Dean Young > Quotes

“You start with a darkness to move through
but sometimes the darkness moves through you.”
― Dean Young

“I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping.”
― Dean Young

“A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.”
― Dean Young, Skid

“‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.”
― Dean Young

“There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.”
― Dean Young

“Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“When you look ito the still, deep water,
you can feel it looking back,
trying to come up with the proper punishment.
Fucking water, who made you the boss?”
― Dean Young

“but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.”
― Dean Young

“You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.”
― Dean Young

“Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.”
― Dean Young

“Go down any road far enough
and you'll come to a slaughterhouse,
but keep going and you'll reach the sea.”
― Dean Young, First Course In Turbulence

“There is no pleasure like leaving
before dawn in last night's clothes.
Light snow or thick dew in the grass-
no one's passed this way before.
The note you left needed only a few words,
no explanation where lies could creep in.
Your eyes, blinked clear, won't squint or glance off,
it's the stars that turn their faces away.
He or she is or is not the one you love
and you cannot stay. The dark
turns to mist and the mist cannot stay
but for once there's no need for alarm.
You're getting a good head start.
Maybe the world isn't made of dust.
Maybe you won't make another mistake.
You're as young as you'll ever be.”
― Dean Young

“Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.”
― Dean Young

“Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it. ”
― Dean Young

“Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.”
― Dean Young, Fall Higher

“Kissing a rose is a dumb thing to do
not just from the rose's point of view.
But it's a start
like driving off a cliff's probably a finish.
In beween you'll probably want to go to Mexico,
get so drunk you think what you're doing is a dance.”
― Dean Young, Primitive Mentor

“Often beauty is disguised
by appearance just as music can be
by sound, the dreaming wish by the waking
wish until there's this terrible stress
because a thing must finally reveal itself,
break itself. Leaning shadow, cinder
heart, shouts. In Gorky's The Unattainable,
the line begins to free itself from any
utility of contour and becomes a trajectory.
One day, Gorky hung himself from a beam
but left us in charge of those ravishments.
Hello, interior of the sun. Usually alone
on Sundays, she won't get off until late,
the man steams rice because it's cheap
and easy and feels in its austerity poetic
like candles during a power outage
or trying on overcoats all afternoon,
buying none. ”
― Dean Young, First Course In Turbulence

“You bend the nail
But keep hammering because
Hammering makes the world”
― Dean Young, Skid

“On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds
that don’t have names either.
I do not remember the word dew.
I do not remember what I told you
with your ear in my teeth.”
― Dean Young, Bender: New and Selected Poems

“Elegy on Toy Piano"

For Kenneth Koch
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.

You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.

Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.

The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.

Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.

When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.”
― Dean Young

“When you are 70% sure, act /
because the other 30% is reserved for hope /
which is doubt turned upside-down.”
― Dean Young, Elegy On Toy Piano

“I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“I still love the sound of breaking,

the tearing of the page”
― Dean Young

“Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages.”
― Dean Young, Fall Higher

“Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.”
― Dean Young

“Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers”
― Dean Young, Fall Higher

“No one believing you is a symptom of telling the truth.”
― Dean Young, Shock by Shock

“The quality of mercy is not strained, there's like,
umm, lumps in it.”
― Dean Young, Primitive Mentor