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Elegy on Toy Piano by Dean Young. University of Pittsburgh Press. $12.95, paper.

Review by J. E. Pitts

Reading Dean Young’s work is like riding a roller coaster with a rickety safety bar. It’s exhilarating, and if you can hold on long enough, you’re bound to catch some sparks. He’s been described as one of America’s premier surrealist poets, but he disowns that tag, since Surrealism comes bundled with political attachments that he would not embrace. He does like the intellectual freedom, though, that that particular -ism advocates. His language (and it is his language, because I can think of no other poet right now who uses language like Dean Young) if full of the odd bits and the usual taken out of its element, as in when the cliffs in a Dali painting drip down to the bottom of the canvas and turn into eyeballs or something just as bizarre. As readers, we are trained to look for and read within a structure, and so we take in such poems with a nag of suspicion, wondering if a trick is being played, and if so, if we should laugh along with the other forward thinkers. It doesn’t always catch on, in art or poems- if Surrealism was so great, as the old joke goes, everyone would be doing it. But the tenets of the random often make for some astonishing moments in Dean Young’s work, as in ‘Ghost Gash’, reprinted here in its entirety:

They were working from the wrong cross-sections.

Two procedures: same results.

My mother was a wolf.

Sometimes they tied her in green leaves.

Who wouldn’t want to be raised by a wolf?

Apparently a lot of counselors.

The tying in green leaves-I’m not sure

if that was to protect her or us.

It didn’t.

It was all spelled out with red bulbs.

Maybe when you get to oblivion,

the car lights sweeping the motel room walls,

you’ll never know who you are again,

or what you’ve done or what’s been done to you.

You’ll have maybe forty dollars,

maybe a road map of Vermont,

only an inkling of what you’re escaping,

what you’re trying to find and what calls you back,

what you’ve stolen and what you must return.

Hello frozen river.

I like your lipstick.

Hello big gray coat.

Can’t talk now.

One attraction of Dean Young’s work is that it harbors constant surprise, like the opening of ‘Lives of The Robots’:

Green fluid drools from my shoulder.

I can’t carry the tray I’m supposed to

and you know what they do to broken

robots, don’t you? They pop their heads.

They yank out their uranium and belts.

They donate parts to art schools so

bug-brained sculptors can spot-weld

awful stupid things left to rust

in the backyards of houses where only

art students have lived so long,

the houses have forgotten everything

but the drunk names nicked into

their hardwood.

It’s obvious that Young has a lot of fun with his poems, and why shouldn’t he? The best poetry uplifts us and brings joy to the soul. This mantle of serious that poetry has always been yoked with doesn’t do much for the craft anymore, except keep the new reading populace low and only mildly interested. If we happen to smile or even chuckle aloud while reading a poem, that shouldn’t be grounds for disqualification as fans of what language can do. Poets like Dean Young show that high art can also be playful, that even sadness can be somewhat funny and brave, that all of this life plus more can be contained in even one line. Dean Young’s own lines testify best of all, like the ending to ‘Last Words’:

What if everyone’s combined into one big poem

and I’m stuck with a preposition? Oh well,

even prepositions have their place

like kudzu. We are human beings, not

texts. Not loudspeakers or layers of gas.

Not even jellyfish. Is tranquility

possible? I want dot dot dot gasp.

You must dot dot dot gurgle.

I used to move pretty fast.

Invisible, barefoot river.

VOX