Dean Young
From AwardAnnals
Poet Dean Young has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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Dean Young
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t you but some alarmed pretender, I went on running, shouting now into the sky, continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought, that all things loved are pursued and never caught, even as you slept beside me you were flying off. At least what’s never had can’t be lost.
Dean Young
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young’s sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty’s evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young’s tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated “Whirlpool Suite”: “Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline.”
In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young’s poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.
