When the fog burns off and the air's pulverized
diamonds and you can see beyond the islands
of forever!—far too dramatic for me. It hurts
something behind my eyes near the sphenoid,
not good. I prefer fog with fog behind it,
uninflammable fog. Then there's no competition
for brightness, no Byron for your Shelley,
no Juno eclisping your Athena, no big bridge
statement about bringing unity to landmasses.
All the thought balloons are blank. The marching
band can't practice, even a bird's got to get
within five feet before it can start an argument.
Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned
nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle
of mortality. A foglike baby god
picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely
then goes back to playing with her feet.
I have felt awful cold and lonely and fog
has been blotting paper to my tears.
My dog is fog and I don't have to scoop
its **** with my hand in a plastic bag.
There are sensations that begin in the world,
the mind responding with ideas but then
those ideas cause other sensations.
What a mess. We stand at the edge
of a drop that doesn't answer back,
fog our only friend although it's hell
on shrimpboats. There, there, says the fog.
Where, where? You can't see a thing.
by D. Young
21 Feb 2014
Dean Young (b. 1955)
Poet Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. Recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today, his numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).
Strongly influenced by the New York School poets, and Surrealists such as Andre Breton, Young’s poetry is full of wild leaps of illogic, extravagant imagery, and mercurial shifts in tone. Using surrealist techniques like collage, Young’s poems often blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, creating a poetry that is enormously, almost disruptively, inclusive.
In an interview with the journal Jubilat, Young admitted of his poetry: “I want to put everything in.”
And speaking to the centrality of misunderstanding in his poetry: “I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the point.”