by Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Modern Disciple

Now nine books into his repertoire, Dean Young risks a number of easy criticisms. One of these is that his poems are simply permutations of themselves, that each maps the same territory as the last. Another more conspicuous concern with Young’s work is its extremity. Unabashedly surreal, his imagery and his narrative impulses can be dismissed as wacky and superfluous. More than any of his past books, Primitive Mentor squelches these concerns.

While maintaining his characteristically deep, impulsive humor and outlandish images, Young explores new dimensions while honing his more familiar instincts. Young is not an experimental poet in the traditional sense; he doesn’t try to reinvent his style with each book. Instead he is concerned with a “constant plumbing of the spirit – / Like living in a mine making a study / Of cave ins.” In his first book Design with X, Young staked out a small soul-sized plot which he “mines” again and again and for the most part, more deeply with each attempt. In Primitive Mentor, new vistas appear. Take for example the opening lines from the poem “Triage”:

Fatally, the boy picks up a what he thought
on the occupier/insurgent fractioned
road. Fatally, the man goes out for popsicles
in the storm not for himself for his two
days later from the mudslide pulled he’s
given a kind of super power, drive a nail
into his chest he won’t care or notice.

The chopped syntax is something Young has done before, but here it has been applied to different ends. Take for example the lines “In the storm not for himself for his two / days later from the mudslide pulled…” The altered syntax feels like a jump in time. We expect to see “not for himself for his two kids,” or “children” or “friends” and instead are given a jarring forward movement. It’s worth mentioning that triage is both an action that organizes according to quality as well as a medical term used to prioritize a large group of patients according to the urgency of their ailments and or wounds. In this light, the break not only conveys the sense of urgency of the subject via its form, but is also characteristic of Young’s deeply ironic humor. The break between “two” and “days” encapsulates the period of time “the man” is trapped beneath the mudslide and the moment he is pulled from it, thereby gaining “a kind of superpower.” Of course, this power can only be death, which might send one back to reexamine “the boy” from the first line who fatally picks up a “what he thought.”Ostensibly, what Young is doing in “Triage” is assigning degrees of urgency to a group of patients who are already dead. His touch with the subject is insightful, bathetic and funny as ever.

The “two,” “day” line break is indicative of the greater project of Primitive Mentor. For me, Young’s writing has never been about the impressive quality of his imagery or his wit, although those are definite bonuses. What I appreciate most about Young, and what strikes me most about Primitive Mentor, is the spaces between the words, the line breaks that take 180 degree turns, the tenuous blankness between stanzas and words, the often concealed darkness at the heart of his poems. It’s in these spaces that the unifying force of Young’s poetry and the depth and scope of Primitive Mentor can be found. Image and wit are little more than tools Young uses to enter into these unknown areas. They lead him into dangerous places that the conscious, logical mind can neither purposefully go to, nor operate near, areas where more is at risk because less is known by the poet. The result, for the reader as they enter into these dimensions, is confounding, hilarious, idiotic, melancholy, heartbreaking—and never boring.

One of the miraculous aspects of Young’s poetry is that despite his forays into seemingly unreal worlds of poetic experience, everything he writes is deeply connected to our reality. His poems are recombinations that assume each word refers to something other than itself and that that something is real. A rabbit is a rabbit. Granted, that rabbit might be placed within a hallucinatory context entirely unfamiliar to anyone; nevertheless “Force of Rabbit” is a force felt, and stands among the best poems of the year so far. All of Young’s poems are based on the assumption that the world preexists poetry, that it is there, absolutely, and that its purpose is to lead us into greater areas of consciousness. He’s not just fooling around for the sake of creating a impressive panoply of images. Take for example the title, Primitive Mentor. What exactly is this? What implications does it have for us? What are we to learn from this mentor? Is it simply a creation of Young’s overactive imagination?

It’s my feeling that the “primitive mentor” is as real as the brain inside out skull. It’s the mechanism buried deep within our animal mind that knows more than we know. It’s the part of Young’s mind that reaches out to us from the line breaks and logical leaps that just barely defy our understanding. In a sense, “primitive mentor” is more real than the chair we sit on or the coffee we drink. In fact it may be the only real thing, as it is what allows us to reconfigure our reality into a new more vital one, just as Dean Young does with startling consistency and increasingly refined artistry in each new book.

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