Dean Young’s poems feel like a mind thinking out loud—quick, curious, funny, and suddenly profound. He’s known for a playful, improvisational style that mixes everyday moments with philosophy, science, pop culture, and surreal leaps. Reading him can feel like listening to jazz: the poem swerves, riffs, jokes, then—almost without warning—lands on something emotionally sharp.
One of Young’s great strengths is how he balances humor and mortality. After surviving a near-fatal heart condition, his poems became more urgent, more alive to risk and joy. Death is often present, but not solemnly; instead, it’s treated with wit, irony, and stubborn delight in living. Lines can be absurd one moment and quietly devastating the next.
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- His language is loose and conversational, yet carefully charged. He resists tidy conclusions, preferring open-ended thinking, fragments, and sudden turns that mirror how thought actually works. This makes his poems feel intimate and human—less like polished monuments and more like lived experiences caught mid-motion.
- Books like Strike Anywhere, Elegy on Toy Piano, and Bender show how Dean Young expands what a lyric poem can do: it can joke, doubt itself, wander, and still carry deep emotional weight. His work reminds us that poetry doesn’t have to be stiff or solemn—it can be alive, risky, and full of wonder, even in the face of uncertainty.
Acceptance Speech
This time I’m not going to say a thing
about deity. It’s not the blizzard,
it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing
roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.
Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.
Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split
to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.
A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets
aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s
strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable
beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,
Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable
in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,
we know you’re in there but no one’s
blaming you for reluctance to come out.
Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity
throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud
and look what that got him: toothlessness
and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst
teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant
in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant
in a steakhouse turned out to be more
than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot
of time in an asylum writing cruel poems
if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.
In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape
in two rows of shapes that seems okay
although to the right’s a capsized canoe
full of mathematicians, to the left a bow
about to launch the killer astrolabe.
By what manner is the soul joined to
the body? How about climbing a ladder
of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s
lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.
You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate
for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.
See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds
which is about average for a cloud.
Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.
Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.
Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated
planet. I know, a promise has been made
but Tony’s been sick for years and no one
knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,
corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone
you’d trust to drive your car, but still.
Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?
Would it help if I said Amen?
Bird-Shaped Cliff
Sometimes I think about climbing
a telephone pole but then what?
Telephone poles now have almost nothing
to do with telephones but I liked
how a curly cord went into the receiver
then a sturdier black wire went into the wall
through the wall out to a pole then
miles and miles of wire pole wire pole
sometimes underground underwater to
whomever you needed who’d dry her hands
thinking Gosh now what or Thank heavens
or Oh no then say Hello as a question
or a lie then the intimate negotiations
and sorry confessions and flat jokes
would take word form from excited electrons
moving through the wire and sometimes
a cowboy would suddenly gallop to town
through dust and cactus Yup a storm’s
a-coming to call someone but the fates
always intend so the cowboy must listen
for the rest of his days to the phone
make a funny insect-performing-Beckett
sound until the operator comes on and says,
Sorry but that calling area's been hit
by the blast and the cowboy thinks,
What blast? What blast? riding off
into the moonlessly blue chaparral.
Colophon
More than the beetles turned russet,
sunset, dragging their shield, more than
the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon,
it’s the bees I love this time of year.
Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips
of too many flowers for one summer but
still must go on hunting, one secret
closing, another ensuing, picking
lock after lock, rapping the glass,
getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap,
almost winter, almost dark, reading far past
the last paragraph into the back blank page,
acknowledgments, and history of type.
I think when my head finally cracks
out will come one of those ravening scouts
autumnal with hunger beyond any sipping,
swallowing, beyond the hive’s teeming
factory’s needs. I think maybe then,
when I’m dying like a bug in a puddle
of dish soap, I’ll be relieved,
my wings wet capes and not working,
antennae slicked back and not working,
eye that sees the ruby above going out,
eye that sees the ruby within getting brighter
as I drag myself to a tomato ripening
on the window sill, reddest, softest
island of my last planet, last aureola,
stinger waving and useless. I’ll wait then,
while air from the north rushes gulf air,
a tree indicating wildly, each leaf woke
in orange outcry. It won’t be suffering,
exactly. Rain coming, then gone, a chill
that means all my barbarous kind are alone
and perishing, our unrecognizable young
buried and waiting, bodies of fire becoming
bodies of air. I don’t think there’s any way
to prepare.
Hammer
Every Wednesday when I went to the shared office
before the class on the comma, etc.,
there was on the desk, among
the notes from students aggrieved and belly-up
and memos about lack of funding
and the quixotic feasibility memos
and labyrinthine parking memos
and quizzes pecked by red ink
and once orange peels,
a claw hammer.
There when I came and there when I left,
it didn’t seem in anyone’s employ.
There was no room left to hang anything.
It already knew how to structure an argument.
It already knew that it was all an illusion
that everything hadn’t blown apart
because of its proximity to oblivion,
having so recently come from oblivion itself.
Its epiphyses were already closed.
It wasn’t my future that was about to break its wrist
or my past that was god knows where.
It looked used a number of times
not entirely appropriately
but its wing was clearly healed.
Down the hall was someone with a glove
instead of a right hand.
A student came by looking for who?
Hard to understand
then hard to do.
I didn’t think much of stealing it,
having so many hammers at home.
There when I came, there when I left.
Ball peen, roofing, framing, sledge, one
so small of probably only ornamental use.
That was one of my gifts,
finding hammers by sides of roads, in snow, inheriting,
one given by a stranger for a jump in the rain.
It cannot be refused, the hammer.
You take the handle, test its balance
then lift it over your head.
Folklore
You shouldn’t have a heart attack
in your 20s. 47 is the perfect time
for a heart attack. Feeding stray shadows
only attracts more shadows. Starve a fever,
shatter a glass house. People often mistake
thirst for hunger so first take a big slurp.
A motorboat is wasted on me even though
all summer the pool was, I didn’t
get in it once. Not in it, not in it
twice. A dollhouse certainly isn’t wasted
on a mouse both in terms of habitation
and rhyme. Always leave yourself time
to get lost. 50 cattle are enough
for a decent dowry but sometimes a larger
gesture is called for like shouting
across the Grand Canyon. Get used to
nothing answering back. Always remember
the great effects of the Tang poets,
the meagerness of their wine, meagerness
of writing supplies. Go ahead, drown
in the moon’s puddle. Contusions
are to be expected and a long wait
in ICU under the muted TVs advertising
miracle knives and spot removers.
How wonderful to be made entirely
of hammered steel! No one knows why
Lee chose to divert his troops to Gettysburg
but all agree it was the turning point
of the Civil War. Your turning point
may be lying crying on the floor.
Get up! The perfect age for being buried
alive in sand is 8 but jumping up 33, alluding
to the resurrection, a powerful motif
in Western art but then go look at the soup cans
and crumpled fenders in the modern wing:
what a relief. Nearly 80% of the denizens
of the deep can produce their own light
but up here, we make our own darkness.
The Infirmament
An end is always punishment for a beginning.
If you’re Catholic, sadness is punishment
for happiness, you become the bug you squash
if you’re Hindu, a flinty space opens
in your head after a long night of laughter
and wine. For waking there are dreams,
from French poetry, English poetry,
for light fire although sometimes
fire must be punished by light
which is why psychotherapy had to be invented.
A father may say nothing to a son for years.
A wife may keep something small folded deep
in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in
resembling the terrible things we believe
about ourselves, a rock comes loose
from a ledge, the baby just cries
and cries. Doll in a chair,
windshield wipers, staring off
into the city lights. For years
you may be unable to hear the word monkey
without a stab in the heart because
she called you that the summer she thought
she loved you and you thought you loved
someone else and everyone loved
your salad dressing. And the daffodils
come up in the spring and the snow covers
the road in winter and the water covers
the deep trenches in the sea where all the time
the inner stuff of this earth surges up
which is how the continents are made
and broken.
Lucifer
You can read almost anything
about angels, how they bite off
the heads first, copulate with tigers,
tortured Miles Davis until he stuck
a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.
The pornographic magazines ported
into the redwoods. The sweetened breath
of the starving. The prize livestock
rolls over on her larval young,
the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs
of the clockworks. I would have
a black bra hanging from the shower rod.
I would have you up against
the refrigerator with its magnets
for insurance agents and oyster bars.
Miracles, ripped thumbnails,
everything a piece of something else,
archangelic, shadow-clawed,
the frolicking despair of repeating
decimals because it never comes out even.
Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm,
the impurities of darkness
sometimes called stars. Mostly
the world is assignations, divorces
conducted between rooftops. Forever
and forever the checkbook unbalanced,
the beautiful bodies bent back
like paper clips, the discharged
blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.
Coppers and silvers and radiant traces,
gold flecks from our last brush,
brushfires. Always they’re espousing
accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow
not in the aimed-for heart but throat
that has the say. There are no transitions,
only falls.
Sleep Cycle
We cannot push ourselves away
from this quiet, even in our sprees
of inattention, the departing passengers
stubbing out their smokes, arrivees in tears,
lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking.
Wind scrapes leaves across the road,
first flashes of snow, it is dark then
it’s really dark. Forgive me for not
writing for so long, I’ve been
right beside you, one of the vaguer
divinities blocking your way with its need
to confess all its botched attempts at love,
what started the whole mess. I love this place,
its absurd use of balustrade, the chairs
that dig into the spine, motorcyclists
propping their drunk girlfriends in the sun,
men playing timed chess with themselves,
the guarantees and warnings that entice us
to the brink of what they warn about.
But we can do no more than pass through
these rooms and their sudden chills
where once a plea was entered almost
unintentionally that seemed at last
to reveal ourselves to ourselves,
immaculate, bereft, deserving to be found.
