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Primitive Mentor
The ninth collection for this Pulitzer Prize finalist, who remains as entertaining, imaginative and inventive as ever.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
7 people are currently reading
213 people want to read
About the author
Dean Young
46 books106 followersDean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 20, 2018
Dean Young has a formula: he is very good at it--bits of confessional or conservational language rich with personal reference and irony paired with hallucinatory and surreal images that make banal language strange and the poem often arrives at an image that is both poignant and absurd or a statement that can be read somewhere between farcical and profound. By this, his 9th collection, this seems both slightly tired and yet he has also mastered it and even knowing Young's formula, he still manages to surprise me.
April 15, 2017
Some startling lines that linger and entrance but the poems were a bit too hallucinatory to digest as a whole.
May 16, 2018
I like to browse the displays at my local public library, and I found this during National Poetry Month. Young is a talented poet.
Read
October 19, 2022when my mother dies,
I’m afraid I’ll have to return to my hometown,
find it recognizable as someone else’s
set design of my bad dreams, humiliations
intact, fresh as cheese, my friends still
haunting me with their superior models
and I still won’t know what to do
with the ashes of my dead cat.
I’m afraid I’ll have to return to my hometown,
find it recognizable as someone else’s
set design of my bad dreams, humiliations
intact, fresh as cheese, my friends still
haunting me with their superior models
and I still won’t know what to do
with the ashes of my dead cat.
April 12, 2013
When he's good he's so so good. When he's less good you turn the page and let him try again, because when he's good he's so so good.
Read
July 9, 2024Dean Young has a nimble imagination, big, honest ideas, and an obvious love of words. This slight and potent volume starts with a poetic communique to the Reader:
"Be we just passing
figments in this waterhead world or
is there hope that you and I may leave
some trace more permanent, scarlet,
tooth-marked, at least upon each other's heart?"
- and ends with a beautiful thought on fragility, hope and forever:
"Funny word, forever. You can put it at the end
of almost any sentence and feel better about
yourself, about how you've worked in a spray
of sparks accomplishing almost nothing
and feel that's exactly what the gods
intended, look at the galaxies, spilled
milk, their lust and retrograde whims."
He's truly one of the most resonant and impressive contemporary poets I've read. Of course, poetry is a very relative thing, and one man's resonance could be another's indifference. But if these excerpts intrigue you, I'd say you should check this out.
"Be we just passing
figments in this waterhead world or
is there hope that you and I may leave
some trace more permanent, scarlet,
tooth-marked, at least upon each other's heart?"
- and ends with a beautiful thought on fragility, hope and forever:
"Funny word, forever. You can put it at the end
of almost any sentence and feel better about
yourself, about how you've worked in a spray
of sparks accomplishing almost nothing
and feel that's exactly what the gods
intended, look at the galaxies, spilled
milk, their lust and retrograde whims."
He's truly one of the most resonant and impressive contemporary poets I've read. Of course, poetry is a very relative thing, and one man's resonance could be another's indifference. But if these excerpts intrigue you, I'd say you should check this out.
May 27, 2011
Sometimes it feels like enough to say that a book was insanely good.
What I previously thought of as hyper-personalized shades of emotion surrounding bouts of reflection on mortality, selfhood, 'place' in all the macro, cosmological meanings as well as the micro, what-am-I-in-my-various-occurrences-of-family ones turned out to really be a bit more complicated. This is a book that shifts with breakage and tremor along the fault lines that form Young's aesthetic gesture, singular enough to converse on and on as many do about surrealist jumps, the reality post-modern 'collage' that Terry Eagleton say is the only art from we've got left, yet of course intrinsically this just leads to more breakage and nuance (even of every last nuance is accidental, which is really what this book is 'all about'), the camera zooming in and out on exponential scales that defy notions of sense-making in a way that reinforces every last bit of meaning we've felt since listening to water drip down the first cave walls.
The play with mortality is arched up by a sort of warm kindness breathed in like humid air that seems to only be visited on the patients in all the vast terminal wings; sure it's impossible to ignore what I've passingly read about Young's health issues but it beautifully doesn't matter, the hints of this strewn with a careless ease about the book as if Young is saying 'Sure, it's about that, it's about me, but let's get a little more ambitious...' and the camera zooms, even as it sits stationary and solitary.
It's all surrounding the beautiful existential cognitive dissonance of knowing that we're dust motes in the beam of sunlight, sure, but to each mote, no matter how loving and altruistic, we're always our own universe, it all revolves around us at some manner of scale & of course before we had better math and lenses we thought that's how it all really went about. Whether you think poetry is about yourself or not Young feels the same, knows it's both as much as it is neither; the collage sits as a pristine metaphor because every breathing bit in every scene of every micro-poem is Young, isn't him, is you, me, whatever. It's the kind of thinking that dares truly sentimental waxing and Young cast coquettish glances that way his hand guides with far too much irony and experience to let the poems drown.
Like I said: insanely good.
What I previously thought of as hyper-personalized shades of emotion surrounding bouts of reflection on mortality, selfhood, 'place' in all the macro, cosmological meanings as well as the micro, what-am-I-in-my-various-occurrences-of-family ones turned out to really be a bit more complicated. This is a book that shifts with breakage and tremor along the fault lines that form Young's aesthetic gesture, singular enough to converse on and on as many do about surrealist jumps, the reality post-modern 'collage' that Terry Eagleton say is the only art from we've got left, yet of course intrinsically this just leads to more breakage and nuance (even of every last nuance is accidental, which is really what this book is 'all about'), the camera zooming in and out on exponential scales that defy notions of sense-making in a way that reinforces every last bit of meaning we've felt since listening to water drip down the first cave walls.
The play with mortality is arched up by a sort of warm kindness breathed in like humid air that seems to only be visited on the patients in all the vast terminal wings; sure it's impossible to ignore what I've passingly read about Young's health issues but it beautifully doesn't matter, the hints of this strewn with a careless ease about the book as if Young is saying 'Sure, it's about that, it's about me, but let's get a little more ambitious...' and the camera zooms, even as it sits stationary and solitary.
It's all surrounding the beautiful existential cognitive dissonance of knowing that we're dust motes in the beam of sunlight, sure, but to each mote, no matter how loving and altruistic, we're always our own universe, it all revolves around us at some manner of scale & of course before we had better math and lenses we thought that's how it all really went about. Whether you think poetry is about yourself or not Young feels the same, knows it's both as much as it is neither; the collage sits as a pristine metaphor because every breathing bit in every scene of every micro-poem is Young, isn't him, is you, me, whatever. It's the kind of thinking that dares truly sentimental waxing and Young cast coquettish glances that way his hand guides with far too much irony and experience to let the poems drown.
Like I said: insanely good.
July 8, 2016
This one seemed even more like a Mad Lib than Young's other collections I've read. He seems to be focusing on language and odd rhyme a bit too much, and in the tiny places where a narrative--even a disjointed, let-the-mind-wander kind of Dean Young narrative--does develop, it either doesn't last for long or is mostly charmless.
This book still has some wonderful lines and parts of solid imagery (A boy has found a bullet / by the swing-set. / Something's written on it.) or humor ("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."). Young's style to me has always been about digging through whatever is inside his head at the moment until he unearths what's at the bottom and then starting over with a different direction. Aside from the language-related detours, this is no different, but it just doesn't add up for me in the end.
This book still has some wonderful lines and parts of solid imagery (A boy has found a bullet / by the swing-set. / Something's written on it.) or humor ("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."). Young's style to me has always been about digging through whatever is inside his head at the moment until he unearths what's at the bottom and then starting over with a different direction. Aside from the language-related detours, this is no different, but it just doesn't add up for me in the end.
September 26, 2014
Dean Young is kind of like the Rupert Pupkin of "surrealism," that is, quintessentially American in his funny-not-funny psychotic patter. Of course, these poems are self-aware in a way that Rupert's confessional jokes can't be, and they are far more skeptical (though perhaps no less obsessive) in their project than Pupkin's ambitions. But where the cardboard interlocutors on the pretend King of Comedy's set are just creepy, in the context of Young's hurtling interrogations, the fact that any pain can actually be flattened and represented is a source of relief. Or: Rupert Pupkin's non sequiturs drop you through trap doors into the dark airlessness of his subconscious; Young's / Young's personae, their non sequiturs are exit ramps out of the traffic jam of nonsense that the world would have us take as our actuality.
July 9, 2013
As I'm making my way through Young chronologically, it occurs to me that 2 things are happening: 1. the influence of the French surrealists is becoming more prominent, and 2. Young's letting his crazy flag fly. And you know how much I love both the surrealists and a crazy flag. So I'm enjoying this romp. Here are some of my faves:
"clouds that seem like nothing
until the pilot hits one."
"My mother tried to be nice to me
but she had to lock me in my room."
"Her sister has a hatchet in her forehead
it seems rude to mention."
"Everyone gets a hurricane name,
a moon drunk in a puddle."
"Once I saw a snake with a snake in its mouth."
"Who can sell my teeth to the teeth museum?"
"Even if you're looking at it through cage bars
and all you have to play with
is an empty bleach jug."
"clouds that seem like nothing
until the pilot hits one."
"My mother tried to be nice to me
but she had to lock me in my room."
"Her sister has a hatchet in her forehead
it seems rude to mention."
"Everyone gets a hurricane name,
a moon drunk in a puddle."
"Once I saw a snake with a snake in its mouth."
"Who can sell my teeth to the teeth museum?"
"Even if you're looking at it through cage bars
and all you have to play with
is an empty bleach jug."
February 15, 2011
Really delightful book, language filled with whimsy and irony, strange and disjointed images all stacking together, many through the use of simile, creating poems with emotional punch. That emotion so often relates to the human condition--life and death, love and its loss, parents and children. Some of the poems work better for me than others, but all of them create a delightful music that is wonderful to read.
May 1, 2015
Though I'm lost at some points, Young's poetry always pulls me back in with a turn of phrase or a crystalline image of pure truth. Cheesy, I know, but his images are beautiful if you can wade through some of the detritus of craft. (all very necessary, though)
Read
July 6, 2008charming and jarring.
Currently reading
June 7, 2008so far i'm liking it a lot, a lot more than embryoyo i think!
August 25, 2008
the expert, who turned her freezer
into a diorama of failed arctic expeditions
-Dean Young, "The Great Loneliness"
into a diorama of failed arctic expeditions
-Dean Young, "The Great Loneliness"
April 11, 2011
Not my favorite Young, but solid.
January 16, 2012
One of the best collections I read in 2011. Dean Young is the bee's knees.
January 23, 2013
His poetry is contemporary -- incredible images, wonderful words, raw and funny all the same time. And you don't even have to understand the meaning to know that it's terrific!
August 12, 2008
I'm not sure why, but this book didn't do it for me like "Elegy on Toy Piano" or "Embryoyo."
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews