Dean Young

Reading Dean Young after Flynn and Greenfield was like feeling the sun emerge after a horrific storm. In his poem, Acceptance Speech, Young writes,

"Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him toothlessness and Shock therapy."

and

"Do not spend a lot of time in a n asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough."

The "grinding of multiplicity throwing of sparks," is how I feel about Flynn and Greenfields poems. The sparks of emotions derived from the grinding of pain results in a chaotic mess of words to illustrate emotion.

Young uses his poems to tell stories that the reader can identify with. The poems are not simply outpourings of emotion. They illustrate a certain idea or ideology but the illustration not completed by Young. The ideas that Young present are open to the reader's personal feelings toward the poems. This creates the elliptical feel of Young's poems. The poems never seemed to be completed on the paper. The reader is left to illustrate his or her own complete image of the ideas that Young presents. I found this in the poem, Elegy on Toy Piano.

Young starts,

"You don't need a pony

to connect you to the unseeable

or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live

and there are many manuals

but in all important ways

one is on one's own."

He finishes with,

"When something become ash,

there's nothing you can do to turn it back

About this, even diamonds do not lie."

Young makes a strong statement about what is necessary in life. While this statement about necessity is a solid one, it is left to the reader to play with. By making a bold point about the structure of life, Young deconstructs this very structure, leaving the reader with the lego blocks of life and prodding the reconstruction of something entirely new. This is why I loved Young's poems. They are playful and thought-provoking giving the reader a puzzle, and "this puzzle has 15 thousand solutions!"