CREATURE FEATURE, by Dean Young
Maybe you feel like something is wrong with your brain. Your thoughts won’t stand still. They hopscotch around. You remember a time not so long ago when you could focus on one thing at a time, but lately the machine of your attention has turned into a poodle chasing squirrels in Central Park, dashing here and darting there and never catching anything at all. Even now, perhaps, you’re having trouble staying fixed on this paragraph. Your phone beckons you with texts from friends and calamitous news from around the world, and — wait, what were we talking about?
Dean Young (1955-2022) saw this coming, or seemed to. His first collections of poetry trickled out into the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, right before the onslaught of the internet and social media and smartphones began tumbling our consciousness like compost. But the cadence of his voice suggested that language itself was already on the verge of a breakdown. His poems conveyed the vibe of a mind wandering — a little amused, a little freaked out — through the fun house of the distraction economy.
He didn’t strive for perfection (“My books are full of mistakes,” he once wrote) but he seemed incapable of composing a boring phrase. And as Young hit his stride in the early years of the century with volumes such as “Skid” (2002), “Elegy on Toy Piano” (2005), “Embryoyo” (2007) and “Fall Higher” (2011) — which hit shelves days after the poet survived a heart transplant — the surrealism of his poems seemed to merge with the surrealism of our times, as if the Y2K bug had indeed crashed systems and left us spinning in a state of perpetual glitch.
That’s probably a lot to wrap our heads around, so here’s an example of a few lines from “Elegy on Toy Piano”: “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.” Or how about we revisit “Flamenco,” from the same era:
Someone walks into a bakery, shakes his head at the cakes then leaves, goes back to the thing he’s making with a thousand lightbulbs. It’s complicated. It doesn’t need to be, says the quadratic equation sick of itself. Do you realize what time it is? scolds a speck of dust.
Reading that, maybe you feel as if something is wrong with your brain, or maybe you feel that someone finally understands how your brain operates.
Back in 1957, Kenneth Rexroth memorably wrote this about Frank O’Hara in The New York Times: “Certainly his poems always manage a fresh start, free from the dreadful posturings of the conventional verse of his generation.” Dean Young grabbed O’Hara’s “fresh start” baton and ran with it, sprinting in crazy directions. He cared less about the finished product than the act of making it — so much so that apparently sometimes Young would dash off a single draft of a new poem and give it away to a stranger.
It’s no accident that he published a manifesto about poetry called “The Art of Recklessness”: In Young’s poems every new line bounds out of the brush, gazelle-like, with a reckless leap. The absurdity of his juxtapositions and the wildness of his enjambments can be funny, in a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” sort of way, but in poems like “Scarecrow on Fire” and “Delphiniums in a Window Box,” the randomness could suddenly yield to deep expressions of love and hurt.
Both the humor and the hurt seep through in “Creature Feature,” a posthumous collection in which the poet seems fully aware of being pre-posthumous. (The title refers to classic monster movies in which the creature often occupies a borderland between life and death, and Young’s author photo is an image of the actor Boris Karloff taking a tea-and-smoke break, in full makeup, on the set of “Bride of Frankenstein.”) Young never lost his knack for fresh starts. “It’s not as hard as you’d think to start over,” he writes in “Bubble in a Crystal.” “It’s impossible. I haven’t been able to lift/my arm above my ear since.”
But if his poems had often captured a sensation of unraveling, it’s clear in these pages, as in a poem called “Why Ohio,” that he realizes the unraveling is now happening to him: “It’s like what you’ve been told a million times/finally stops making sense like a name/repeated until it’s meaningless and free/it’s like snapping a rubber band in your own face.”
“My kid could paint that!” is the steadfast cliché of visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where Frank O’Hara not coincidentally worked in the 1950s and 1960s, and I suppose it’s possible that someone could flip through “Creature Feature” and express the same thing about Young’s poems. (Is it possible for spontaneity to feel too tossed off?) But as Rexroth also said about O’Hara, “It is just as hard to be casual and amazing as it is to be catchy and profound.” The best of Young’s poems are casual, amazing, catchy and profound all at once. Addled and swervy though his work may seem at first glance, “Creature Feature” races to the finish line with a poem, called “If Anyone Asks,” that telegraphs to us that Young knew exactly what he was doing right up until his last breath:
Ecstasy is willingness. I dare you to find a river any other way. I dare you to breathe. Some cries never reach us even though they’re our own. The best endings are abrupt.
CREATURE FEATURE | By Dean Young | Copper Canyon Press | 81 pp. | Paperback, $17
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