“Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in
Pennsylvania?
Maybe poems are made out of breath, the
way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul,
freed.”
--“Scarecrow on Fire” by Dean Young
As I write this, I am still reeling from the sudden announcement that Dean Young—that inimitable, endlessly entertaining, and gigantic voice of American poetry—has passed away. Tony Hoagland once said Dean Young was the most imitated poet in the United States which is perhaps a testament to just how important his poetry was to other poets. But, honestly, no one could could really write like Dean Young except Dean Young. He was a master of the non-sequitor, the kaleidoscope volta, the irresistable “stick-the-landing” poetic ending.
Take for instance, the ending of his poem “What Form After Death”:
“Maybe all that we become
is rhyme of our limited time alive,
an echo loosening almost no snow,
no avalanche, just some puffs of white
like clouds that seem like nothing
until the pilot hits one.”
This is the mastery of Dean Young. The unrelatedness or seeming disconnection of his material which somehow culminates in a hard-won wisdom by the poem’s ending. Whether he was taking about William Butler Yeats or Stan Rice, the futility of cathedrals or the world’s biggest lightning bug, Young could somehow “gift-wrap” it all—the whole damn world—into meaning.
I wrote him once and he kindly wrote me a very short witty email back:
Hello Chris,
Thank you for your message. Forgive my
slow response. But honestly, who can tell one day from the other?
I've been listening to too much Scandinavian jazz which is as close as I can
get being here in Texas cactus-stuck to vanishing in a snowstorm.
Just want to say thanks for reaching out.
Best,
Dean
Even in this small kind gesture, an email I am sure he wrote very quickly and then promptly forgot, you have some of the hallmarks of his poetic genius. The contradiction of being “Texas cactus-stuck”, listening to Scandinavian Jazz, and the pendulum of thought swinging rapidly to “vanishing in a snowstorm”.
In his book “The Art of Recklessness”, he said “our poetry is our haunting and adventure”. Indeed, he went on to write on the same page:
“I’m asking you to consider poetry that is unhindered by doubt (while acknowledging that doubt can begin the inspiration toward liberation), a poetry that arises out of recklessness and is composed off first needs, first minds, of truth in language arising from the active impulse of emotion, moving through the calculation of the rational toward irrational detonation” (12).
His book of criticism I drank down like mountain spring water at a time in my life when I had said everything I wanted to say about my life. I felt there was still more to say certainly, but this time in language itself, in pure imagery, in word-play and mischief, and especially in freeing the imagination from the chains of the self. Perhaps these are the greatest gifts of Dean Young’s poetry. The illusion that everything belongs in a poem. Especially the weird, the undomesticated, the improvisational, the truly imaginative.
I wanted to write a kind of critical eulogy for Dean Young but, honestly, I feel like nothing I can say will ever be enough to thank him for the poems he gifted us. I never knew him. I know he had a bad heart that needed to be replaced. I know he could be a difficult teacher who had a fraught relationship with many of his students. But his poems remain.
As I think of his loss, I am reminded that he said, “the blood may be fake but the bleeding must be real.” He detested quaintness and said, “the worst thing that can happen to an artist is to become a bore, to become complacent.” He never was. He was the Great Oz of American Poetry. He had a wizard’s voice and all too fragile human heart. He will be missed.
Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of six collections of poems, most recently Deepfake Serenade out with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2021). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, GRIFFEL, American Poetry Journal, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.