Hello to all, and welcome new subscribers. Glad you’re here. Before I get going, I wanted to give you the final lines of Dean Young’s last manuscript, as shared by his editor at Copper Canyon Press:
Ecstasy is willingness.
I dare you to find a river any other way.
I dare you to breathe.
Some cries never reach us
Even though they’re our own.
The best endings are abrupt.
And now an essay after/for/on Dean (1955-2022).
One of my mentors died last week. He was the kind of person who wasn’t a “kind of person” at all, and would approve of me stating the following made-up facts: I am the 867th closest person to him on the planet (866 was a neighbor who played for the Hawkeyes and once shat on his lawn by the garbage can around 4am. They shared a beer less than one week later.)
I may take such leeway, in my sadness, which Dean taught me can be simultaneous with irreverence, recklessness, wonderment, and play. After all, the man asked me to watch his cat for a week. Reader, I borrowed his CDs. I sat on his small, tidy bed, and read the poem drafts on his bedside table like I was stealing Cheerios from a sleeping child’s hand.
*
This is what Whitman is: here are my credentials. And here are some more of my credentials. Here are more. See all my credentials? — DY
I arrived in Iowa City for graduate school a mostly terrified creature from a Jane Austen novel. I wrote diligently and darkly about fields and moss. What I lacked in pizzazz I made up for in earnestness.
Until: Dean noticed that I was hiding behind a heap of well-tended sentimental schlock. He turned to me, grinning, plucked me up from the sea of my peers’ talent and skill, in which I thought I was probably drowning, and said “Manring, I dare you to end every line at its end.” I think I saw the glint of an incisor.
Poems are about endings. The line ends. The stanza ends. The poem ends. —DY
I tried. I really did. And eventually things would improve in my poems to the point that I was writing in all caps for a while. Dean enjoyed this because it meant I was turning, standing, and fighting. I no longer rushing out of town atop the river of all desires I was unwilling to speak, focusing on the craft of my canoe’s seams while the waterfall came into hearing distance.
*
You have to be able to fuck up your comfort zone. Sometimes it helps to blame someone else. —DY
I was deeply confused about my own power, my own importance, when I was 24. I both felt that I might be something special and that I was factually a worm. It turns out these things are true, but not for the reasons I thought: they were true because they’re true of everyone.
Dean had the kind of bearing— a bouncing step, hands thrust in pockets of leather jacket, equal parts The Fonz / baby duck / philosopher / trash panda — that made one suspect it was not only OK to be whatever one was, but it might be imperative that one use teeth, and knuckles maybe, to find out more about that person, and defend their train-wreck of a brain-space, even if they kinda ultimately sucked.
Maybe especially then. Dean saw something respectable, gorgeous, and necessary in being screwed and fighting for more anyway, as well as being completely gob-smacked by what already was.
“God, can you IMAGINE what would happen to [GM] Hopkins at the hardware store??” he asked my class one time, almost lifting off the ground with emphasis. “All those bolts? Nuts? Conduits? It’d fucking blow his mind.”
He was really excited about this image, yelled a little, and laughed to the blackboard for a while while he copied out a pictorial diagram he’d invented about the Odyssey.
*
“Without you” is one of the basic, basic functions of poetry. —DY
Why, as #867, do I feel this man’s loss in such a ganglion way? Why is the little hand-made book of 11 sentences he made on his typewriter, finished with actual staples and duct tape, which he gave all my workshop members one semester, still riding in the back of my teaching bag? Why do I always teach one of his poems on the first day of poetry class?
And why am I only seeing all of this now, as if suddenly realizing I had been living in a house painted bright orange all along, and I’d only just learned to see the color orange? (And hey, great choice! Orange! Who knew?)
Well, for one thing, the man wrote stuff like this:
is there hope that you and I may leave
some trace more permanent, scarlet,
tooth-marked, at least upon each other’s heart?
And, he said stuff like this:
It’s entirely possible that the first word was “yikes!” —DY
and
I want you geniuses to write stuff I want to read. —DY
*
One of the things that happens when someone dies is you get to find out where they are inside of you, because that’s now their primary residence. Where they used to be in Iowa, or Texas, or wherever, and that left you free to leave them to their business, now they’re nowhere, and so they’re everywhere, too, which includes under your left rib, and up in your sinuses with the ragweed.
And: on your pillow at night when the humid dark does its cricket thing, like it did in Iowa with the bugs saying YAYAYA so loudly you couldn’t really talk to all the sweaty nervous twenty-somethings at the baseball game, and fast forward a million years and space opens up into which your 40-year-old self pours your ideas for teaching the next day, sure for a moment that they will make… something somehow important?
*
My notes from a one-on-one meeting with Dean about my work circa 2007 include fragments that outline a request he was making of me. I wrote, quickly and all down the page:
New vernacular / something stripped down / further remove from spoken language / new way of thinking / heavier lines / angular, faceted material / Abrupt
Dean knew where I would find my giddyup. He had the kindness and brilliance to say “It’s a change. It’s value neutral,” but he knew I didn’t want or need to lie on the mossy forest paths with my hand across my fainted forehead anymore. I didn’t need to keep privileging the sound of what I thought was beauty over all else. “Why is everyone always looking for the RIGHT WORD?” he said cantankerously. “Why aren’t we looking for the WRONG ONE?”
It took me roughly ten years to make it from my first to my second poetry book. Part of that interval was me working to do what Dean had asked: to find the power of angularity, the bounty of irregularity, and the joy of playing, through even (and maybe especially) the darkest spaces.
As I thumbed through the proof from the printer, I remembered that for a few years the whole manuscript had been titled “Some Trace More Permanent,” after Dean’s line about biting each other’s hearts. Now that line of his remains only as the title of one of the poems, as the whole book found a larger home that was made more of me than anyone else.
My version of “some trace more permanent” is one of several “mirror poems” in the book—poems whose first word is also the last, second word is also the second-to-last, third is also third-to-last (more or less) etc., with these reflections continuing inward until you find the center. Blooming out from that middle seam, the first and second halves of the poem stand startled by both their sameness and difference from each other. Maybe…much like a teacher and student? I think the mirror structure was a way for me to download Dean.
That poem is both after and for Dean, and I include it below.
The only other things I guess I need to say:
Dean, I was disappointed that your cat was a jerk, but I know you were devoted to him and I respect that.
Also: thank you so fucking much for not only being brilliant, but making me laugh.
That made me listen.
*
The above is from Ceruleana, my second poetry collection, which is forthcoming from NineMile Books in a few weeks.
All italicized quotes followed by the “—DY” attribution were spoken aloud by Dean between the years 2006 and 2008, while teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Your intellectual, artistic and emotional recollections of Dean Young build up for me into a memory of his physicality -- which, now that you mention it, reflects the interior poet. Not that I ever got close. A public reading here, poem I read from a book there. A glimpse around campus or in the AWP book fair. A poem by another poet about the poet, like a reflection of a reflection. Thank you for this insight into the mind of a poet who already made me think, by reading, "Yes, this is what words can do."
Really moving, wonderful tribute. xo