Skid (Dean Young)
I wake in pjs crenellated and badged,/my head full of 18th century French/battle strategies. My god! I’m Napoleon!/What can I possibly say to my creative/writing class now?
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poetrymagazine.org
What to say about Dean Young? First and most importantly, of course, he’s coming to TCNJ in the spring to give a reading and host a master poetry class – hence the sudden obsession. He’s a surrealist which, as I told our Student Finance Board members, means… he’s really cool. He’s self-reflexive and self-conscious, and sometimes a bit self-involved. His poems jump from one place to another with little explanation, sometimes presenting two seemingly unconnected, completely unrelated thoughts in adjacent sentences (parataxis! hooray postmodernism!). I like apples.
He’s also really, really funny. As we said in poetry class, there’s no “getting” his poetry unless you “get” the humor in it. Everyone I know whom I have shared this book with (Skid) has fallen madly in love with Dean. Sometimes I think his poems have an almost dream-like quality to them, in the way they jump from image to image and place to place and thought to thought… but then I think, not dream: real life. Our minds work that way, jumping around when we aren’t engaging them in one thing: ADD is the new pink.
Anyway, if you’re reading this and you’re in the vicinity of TCNJ, stay posted for more information about Dean’s reading and class in the Spring.
Literary Ponderings and Such 