Skid

by Dean Young

Overview

Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner's "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young's poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979357
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/31/2002
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	863 KB

About the Author

Dean Young has published eight previous books, most recently elegy on toy piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Embryoyo. He 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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Sunflower
 

When Dean Young vacuums he hears
not just time's winged whatchamacallit
hurrying near but some sort of music
that isn't the motor or the attic
or the sucked-up spider's hosannas
or his mother pounded into a rectangle
or what's inside him breaking
because the only thing conclusive
all those tests showed is inside him
is some sort of crow so unsure of its
crowness, it thinks it's a stone
just as the stone thinks it's
a dark joke in the withered fields
and has to be so opaque to keep
all its ketchupy light inside because
you never know what sonuvabitch
is hanging around, waiting for a chance
to steal your thunder. When Dean Young
has his thunder, nothing moves. Not
the dust in the hose, not the music,
not even the eye of the crow. It drives him
crazy how little effect he has. He thinks
of his friends at ballparks and feels
miserable. He thinks of women's behinds
and feels radiant. He's afraid how he invented
running by moving his legs very fast
will be forgotten, attributed elsewhere.
He can't resign himself to losing the patent
on masturbation. On the other side
of the back of his head hangs his face
which he puts strawberries into.

He dreads strawberries because their mouth
is bigger than his. He dreads his wife
because he loves her. His strong opinions
re: capital punishment, arts education,
the numen dissolves in water,
the universal solvent that falls from clouds,
clouds that were HISidea.

 

Bright Window
 

I was born through a bright window.
Winged faces, docile lions, the usual
heliocentric wires. The gods loved playing
tricks then, festooned with rags,
making the wine dregs pour forever,
switching the reels so midway through
Children of Paradise, Wile E. Coyote
creams himself again. Meep, meep,

everyone in a hurry in clouds of ink
like frightened squid. I had a friend
who spun in the rain until her makeup
melted and a scar remains on my retina.
I had a friend who thought the secret
was in turning a turntable backwards.
One pill made you stronger, one pill
and you could fly. I had a friend
who crashed us through a cornfield
and all the husks could do was sing
but that was all right, it was singing
that mattered to us, had weight,
occupied space, in motion tended
to stay in motion, at rest rest.

You start with a darkness to move through
but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

I loved those cold May mornings
stalling the wisteria,

none of the oils yet, just sketch,
the million buds of I don't know what
waiting by the stairway where no one's crying
yet, or laughing, not one leap yet in the dance,
it's almost impossible to be afraid,
the furnace kicking on one last time,
the animal dragging itself a short way
from its birth.

Sometimes I sit for hours watching people
struggle with the big glass doors,
trying to fit small lids on large cups.

You can't have it back, says the fire
affectionately. You never needed it
anyway, promises the earth.

 

I Am But a Traveler in This Land
& Know Little of Its Ways

Is everything a field of energy caused
by human projection? From the crib bars
hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed
desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts

surrounds the soccer field of what if.
Sometimes it seems like a world where no one
knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes
both directions. How about a polymer

that contracts in response to electrical
charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor?
King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone
who has traveled here knows the discrepancies

between idea and fact. The idea is the worm
in the tequila and the next day is the fact.
In between may be the sacred—real blood
from the wooden virgin's eyes, and the hoax—

landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas
are best sprung from actions like the children
of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette,
another nightmares and SUVs. There's considerable

wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams,
waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened
nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head:
good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea.

The stranded whale, guided out of the cove
by tugboats, turns and swims back in.
The violinist will not let go her violin
which is 200 years old and still on the train

thus she is dragged down the track. By what
manner is the soul joined to the body?
Answer: an arm connecting a violin
to a violinist. According to Freud,

there are no accidents. Astrologists
and Presbyterians agree for different reasons.
You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake.
You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop.

Human consciousness: is it the projector
or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits
and spray the grass so everything dies
but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka

what he thinks. Sometimes they give you
a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest
is your problem. In one version,
the beggar turns out to be a king and grants

the poor couple a castle and a moat and two
silver horses said to be sired by the wind.
That was before dentistry, which might have been
a better gift. You did not want to get sick
in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries.

So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided
but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master
of the short story. After the kiss from whom
he will never know, the lieutenant, going home,

touches a bush in which birds are singing.

 

Torn Red Interior
 

This is the time of year people return
and can't shut up about where they've been.
Apparently the membrane's pretty baggy
stretching back to Paris. There: how easy
to go out your door and wander among the concentric
Parisianers. Here: impossible to go out your door
and wander among the concentric Parisianers. How
can anyone live in such detestable conditions?
Someone did a feasibility study once
but nothing came of it although
it still has influence in academic circles.
In Paris, people say things, things
even a rhinoceros couldn't understand
because their lips are reenacting
the coronation of Louis the 1/16th.
After the revolution, that's all
that's allowed: the upper lip's
borne in on an ermine litter
and lifted bodily by two bishops
then anointed from a purple ampulla.
The lower lip is presented with the sword of Charlemagne.
That shit don't cut it round here.
Says who? Says me, the lone star child
of Howling Lightnin All Night Long.
How do I know when the folks that raised me
inspected hams and danced like wax?
No cardinal doffing no miter
told me that's for sure but once
when I was snake-bit in a revival tent,
my aunt said, Boy, you are surely a baby of the blues.
Since then the river flowing through me
has filled with iron filings. I took a test
and they said they'd let me know but
they never let me know so now I go
on faith and gasoline, my wound
singing for its mother wound. Why,
compared to even my smallest cactus garden,
Paree is a wussy blitz of amateurs.

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Excerpted from Skid by Dean Young. Copyright © 2002 by Dean Young. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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the volcano sequence

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By Alicia Suskin Ostriker

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Alicia Suskin Ostriker. All rights reserved.
TAILER

Table of Contents

Contents Sunflower Bright Window I Am But a Traveler in This Land and Know Little of Its Ways Torn Red Interior My People Howl Upone Eskaping, I Learne Mey Vehikle Is Not Sea-Worthie and Upone Mey Tragik Recapture and Longe Internmynt During Whyche I Wrighte These Words Thorough a Secret System Infolfing Mey Owne Blood Gaga Gala Blue Garden Side Effects Dead Dean Sources of the Delaware Today’s Visibility We Through Mists Descry Snowy Prairie Rabbit Bright Head This Living Hand Chest Pains of the Romantic Poets Whale Watch Shamanism 101 Honeycomb Lives of the Mind Flight Pattern Goodbye, Place I Lived Nearly 23 Years Almost Everyone Left Before Me Hammer Changing Your Bulb Republican Victory The River Merchant, Stuck in Kalamazoo, Writes His Wife a Letter during Her Semester Abroad Roller Coaster Saga of Stumps All the King’s Men Lives of the Noncombatants I See a Lily on Thy Brow Lives of the Dead Sleep Cycle Troy, Indiana And You Don’t Even Have to Leave the Building Action Figuring My Fall Teaching Schedule Even Funnier Looking Now A Poem by Dean Young I Can Hardly Be Considered a Reliable Witness Not in Any Ha Ha Way Cotton in a Pill Bottle Eidos Pulse What a Good Horse I Have Archon Noncompliant How I Get My Ideas Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

The talky, impatient verse of Young's fifth collection skids all over mainstream American culture and across the language, jumbling comic or startling phrases together in hot pursuit of comedy, shock or charm. "A swimming pool on the 18th floor? King Lear done by sock puppets?" Anything goes in a Young poem, especially if it makes the poet sound hip, or insouciant, or just plain strange: "Initially I too appeared between the legs of a woman in considerable discomfort," he opens one mock-autobiographical poem. "A poem should be a noise then it should know when to shut up. It should be naked in the rain or nearly so"; "Tragically, I took over Sue's damaged iguana." Elsewhere, Young (First Course in Turbulence) visits "the Caf of One Thousand Adjectives" and "the Museum of This Moment" and pays homage (by name, repeatedly) to his poetic peers and friends Tony Hoagland and Mary Ruefle (both of whom blurb the book). At his best as in the mock-instructional "Whale Watch" Young makes one-of-a-kind, read-aloud poems from the verbal detritus he juggles. Set against their distant models in O'Hara or Ashbery, though, Young's poems can be far more predictable than their surfaces make them seem: they're light, sometimes information-free po-biz comedy for an information age. With this much fun (and this many inside jokes), however, Young's champions will hardly mind: as his speaker notes, "It's an unstable world, babe." (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Young’s poems ignore and gently deride the familiar, anticipated forms of serious poetry—and in doing so they seem to present themselves as less equipped than, say, sonnets, to do their job —and then simultaneously deliver a message of thunderous emotional resonance. . . .Young’s poems are reason-defying but compassionate; the poems don’t alienate the reader but accommodate him.. . .For all his comedic effects, there’s some serious work being done here. Young’s work withstands and encourages such serious treatment.”
—Boston Review


“Dean Young’s poetry at once invites, repels, and surprises. . . . The scattered rush and push of ideas, the energetic narration, and the complex array of visceral images are complemented by moments of stark clarity. Incongruously realistic and surreal, frightening and funny, simple and complx, ‘Skid’ shocks us with portraits of our everyday lives.”
—Prairie Schooner

From the Publisher