost sweet, a sort of tar,
following a trail of one or two molecules,
leaving a trail
of one or two molecules.
Sean Penn Anti-Ode
Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
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the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb
so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.
Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.
Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up
and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.
Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,
regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,
internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment
of laboratory animals.
Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.
Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.
Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.
The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.
Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.
The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.
Peach Farm
I felt pretty stupid in brown pants,
brown jacket, shirt, shoes and tie
at the peach farm. I cast them off!
The young peaches clung to the limbs
like sag-resistant muscles.
It's a good place to have a pony. Ditto
a heartbeat, something long, a SpanishEnglish dictionary and lots of water
to remove stickiness. Bees are encouraged,
so too worms in the soil and every evening,
bats. Quadratic equations, not so much so.
Only an old dog is buried there.
I can't find the anvil
but then "Go find the anvil"
turns out to be some kind of joke
at the peach farm. The owner started paying
for the peach farm by selling a motorcycle
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then selling peaches. Walking through the trees—
how different from looking for a Ph.D.
Yet also not. One good thing about
being unable to sit beside you
is seeing the back of your head in the leaves.
How far we are from kissing
our damage deposit goodbye.
Ode to Hangover click here to hear Young read this poem
Hangover, you drive me into the yard
to dig holes as a way of working through you
as one might work through a sorry childhood
by riding the forbidden amusement park rides
as a grown-up until puking. Alas, I feel like
something spit out by a duck, a duck
other ducks are ashamed of when I only
tried to protect myself by projecting myself
on hilarity's big screen at the party
where one nitwit reminisced about the 39¢
a pound chicken of his youth and another said,
Don't go to Italy in June, no one goes to Italy in June.
Protect myself from boring advice,
from the boring past and the boring present
at the expense of an unnauseating future:
now. But look at these newly-socketed lilacs!
Without you, Hangover, they would still be
trapped in their buckets and not become
the opposite of vomit just as you, Hangover,
are the opposite of Orgasm. Certainly
you go on too long and in your grip
one thinks, How to have you never again?
whereas Orgasm lasts too short some seconds
and immediately one plots to repeat her.
After her I could eat a car but here's
a pineapple/clam pizza and Chinese milkshake
yum but Hangover, you make me aspire
to a saltine. Both of you need to lie down,
one with a cool rag across the brow, shutters
drawn, the other in a soft jungle gym, yahoo,
this puzzle has 15 thousand solutions!
Here's one called Rocking Horse
and how about Sunshine in the Monkey Tree.
Chug, chug, goes the arriving train,
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those on the platform toss their hats and scarves
and cheer, the president comes out of the caboose
to declare, The war is over! Corks popping,
people mashing people, knocking over melon stands,
ripping millenniums of bodices. Hangover,
rest now, you'll have lots to do later
inspiring abstemious philosophies and menial tasks
that too contribute to the beauty of this world.
INTERVIEW WITH DEAN YOUNG
The first line of yours that amazed me was "First you will fall in love with what you don't
understand. The baby ram butts the shiny tractor." Do you think your poems are defined by
misunderstanding?
I think they're very much about misunderstanding. There's that old writer's truism, "Write what
you know"—well, you don't know very much. I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding
misses the point. In graduate school, nobody understood what I was saying, and I didn't have a
clue either. So, I wrote my first book to be understood, to be accepted. I got my father's ghost off
my back. I got a job. I wasn't in graduate school anymore. And I realized that the poems in the
first book weren't by me—they were instilled in my head. And that not being understood, not
being accepted, was my subject.
In your forthcoming book, Skid, I was surprised to discover a sadness, even an edginess to the
imagery, as in "You know not to hit the brakes on ice / but do anyway. You bend the nail / but
keep hammering because / hammering makes the world."
I think my first two books were relatively austere. In the following books, I tried to work toward
celebration and joy and goofiness. But life conspires against you, hands you tragedy, proves that
nothing can last. I think all of that is more apparent in Skid than it was in First Course in
Turbulence.
In "Blue Garden" you write, "A poem should be / a noise and then it should shut up," which
made me think about the brevity of lyric intensity. Do you think of poems as offering a kind of
psychic burst?
Well, we spend so much of our time like dumb animals. Our psychology is a little bit flat, and
we're consumed with the materiality of life: maintaining our bodies, getting things done, going
here, going there. But then, when these portals of almost clairvoyant empathy open up for us,
they're amazing. That's what we look for in art—the moment when something comes rushing in.
All you have to do is make yourself available, accessible, perhaps in ways you haven't done
before. Of course, you can't live in that state. There are also long periods when you can't find it,
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and they're terrible. They're like being in a desert. Everything you read just plays across your
eyeballs.
Are there poets whose work gets you into that state?
Some of the French Surrealists do it for me, as well as Tomaz Salamun, O'Hara, Lorca—poets
whose vitality reminds me of the great joy of being able to make art, even when it's about terrible
things.
What about a poet like Paul Celan?
Celan's poetry is a black hole for me. As the language of his poems becomes both more and more
fractured and compact, it feels like less and less can escape. I admire that level of psychic
concentration, but it's something I don't go to. I would pick up Keats or Hopkins before Celan, or
Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson gives me a headache! There's definitely a greatness there,
and something about the language is totally engaging—but finally, it doesn't sustain me.
Remember how Ashbery's "Three Poems," begins with something like, "I realized that I could
either leave everything out or put everything in"? I want to put everything in. The critiques of
representation, the critiques of manifestations of the self, the materiality of language—I look at
all that stuff as opening up opportunities for shimmer and wobble, not as a form of negation.
And, I'm constantly getting involved in meat.
Meat?
Yeah, meat, and parasols, and my cat.
To read the rest of this interview, see JUBILAT 4
Another interview from a blog called EarthGoat:
4.03.2005
Writers’ Workshop faculty member Dean Young will be reading at Prairie Lights this Tuesday,
April 5, at 8 p.m.. He is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Elegy on Toy Piano
(Pittsburg 2005) and Skid (Pittsburg 2002).
A sample of his work can be found at the following links:
Poetry Daily
Jubilat
Jacket
Despite his computer’s best efforts to sabotage this interview, Young kindly responded to all of
the questions I sent him. The questions were solicited from students, admirers, clerics, groupies,
band mates, motorcyclists and millionaires. Blame them.
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EG: What would you do if you only had 24 hours before the earth’s magnetic poles switched?
DY: That's gonna really mess up out TVs isn't it?
EG: What role do tradition and poetic tropes play in your poems? For example, one might think
of the "Lives of…" poems as in the elegiac vein (not to mention a great deal of the new book,
whose title might have something to do with this question).
DY: Traditional and poetic tropes are the very things that help us recognize poetry as poetry. I'm
not interested in trying to destroy everything that makes a poem a poem as too many writers
seem to be trying to do. Whether one approaches the conventions frontally, as in writing an ode,
or more covertly, perhaps through covert sound systems or an autobiographical trace, those
conventions are there to be reinvigorated, the challenge then is not inhabiting conventions but in
not being conventional.
EG: Your work bears undeniable traces of the avant-garde, and yet … [complete as you wish]?
DY: The avant-garde has always been split between a party you want to be invited to and a party
that if you're not a member, you're damned as counter- revolutionary. Currently the avant-garde
is owned by the experimental, post l=a=n=gooey poets who fetishize novelty to the sacrifice of
true amazement, sentimentalize the fragment with assumptions of emotionality and refuse any
notion of subject. Wake me when it's over.
EG: Teaching in the Workshop, you must have a pretty good "beat" on the direction of younger
American poetry. What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing young American poets?
DY: The challenges to young poets now are the same as the challenges have always been to
poets. To write with energy, to stay true to those primary, urgent drives that first made us write
poems, to get better, to not be utterly stuck in the sap of our own time.
EG: If you could be any cartoon character, who would it be? Why?
DY: I resent the notion that I am not already a cartoon character. Wait, that didn't come out right.
EG: Do you write in the mornings or the evenings? With or without music? Longhand or directly
to the typewriter? Vodka or gin?
DY: All the above except gin, gin makes you mean and a very poor typist.
EG: I am interested in Dean Young, Inc. Who designs and promotes the Dean Young brand?
Where are its headquarters, manufacturing facilities, and where can I get free promotional
samples of Dean Young? And most importantly, is there really such a thing as Dean Young, or is
it just a marketing device?
DY: As you know, as the author of Blondie, I have many subsidiary concerns. For further
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information regarding these matters, I encourage you to contact Vatican City.
EG: Do you ever resent the labels associated with your work (i.e. humor poet, American
surrealist, New York School)? They’re all traditions you clearly work with, but then again, do
you worry about them limiting the way your work is read?
DY: I'm sick of all of them because most of the time no one knows what they mean. I don't really
care about them limiting the way my work is read though because I hardly care at all how my
work is read.
EG: What is your idea of "beauty," either as an aesthetic guideline for writing or as a principle
for life in general?
DY: Beauty is the manifestation of form. Form is the manifestation of fatality. I guess you can
see where this is going.
EG: Given the choice of super powers, which would you chose: flight or invisibility?
DY: Well, with invisibility I could walk into the girls' locker room alright but flight I think
would have far more daily applications. Yet one can imagine being made very exhausted by
flying but never so from being invisible. This is a TOUGH question!
EG: What’s you favorite thing to cook? Why?
DY: I like to cook things that take days, many small processes. Thanksgiving dinner (always
brine the bird), fish stew (I can't spell the other names for it) starting with salmon heads, lasagna,
risotto, missionary.
EG: What’s the longest you’ve gone without writing? How did you feel?
DY: Are you trying to depress me?
EG: How do you think using the third person in your poems changes the way you think when
writing them? When you write, do you think of Dean as yourself, or as someone entirely
different?
DY: Considering that the person in my poems is always a shifting center of descriptive gravity,
the pronouns are rather unimportant. A switch in pronouns may allow a quick exit and scene
change which can always help the play along.
EG: If you were forced to write a novel, what would it be about?
DY: It would have to be about what could possibly force me to write a novel, perhaps an even
more extreme situation than what forces me to read a novel.
EG: One of the striking characteristics of your work, especially noticeable in Strike Anywhere, is
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the co-presence of an American confessional mode and a European surrealist aesthetic. That is,
the poems are informed by a locatable "person" or "life" as much as by wild associative leaps
and humor. In what way do you consider these two projects working together? Are they at odds
with each other, or flip-sides of the same coin? Do you have to do a lot of coaxing to get them to
cooperate?
DY: For me, what is of primary importance in a poem is the human dilemma. That pang. For
emotion to resonant it needs a subject to resonant in, a kind of chamber. The nature of that
subject is always shifting, decentered yes, but not nonexistent, more constantly re-centering as
our consciousness does whenever we move through our day, meet the various gazes. Even
rabbits have selves. I suppose that's a surrealist idea.
EG: How do you make ceviche?
DY: Soak white fish in lime juice. Drain when opaque, toss with a little olive oil, olives,
tomatoes, capers, vodka, come on help my out here.
EG: Thomas Hobbes’s "Leviathan": philosophical treatise, or long suicidenote from a
reallyboring guy?
DY: Who?
from Primitive Mentor, 2008
Ash Ode
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.
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Young is sometimes considered a new-generation Frank O'Hara:
"When critics speak of a second-generation New York School poetry, they are referring to poets
such as Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ann Waldman, Dean Young, and Bernadette
Mayer. Like their predecessors, these poets have a variety of styles and forms only loosely held
together by an imagistic intensity and a tendency towards humor and familiarity. While some
speak of a "third generation" and after, influence of the New York School is now so pervasive
that such a term has become almost meaningless" ("The Artists & Poets of the New York
School," accessed Sept. 28, 2008, Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/
prmMID/5941).
Bernadette Mayer is recommended for a woman's voice.
from Wikipedia :
"He finds the process of creation to be more important than the work itself, and that his poems
are more demonstrations than explanations. He also finds that using mangled quotes from
technical journals, as he experimented with in First Course in Turbulence, allows for a kind of
collage in which tones confront each other. Citing Andre Breton as a major influence, Young
finds Surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between
real and unreal."
from William Stobb's blog, Hard to Say
I feel like it can be a back-handed compliment to praise a poet’s early work when that poet is
crackling out new poems & poems & great books of poems like he’s locked into some hot
circuit, ungrounded. Dean Young rules. I don’t mean that—it’s not about ruling, obviously. But I
mean that Dean Young’s poems continue to be a gift to me. Consider the fucking great (can I use
that word in this?) brilliant “True / False” poem from Elegy on Toy Piano. It’s a three-full-pager
made up of 100 T/F questions by and about Dean Young. In some of these, he plays that
familiar, tricked-up autobiography card that I never know what to make of, when he uses “Mary”
and “Tony” as characters. Readers of Ruefle and Hoagland will recognize the games these three
play with each others’ names and with seemingly autobiographical poems including each other
and about each other. Hoagland’s “When Dean Young Talks About Wine” comes to mind and
Ruefle’s “A Poem by Dean Young,” which she wrote but which appears in his book—and he’s
got her back with “A Poem by Mary Ruefle” which he wrote but which appears in her book.
Anyway, here’s some of “True / False” by Dean Young, from 2005’s Elegy on Toy Piano.
1. Usually my first answer is correct.
2, I want to break things.
3. I hear voices.
4. I am good at following orders
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50. Tony made a mistake getting married.
51. Tony made a mistake getting divorced.
52. Parking meters lie.
53. Stay out of Indiana
61. Don’t let Mary drive.
62. Most hospitals keep some leeches just in case.
63. Spaghetti is done when it sticks to the wall.
64. Stay with me and be my love.
65. Spending a major holiday alone – too bad the zoo’s closed.
66. The meaning of every word comes from context and whereas context is created by
other words, meaning can never be fixed but you can cross a stream on loose, slippery
rocks without getting wet by keeping a strong, forward momentum.
So, yes, these lines play the autobiography game, but that’s nothing, really. It’s gossip-slashcommentary-about-gossip and it’s interesting to that extent. And also I really like the writing of
all three of those people, so I always hope they’re happy when I meet them in their poems.
But it’s the poetry of it that’s killer. The transformation in that last one? #66? Where it transfers
from pointy-headed theory discourse to an action image of crossing a stream—an action image
with religion, yo: walking on water w/ out getting wet? That rules. I don’t mean that. It’s not
about ruling.
As I write this, I’ve learned that Press Assistant Sarah Roberts, at the University of Iowa’s
Center for the Book has produced a 23-foot-long, accordion-folded print version of this poem,
published by Inflorescence Press, which sounds magnificent to me.
All of this has been my long-ass way of saying Dean Young’s new work is great. It’s on fire,
you know, in all the ways you’d want to be on fire. Actually, Elegy’s not even Young’s most
recent book—there’s one called Embryoyo that’s DUE any day. Ha ha.
But I loved Dean Young’s early work at a time when I needed to learn to love stuff. The nights
were long and cold back then, in Grand Forks North Dakota—that’s a shout-out to Grand Forks,
by the way: is anybody out there? Of course you are. I lived in GF when I was 22 & that book
came out and a few of us were into new poets. My friend Kevin Marzahl is great at reading
poems and finding all manner of cool shit to look at, so I kind of got Dean Young as a gift from
Kevin. I’d learn a lot from Kevin’s poems, too—his poem “Kiln” won a contest at The Southern
Review right about then, when he was 23 or so. I couldn’t find it on the internet, but I’m told that
text archives exist.
I meant what I said about love, though. Maybe it comes easy to some people, but for me I have
to learn it—this is sounding hokey, so I’m gonna leave it at that. Here’s a poem I loved called
“Legend,” from 1992’s Beloved Infidel.
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Legend
By Dean Young
Someone said lightning from a clear sky
Threaded through a house and struck
His picture on its shelf as he died
Watching Pele replays on TV
With his wife and bassist. They say
He returned to the hand of Jah like
A severed finger restored.
You’ve got to imagine a God cutting off
His own finger in the first place.
While Marley finally bowed to radiation
And dismantlement, the girl who taught
Me the dance—barely lift the feet, foggy
Shrugs and ducks—was in Mauritania
Losing chickens to blight, her hair
To vaccines, losing her help and those
She came to help to a village seer
Preaching she was the devil.
When we were young we watched workers
High in girder webs operating spark-spurting
Guns, others on the ground with plans,
Throwing lifting switches. We thought,
Housed there, we’d grow into expertise,
fortify land and seas while clouds amassed
like grateful nations at our knees. We
wanted it called House of Invisible Lion
or House of Hunger Ended and we thought
a giddy smoke-let dance the start of its
administration. But then the next craze came along,
the next rich costumery, a new beat loud enough
to cover the sound of someone being kicked to death.
Last night I listened to the early, one-track
nearly empty stuff. Wails and taunts
in the empire of wail. In one cut, I swear, bugs
buzz against a screen like the sound of faith
rasping crinkled wings from under a helmet-green
shell. You’ve got to imagine faith can be caught
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kept living like a thing in a jar,
breath-holes punched in the lid,
a little torn grass in the bottom.
You know, that poem uses some conventions of poetic speech that might now seem… what?…
culturally enforced?… to a poet as advanced as Dean Young. I mean, these days, Dean Young is
making dynamic moves on so many levels that this sustained first-person narrative might seem
naïve. But I admired the speaker of those poems, & wanted to live like him. That guy in those
poems—Dean Young or not—was a friend to me. He knew interesting stuff—he had apparently
been a med student at one time and there was one poem where he showed an open brain. Cool.
He’d had a wide variety of romantic and sexual relationships, knew something about drugs, not
to mention reggae (I mean, in “Legend,” that’s a good analysis of the little bob-slash-groove of
reggae dancing—I wanted to analyze stuff like that!). That poetic speaker also had hip, activist
friends. Those poems seemed to want the world to be a good, or at least better place. And the
speaker of those poems was possessed of this ability for vision. I wanted to absorb what I saw
like that speaker absorbed those spark-spurting workers in the girders. I was learning from those
poems how to see, I guess.
A review of Young's book, Embryoyo at
http://www.zolandpoetry.com/reviews/Embryoyo.htm at Zooland Poetry (a good site; check
it out!):
Review by Eliza Rotterman
Recently, I dreamed Dean Young was giving a reading in my town. I can recall nothing about the
reading itself, only that afterwards I approached the book-signing table with a gift wrapped in
yellow paper and an excessive amount of tape. I shyly presented Young with the awkward token
of schoolgirl love and immediately panicked: I could not remember what was in the package. We
suffered a long minute while he unwrapped the gift, tape sticking and un-sticking to his fingers,
the paper tearing open to reveal an enormous container of biscotti.
I acknowledge the shortcomings inherent to dream analysis, yet I can’t help but see a connection
between the absurd gift and the experience of reading Dean Young’s poetry. Most poets don’t
have the moxy to mix pop culture and fine art. Most still rely on willow trees and seabirds to
elevate language from signification to expression. However Young’s art occurs in the rapid
layering of the pop culture lexicon, idiosyncratic jargon, the absurd, and the lyrical. Young
shatters the idea of “clean” poetry that bows down to metaphoric chains and the holy unity of
images, and instead, shamelessly exploits the come hither non sequitur, requiring his readers to
let go and hold on at the same time. The opening lines of “Luciferin,” the first poem in
embryoyo, demonstrates Young’s signature saddle-up and go approach
“They won’t attack us here in the Indian graveyard.”
I love that moment. And I love the moment
when I climb into your warm you-smelling
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bed dent after you’ve risen. And sunflowers,
once a whole field and I almost crashed,
the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation,
I love you. Dividing words between syllables! Dachshunds! What am I but the intersection of these loves?
The energy of a Young poem lies in the accumulation of zigs and zags, quips and cries, knee
jerks and caresses, and like previous collections, the poems in embryoyo are both luminous and
deceptive. More than once I have read a Dean Young poem aloud and more than once have I
realized, after baiting my audience with the promise of “something hilarious”, that the poem was
actually heartbreaking, This is not to say that embryoyo isn’t funny, but most of the humor comes
at a price: heartbreak, lest we forget Mary Reuffle’s poetic impersonation entitled “A Poem by
Dean Young”: “Don’t think for a fucking instant/ that I don’t have a broken heart.” Even the
casual reader will note one of Young’s most ubiquitous themes is the agony love inflicts on the
heart. The hyperbolic airing of wounds is melancholic and satirical. Percy Shelley took a hit in
Skid, and in embryoyo, it’s Keats: “Bloom rhyming with doom/ pretty much took care of Keats.”
Young gets away with this mockery because he is equally seduced by the Romantic impulse. We
all know he has fallen on the thorns of life, and his poetry defends the connection between
emotion and artistic creation and honors the moment of creation as inseparable from the art itself.
“Ten Inspirations” portrays the artist afflicted by the void, then saved by the intensity of feeling,
at the moment of creation
You decide to make a flower.
You don’t have any seeds, bees,
bat guano, engravings, pitchforks,
sunshine, scarecrows.
You have a feeling though.
Presto.
Despite the criticism that some artists mistake inspiration as art, Young’s poetry spans only a
short distance between inspiration and art, and by that I mean, his art is one of improvisation.
In the ars poetica prose poem of the collection, “Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool,” Young
lays it out:
Theories about art aren’t art anymore than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn’t a
meal. We’re trying to build birds not birdhouses. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the
murmur, Breton said that and know when to shut up, I’m saying that. We’re not equations with
hats. Nothing appears without an edge. There’s nothing worse than a poem that doesn’t stop. No
one lives in a box. The heart isn’t grown on a grid. The ship has sailed and the trail is shiny in the
dew. Door slam, howling in the wood, rumble strips before the toll booth. Enter: Fortinbras.
Ovipositor. Snow. Bam bam bam, let’s get out of here. What I know about form couldn’t fill a
thimble. What form knows about me will get me in the end.
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The final lines of the above passage touch on two additional themes running through the pages of
embryoyo: mortality and form. The death of his father continues to haunt, and that loss seems to
have lead to meditations on material and abstract forms and a desire to escape linguistic
boundaries. If, as Young says, “Every word is from elsewhere/ and wants to return,” does his
poetry offer us, as readers, the experience of returning with them to a world undifferentiated by
language? For this reader, it comes close and that’s saying a lot. Who else can be so
transcendental and so flip at the same time?
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