by Dean Young
Believer Books 2007
Reviewed by David Sewell

Walk the Dog

In the July/August ’05 issue of Poetry (nominally, at least, that year’s “humor” issue), Dean Young reviewed his latest book, Embryoyo, and nine others. Well, sort of. Here’s part of what he said: “But in Mr. Young’s what seems zillioneth slim volume of verse there is a seeming inability to take what is serious seriously, and let us not forget the enactment of the sacred is the enactment of separation. What abominable mixing we have in this monstrous tome, and one feels often like one is watching a clown burst into tears, a very uncomfortable, even traumatizing experience should it happen to a young mind.”

Poetry usually calls its omnibus reviews “Ten Takes”—or however many takes are present. Young calls his, a sort of satirical poem as review, “Ten Tokes.” I mention this only because if there’s anything worth regularly assailing in Young’s writing, it’s that his sense of humor has the tendency to go a bit too slack or wind up a bit too puerile, which that title is a decent enough example of.    

Young does manage to be regularly funny, though, and while his M.O. in Embryoyo is pretty much the same one he’s been running with for the last three or so books—mixing funny with serious—this time it seems he’s a bit more focused—here, on death (“So what is the cause of death?” begins “Inverness Grey”) and immutability in a life (“So much life we cannot have or / find or repeat yet so much we had and found,” from “Resignation Letter”). So it seems the jokey-jokes are not so important, or present, this time around.

A quick aside or two, though, before we really get going: In the June ’05 New Criterion, the critic William Logan said a number of bitchy things about Young’s previous book, Elegy on Toy Piano (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a fact that is mentioned in four separate places in the otherwise toothsomely designed Embryoyo). Here’s one of the barbs from Logan’s review: “Elegy on Toy Piano shows what happens when a poet inherits a difficult, contradictory tradition (the uses of surrealism are almost as various as the use of lyric) and can make nothing out of it but trash.”

And, in response to “Ten Tokes,” someone calling himself Charles Douthat, whom Google advises is a lawyer in Connecticut, wrote in to Poetry with a knee-slapper of his own, implying, one, that Poetry has ethics and, two, that it is engaged in a journalistic endeavor. Here’s his opening salvo, which he somehow managed to get down on paper despite the state of shock he had been unwittingly dragged into: “I am shocked, reading the letters you elect to print, that not a single reader has complained about the extraordinary breach of journalistic ethics evidenced in the July/August issue.”

I mention these two responses because I think it’s worth noting that Young’s poems tend to radically polarize those who have been exposed to them (and they give “Ten Tokes” the perspective it deserves). That said, it seems that what Logan is up to is furthering his defense of an old guard that is not old as much as decrepit, and that Douthat, well, that Douthat just needs to chill out.

As I’ve mentioned, Embryoyo sees Young doing pretty much the same thing he’s been up to for a while. The usual wit and imagination are in as prodigious supply as ever. All of Young’s normal moves are in play—mixing of the high and low (“It is not that I love ottava rima less / now that I know it is a verse form / and not a Renaissance hooker,” from “Continuing Instruction”), rapid juxtapositions (Frankenstein appears later in the poem), the surreal (“It doesn’t hurt when the raven / puts its beak into my chest,” from “Mortal Coil”), the absurd (“It is now clear that eating your own brain / will make you mad,” from “House of Geodes”), and the just plain silly (“Bunny glimpsed by headlight: sailor’s / delight; bunny in the morning red: / might as well stay in bed,” from “Bunny Tract”).

In “Clam Ode,” he talks a bit about clams then makes a detour to talk about sucking jawbreakers on the Jersey Shore. Reflecting on this jawbreaker detour, he writes: “What does this have to do with clams? / A feeling.” Reading Young’s poems requires a sizeable amount of trust on the part of the reader, as it’s clear we’re going to be rapidly moved around to wherever Young’s feelings take him. This can be exciting, but also confusing, even, at times, exasperating. But, like it or not, this is the Dean Young engine.

Where Young has perhaps struggled most before has been in balancing the antic impulse with the need to leave the reader with something resonant. In Elegy, though the line between the two is often somewhat muddy, or even, at times, too stark, the poems still work, even if they aren’t always perfect creations. The poems in Embryoyo, for the most part—owing to the fact that Young is more focused or, perhaps, more singularly obsessed—strike a more satisfying balance. “No Forgiveness Ode,” a highly rewarding poem, begins like this:

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly
but nothing can be taken back

Young then goes on to list several examples of things that can’t be taken back—leaves, rain, ugly things said. Listing, or exemplifying, is a mode he falls into regularly, and this mode’s success depends on how interesting/fresh/moving the little lists are. The list in this poem is, I think, a good one, though it’s good mainly because it doesn’t try to be too cute or clever. The poem ends well, and the ending actually has a feeling of inevitability—it doesn’t seem to be just the sense-making cap on a madcapping poem. Here it is:

The heart needs its thorns
just as the rose its profligacy.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

But here’s a beginning that doesn’t work quite as well, from “Glow Ode”:

My best idea so far had been
to take a girl to a half-built house
and feel her up but bras back then
allowed a woman to feel secure
knowing if she fell from an airplane
into the ocean and was snagged and dragged
through the water by 50 mph barracudas
her foundation would remain in place
so you think I’d be better prepared
but some experiences can only be true
if you’re not prepared.

Here’s another beginning, from “Sean Penn Anti-Ode”:

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face?

The first example reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch allowed to go on too long (though the poem recovers by the ending [“no one noticed / my new floor until I told them, / how it makes the whole kitchen glow / and one of the guys who laid it / only had one arm!”]); the second reminds me that different people find very different things funny. But there aren’t many major hiccups in the book, if hiccups these be. More often he hits his stride, doing the thing that only he seems able to do—riding his impish persona to illogical ends, making something out of an awful lot, combining all the disparate elements he fancies into one big jumble of a successful poem.

In “Leaves in a Dead Swimming Pool,” Young writes, “Theories about art aren’t art any / more than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn’t a meal. We’re trying to build birds, not birdhouses.” I like that as a shorthand poetics. And keeping that in mind, it’s hard to take too much issue with Young’s attempts at building birds, an ambitious undertaking, no doubt. Maybe some of his poems-cum-birds are a bit too big, maybe some deliver the same note too many times in succession. But like alchemy or astrology, what Young is up to is not science. We’d do well to remember that.

To touch briefly on Young’s self-review excerpted above, one problem he has is not that he can’t take the serious seriously—which, in Embryoyo, he does—but that, at times, he entrusts the not serious or not really interesting with a seriousness/prominence/presence it doesn’t really deserve (the bra and barracuda business, for example).

But at the center of all of Young’s pyrotechnics, the speaker so consistently (Young is consistent above all things) evinces such a bountiful amount of humanity (“I would rather spend an hour with a dying squirrel than tour a cathedral,” from “Paradise Poem”) that the resulting persona, which we already know is highly entertaining to listen to, is also quite likeable. Combine that with Young’s fecund imagination and his willingness to take grand risks, and the resulting poems are quite good.

As for our Connecticut lawyer, I think that his sense of humor could clearly use a bit of fresh air. And as for Logan, the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure is never more relevant than when considering Young’s poems, or, for that matter, when considering Logan’s.

But Young’s idiosyncratic babel is not trash. It’s something else, something hard to put a finger on. The poems always seem to be flying away—from easy sense making, from themselves, from us. It’s almost as if they are birds. And, as birds, most of them soar well above the seed-pecked fields of contemporary poetry.

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