Sunday, February 03, 2008

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Dean Young


Wolf barf.

--Dean Young, "Learn by Doing"

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

LESS AND LESS HUMAN, O SAVAGE HEART

Whether this fellow’s self-pity
Is pious, self-righteous or both

There’s simply no help.
Only that greed to consume

What’s pretty triggered his need
To vomit his whelp. [But

In lieu of a URL or link
From genius Tricia,

I offer instead this proof
That Ed Ochester,

Ellen Voight, and whoever
Is calling the shots at the tepid

U. of Iowa--could it still be
That upwardly mobile

Harvard twot, Jorie Graham’s
Ex?--are in the head soft.]

********************

ELEGY ON A TOY PIANO

You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to die
if you are a living thing
which you have no choice about.

Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.

You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit
your tongue a honeycomb.

Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.

Even for the grass, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.

The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.
Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.

When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

Dean Young

Patricia Lockwood said...

Oh, I don't know. "He is the tower the world runs out of" is a pretty good line. Though I'll admit that I generally enjoy individual lines of his work more than I enjoy entire poems.

Radish King said...

you art is becoming genius, like you. i'm not a bit surprised.
xo

Anonymous said...

WOLF NATION

We invented skinning the scalp,
Named mountains and athletic teams
For the sliced bald and bleeding
Indigenes we shamed in life and death,
Then slapped on the wall of a bank
A Picasso beside a Van Gogh,
Crying with mute, exultant pride,
“How’s that for your unincorporated
Creation of wealth, commie beatnik
One-eared red-beard!” Cousins
Still in Britain, where ancients

Kicked without touching
The heads of conquered adversaries
Over fields of frozen green, crowd
Football matches mainly to riot,
Smother and vomit: the plan
Is to cover the planet with swill
The mob calls fun, innocent
As urgent water-boarding, safe
Therefore pristine, proclaiming
“We the impervious just don't care
If our hands are dirty or clean!”

* * *

(On the theme of young Dean's
Teflon, tiptoe through the tulips,
Ballyhoed irreverence, a surrealist
Being one for whom the boring
Is interesting because the interesting
Is for them so boring;
I.e., the delicate onion
And labyrinth of gynecology.)

Patricia Lockwood said...

Rebecca! That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to a person who has no idea what anything in the world looks like.

Patricia Lockwood said...

a surrealist
Being one for whom the boring
Is interesting because the interesting
Is for them so boring


ZING! Yet how you can decry surrealism in the same comments box as you honor my glowing doe-vom escapes my comprehension, truly.

Anonymous said...

THE VIEW FROM BELOW

Nothing teflon
About thee, cherie,
Who we decry
Clumping through
The tulips, hot
As a Scotch Bonnet,
N'est-ce pas?
Your young Dean,
However, is a dreary
Epicine, and if I
May make so bold,
Don't let your Hostess
Tea run cold, or ever
Get grouchy and old
As curmudgeonly me.

Patricia Lockwood said...

Epicene? Really? Indeed, what a neutersexual Dean Young must be, to write poems you don't like! If only he wrote more poems comparing vaginas to peat bogs, we would know more truly his intentions and his worth. Unacceptable; you are PUNISHED.