| |
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
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?
|
|
