I Can Hardly Be Considered a Reliable Witness

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. 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.

2 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 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.

3 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. 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

4 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 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

5 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, 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.

6 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 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

7 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 Spanish- English 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 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,

8 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, 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.

9 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, 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

10 the questions I sent him. The questions were solicited from students, admirers, clerics, groupies, band mates, motorcyclists and millionaires. Blame them.

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?

11 DY: As you know, as the author of Blondie, I have many subsidiary concerns. For further 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.

12 EG: One of the striking characteristics of your work, especially noticeable in Strike Anywhere, is 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.

13 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 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.

14 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-slash- commentary-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.

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.

15 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 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.

16 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 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 syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section 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

17 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. 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?