What Does Us In, Dean Young

This poem seems to start out as him reminiscing about an ex wife. Its another poem about loss. It seems to go on to talk about the losses we incur in war, he seems to be finished talking about his ex wife and wedding photos, the billiard room they first met in. Then: "...But we must not be afraid my countrymen...Horse w/ wings, man with three arms, man with none." Now he's addressing the losses we incur in wartime. Then he jumps ahead again to an allusion of some friends that lost a baby, some interesting language here:

And death-heads I can live with
like what glowed that night as my friends spoke
of the fragile pregnancy between them,

The poem ends on the death of his father:

My heart hurts like a revolving tray of sweets.
It was the hats that my mother broke down about.

This piece didn't have the deep insight I've come to trademark Dean Young on. I didn't come away wowed or learning something new, as w/ Whale Watch, or Asking a Girl Out. It was just alright. Maybe he was too close to the subject matter to really do it justice. We've all done that.

Kites and Masks, Dean Young

This piece had a difference of the surreal quality to it, a bit of a dream-likeness happening; its highly erotic w/ shocking images in places. I was a bit concerned when I picked Young, since he has sucha strong trademark style that it might get old too fast - glad to say, hasn't happened. So he starts out again w/ a familiar theme, loss, but he just touches on it (I'm noticing he likes to revisit certain pet themes and metaphors) and then a kind of "Warming her Pearls" thing is happening, you aren't sure where he's going, but the language is getting very sexy, w/out directly addressing sex.

miniscule splits, glutter and glister, sweet
feeding, sucking out, sweet, sweet, a third-beer

By the end of the 1st S, he starts to let us in on his point, bar life, more specifically the pick up scene. A man and woman are engaged in age old flirtation tactics, she's dangling her shoe playfully off the edge of her toes, he's using the musician card, though this seems to be a more high end bar in a posh hotel, so he's "chasing sheet music, Mozart". They go to a room together. More clues that these are mucky mucks: the paper electronic hotel key, she w/ pearls, he w/ "gold scissors shaped like an ibis, its beak the blades". I have those exact same scissors, no bearing on the poem, just sayin. The most striking images come near the end, and he gives us a bit of crudity, but he handles it just right and gives us a great finale:

...The brief squalls
force everyone under awnings, together
into archways. In a window, a slow-motion
smear of desire, struck and bluish, two
strippers want rid of something glittering
between their legs. Do what you want

with their cries as the crowd turns the corner
to the cemetery and suddenly song seems
sufficient, all the flowers making sense,
each a blaze, lips in blaze, tongues on fire,
"Come closer, closer, lie down.
How do you like to be touched?"

The Hive, Dean Young

This one really wowed me again. Its a page and half in the book, in three sections, separated by * * *. I would love to just share it all w/ you, and I'm not sure why not to do that, since we post whole poems on pffa all the time? Like connect the poem for instance.

But lets start w/ most of the 1st section, most of the first 2 lines are fairly mundane, a question posed of where are we going, what is this dance? familiar themes. JB (in Charon's w/ me) called them placeholder lines, they aren't hugely appealing in themselves, but they build the tension. But he doesn't wait to long to get you hooked, by the end of 2rd line he's smokin. The strong central conceit of human and lover interactions as bees in the hive, the sheer magnitude of what he's conveying: loss, and how it can already be there even as you are w/ someone, already you feel it, the heart of the poem is here:

...Of course
it's all about loss, sweet source, honey
that keeps our busted feelers, crimped
limbs, the useless protecting gestures
of our abdomens. No wind really, just
a sense of things not very well secured
like standing on a dock, the tock, tock.
We've all felt that rocking, that loose
rot, something unhappy in the trees
even in our pleased rumple, legs slung
round another, sluiced with the lovely
other at last known, tasted, naked
as a part of speech. Still there's this
going, going. This gone. A woman I love
has this haunted buzz behind her eyes.
A man I love still rides his wrecked bike.
My phone bills, the part in my hair,
my shirt with the cactuses.

In the 2nd section he mentions some of the mundane dailies of life and the people in his life, and various interactions that he remembers. My favourite parts come at the beginning, he starts w/ a familiar wistfullness I've heard in other poems:

I hate what we do to each other.
In the city you can see the people in cardboard boxes.
In the country you can see the pharmaceutical cows. >>

The encapsulation of pharma cows is magnicifent in its repugnancy. As someone who studied holistic nutrition and found out the ugly nitty gritties of what they do to our food supply, how animals are grossly mistreated an d then fed to us, he just nailed it w/ that short descriptor. This middle strophe is not as strong for me, but again, I believe its again building tension. that deft Dean Young technique of lulling us for a bit until his next wammo. There was the other bit that I could really relate to in here:

...and how we want what everyone wants:
complete devotion and to be left the hell alone.

The ending is dramatic, insightful and vivid w/ startling imagery, we've all seen that guy at the phone, its so easy to picture it.

I know I'm not fooling anyone,
when I say drop dead it means
I fall upon the roses, the traditional
roses. Often just trying to be heard
makes people think you're angry, shaking apart
like a can of screws. Of course
it's all about fear. Last night I watched
a man scream into a pay phone, scream
and whimper and deposit more coins. I've
been him, I've been on the other end
backing off from the uncradled voice
and I've even been the phone, spattered with spit,
close to the furious sea. Didn't they listen
when you told them where you were going?
One day you find yourself unstrung, your stinger
ripped out, inveigled with perfumes. You're standing
on a dock or in a busy field or dragging yourself
through the spilled sugar. Isn't anyone ever going to come?

As he so deftly brought the abstract of loss to life in S1, he brings the abstract, fear, so vividly to life w/ the phone sequence. But he's setting it up w/ the preceding lines of seeming angry trying to be heard. After all, anger is a secondary emotion according to psychology, as fear (or hurt) is usually the underlying and more honest primary emotion. Though he doesn't specifically mention hurt, he doesn't need to, its strongly implied throughout the piece in S1 w/ the concept of loss, which we all know very much hurts, and the end he really brings hurt to life: ripped out stinger, dragging oneself and then the lost and lonely question right at the end. Upon reading it aloud to a poetry fan, he just kept saying, "wow" and asked me to repeat several key lines, and why wound't he. Brilliant, poignant, affecting, I loved it.

The Business of Love is Cruelty -REDUX, Dean Young

I'm going to do something a bit different and come back to this last poem, and write it up some more. Re-examining this piece in terms of craft has been quite the learning curve!! - wanna join me?? The reason being, for one of his shorter pieces, there is just so much more I'm noticing that is so effective. I focused more on content and meaning earlier, but some of his technique is so intriguing, because I didn't much understand what exactly is at work here. Some could definitively label it, but I just know it works and very well indeed. Doing this Remo type Napo is sucha blessed learning experience, in the parsing out, and in reading the feedback and gleaning further from that (I also find I've easily written some decent drafts as a direct result, bonus). So my focus now is on the lovely musicality of these sections of extended analogy of his Acting out of his vindictive Cruelty. In a different way, he is using contrast as a medium, because the section where he's describing the Act of Cruelty, he could easily have went for harsh mirroring sonics, used tonal and rhythmic disjunction to make the lines clunk; in describing an Act of ugliness, he could have mirrored uglyness. But no - he went a total nother way. It reminds me somewhat of the trademark film style of John Woo, and how he would take an unusually brutal scene,but instead of portraying it as such, he would slow it down, make it dance, literally, to music that would not be seen as appropriate to such brutality, employ artful cinematography to make the scene somehow visually beautiful in all its ugliness. (Think Reservoir Dogs, dancing to "Stuck in the Middle With You").


...my mother kneeling and
she's kneeling and somehow I know

exactly how to do it, calmly,
enunciating like a good actor projecting
to the last row, shocking the ones
who've come in late, cowering

out of their coats, sleet still sparking
on their collars, a voice nearly licking
their ears above the swordplay and laments:
I hate you.

Now her hands are rising to her face.
Now the fear done flashing...

Notice the prevalent use of ing ending words. I'd somewhat noticed them, on subsequent reads, but they really popped when i finally read the piece aloud. I didn't know why this was so effective in creating such a theatrical effect, but I sure noticed it did. So I looked up the various ing-words and got a brushup in the difference between gerunds and participles. And also found this very helpful blog http://erinspoetrytips.blogspot.com/2005/03/gerunds-and-participles.html , that encapsulated the effect thus: "can be used effectively to add a sense of movement to poetry. To do this, the writer must pre-think (and often re-think) his choices of frequency and placement." And this encapsulates it more concisely than I could, so I shall end on that note.

The Business of Love is Cruelty, Dean Young

Don't think I can find this online, too bad because its a good one, finally got the book. I'd been looking forward to reading this from title list alone (y'all know how big I am on good titles), and wasn't disappointed. So he starts off w/ a bang:

It scares me, the genuis we have
for hurting one another, I'm seven,
as tall as my mother kneeling and
...somehow I know

exactly how to do it, calmly,
enunciating like a good actor projecting
...//
I hate you./

He embelishes the good actor part, draws it out, not only w/ images, but hits several of our senses, of how the people who straggle in late from the cold and sleet still sparkling on collars, are extra shocked at walking into the penultimate moment. How the carrying voice nearly licks their ears over swordplay and other sounds of the play. The mother's hands rise to her face, fear flashes through him, but:

I wish I could undo it, take it back,
but its a question of perfection,/

carrying it through, climbing the steps
to my room, chosen banishment...

7 yr old N paints the hair of his Bride of Frankenstein model and then goes on a thought tangent which leads to Herr Doktor and what the infamous doctor wants after the fact, after his freakish creations are already out on the loose, a largely failed experiment w/ serious repercussions. I could not for the life of me make the connection w/ his tangent, even after repeated reads. But that's the beauty of NapoRemo, while writing up the analysis, bingo, connection made. Its summed up in this section of 2nd to last S:

his distraught monster's on the rampage
again, lead-footed, weary, a corrosive
and incommunicable need sputtering

Bronzed, Dean Young

I'm running out of online poems from Beloved Infidel until the book comes in, which is why I'm doing this one. For some reason, this one is everywhere, I guess someone likes it alot. Me, not so much. Its about the finite vs. the infinite. I found it too often nonsensicle and a bit precious in spots, the ending esp. A few good spots of note for me:

...The sea
seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one
long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes,

and

all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten
in the lap,...

This last bit is the small flash of brilliance I see in this particular poem. The perfect haircut vs. the haircut from hell, thank God they are both temporary. A kitten in the lap, that's the sum of a lovely temporary moment. As for the rest, mwah.

Dean Young, AFTER 8 BEERS, I RISE INTO THE TURBULENCE

(Attempt to post a link, its about 5th down). This poem is quite different in style than most of what I've seen so far from Dean Young. Its broken into quartets, I'm not quite sure why yet? but maybe that will become clearer as I parse it up. It also tells a quite concise story as well (narrative, Laurie?) and is not anywhere near as -stream of consciousness, lets throw lofty ideas out of left field- as his others. But true to Young, its more deep and insightful shite. So it starts out, pure story, actually totally true to the title and he utilizes more conventional poetic devices to great effect. The title is a clever triple entendre, which has to do w/ the waiting at the aiport to take off; having 8 beers, turbulent in itself; but mainly its highly metaphoric. The metaphor part has to do w/ all the bad news coming at him via the news, and another man also caught in layover, who gets N thinking some deep and turbulent thoughts.

There is also a strong central conceit centered around the act of drinking w/ continued related language dispersed throughout. He starts w/ a wopping metaphor of "sipping time itself":

Pittsburgh airport, early winter, my plane
socked in and the first two beers, 2.50 per,
I try to drink slow. The receipts tag the clock
precisely: 7:54, 8:18 so I could be sipping

time itself, lapping all the numbing events
puddled in the news like a shade of Hell

His also trapped in layover, drinking buddy shows him a girlie in a flesh mag, and claims its his daughter. But the look on the man's face says it isn't. N is tempted to confront him, set him free of his bs, but then lays some of his own bs out, claiming to go from funeral to funeral. The last few stanzas neatly complete his drinking/hell theme and end on some pensive moralizing.

...But it was snowing

too hard to be Hell and the music told us
we'd better not cry and I just swallowed,
didn't say much more, just fluttered his magazine,
recognized no one, read the columns about

people having sex in grocery stores, tollbooths,
airplane washrooms, places you'd think utterly
incommodious, hostile to whatever it is
we work so hard to give and take from and to each other.

For me anyway, this isn't high-handed moralizing, the kind that can make me bristle, and I found I agreed w/ his conclusion. Sure we sow our oats in youth, but in the end, when you really want to find something/someone special, well I concur w/ the incommodiousness factor. This one didn't capture me right away, like some of his others, but I did come to quite enjoy it as it was different from his usual.

ON BEING ASKED BY A STUDENT IF HE SHOULD ASK OUT SOME GIRL

I was initially attracted to this poem for the title's sake, as I have a thing about long clunky titles that are intriguing, so this one sucked me in. But then I was having such a hard time making sense of the poem, as it relates to the title. But bingo, my break-in was actually via Laurie's mention of, When Dean Young Talks about Wine, which I found to be a brilliantly funny parody of Young and his style. And I strongly suspect that Young's, On Being Asked, was the spinoff poem from which the parody was written. A line in the parody says, "when Dean Young talks about wine...it seems that wine is rarely mentioned." So I thought, ok, Young rarely mentions the actual title matter, but what is he saying in subtext w/ all his ruminatings?


Its interesting to see the differences in style from Whale Watch, one of his years later works where he'd grown and this one, from Beloved Infidel, which was only his 2nd book. Perhaps, part of the reason his ramblings are less relatable to subject at hand, is he was just less deft at twining his stream of consciousness style, still in experimental and growth stages. And a clever fellow poet, totally picked up on this and satirized it. Though after umpteen reads, I did pick out more of his ref. for the student/girl, they are deftly interspersed w/ his whimsical musings on a past love and multiple ref. to our mortality and how we'll all die. Like here from the beginning of the piece:

I say get her alone in a kitchen.
I say what Keats said.
I say don't wear that. I display the driftwood
you picked up at McClure's the day we saw the whale.
Part question mark, part claw, part stroke
personified. I say buy her a box of crayons,
the big 64 box. I say you'll be dead soon

This next section, its easy to see the inspiration for the parody:

{I move the triangle
toward the furnace as indication of the indeterminacy
of all human affairs. There is no triangle, there is no
furnace.} I say when I was alone
and miserable. I let the canoe stutter
and drift. I lift my hands like someone asked to dance
a dance I don't know how to. I have this pain.
I have died this way in a previous life,

But yet, I bracketed the beginning section that seemed to make no sense whatsoever. Until finally it did. He uses the concrete (but true to his style, nonsensical) image of the triangle moved/towards furnace to represent the highly abstract concept of the indeterminacy of human affairs. Then he states there really is no triangle/furnace, driving the point of indeterminacy all the way home. A very weird and wise man is this Dean Young, and I'm totally digging his style.


This one (section of a) line is to me, some of the sagest advise given to the boy regarding his potential girl:

I ask her name. I say spell it.

I particularly liked this one, as it seems to say, knowing, remembering, using her name is important, make sure you have that down pat. Women like it when you use their name (hell, I think all people do) makes them feel you are truly seeing them and speaking right to them.

Whale Watch

I was rather captivated by this pretty long and very meandering poem, Whale Watch. Since I couldn't order his book quick enough (plus we have a mail strike in Canada) I've had to search online for now, and this one is actually not from the book I ordered, but couldn't resist it. Its one of his really really less than cohesive ones, he disperses it w/ random things that you just can't quite figure out why they are there. But also some extremely insightful bits of wisdom and psychology that I'm sure I'll always remember. Like:

When someone across the table has a grain of rice
affixed to his nostril, instead of shouting,
Hey, you got rice hanging off your face!
thereby perturbing the mood
as he speaks of his mother one day in the basement,
brush your nose as he watches
and hidden receptors in the brain
will cause him to brush his own nose
ergo freeing the stupid-looking-making rice.
There is so much to say and shut up about. >> * love love love *

And then it just seems to drag on too long, but as your attn. starts to lag, then bam, he throws in shocking bits about suicide. And then all that meandering and dragging makes the shocking bits just pop and shock that much more, and so it works in the end. Its a very affecting and unique style. Here is one of those sections:

You may never get
what you want and feel like you're already a ghost
and a failed ghost at that, unable to walk through walls.
There will be a purple hat. Ice cream.
You may almost ruin the wedding.
You may try to hang yourself but be saved
by a kid come home early from school
or you may be that kid who'll always remember
his mother that day in the basement,

Dean Young, Beloved Infidel

I've chosen Dean Young's, Beloved Infidel, one of his early books from the 90's that came back into print. He captured my eye in a Voyages Thread I commented to and I've since researched him a bit. So this gives me a great opportunity to be pushed to really read and analyze his work. I chose him because I love his unique style of stream of consciousness type sort of rants at times. They are meandering, yet always cohesive in the finale, and he says alot of deep shit whilst on one of his poetic ramblings. His language style is quite accessible, yet I usually have to read several times to really get it, which I actually enjoy doing. Some writers are absolutely frustrating in their obtusity, but I don't find that w/ him, so far, its always been worth the effort.

I also loved what he said here, this part esp., as I so totally relate in writing and sharing my own poetry to - "I can read it now nearly without cringing.":

"There’s a lot to be said for concentrating on accessibility and there’s a lot to say for not worrying about it. In Beloved Infidel I began to address matters of poetic construction that still occupy me, the use of collage, the expressive possibilities of disjunction and tonal variance as well as finding my way to my own form of surrealism. I can read it now nearly without cringing."

Jeanne