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| Dean Young | |
Dean Young, former Texas poet laureate, William Livingston Chair of Poetry for University of Texas and educator, has died. He was 67. In a tribute, Copper Canyon Press Young noted that he "was known for his linguistic agility and off-kilter humor, and he had an enormous influence on contemporary poetry.... Young's iconic style derived from the New York School of Poetry and from art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism. He was often placed in company with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Tony Hoagland, and Tomaž Šalamun, though as Charles Simic has noted, Young had 'his own original voice. The language, the invention, the imagination, and the sheer fun of his poems is astounding'.... In 2011, Young underwent a heart transplant, and his work increasingly engaged with profound questions around mortality and the body."
His books include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Bender: New and Selected Poems (2012); Solar Perplexus (2019) and The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010). He served as the 2014 Texas Poet Laureate and taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin.
Michael Wiegers, editor-in-chief at Copper Canyon Press, observed: "Hearing the news this morning of Dean Young's passing, I turned to his poems--where he always lived his fullest self. I gasp and guffaw with each line or subversion of thought--his body of work is astoundingly brilliant, even when at its darkest. Hilarious, irascible, and often irreverent, Young's leaping imagination was always loving, sometimes cantankerous, and fully, unequivocally in amazed, reverential service to Poetry. For much of his life Dean's body was in conflict with itself, and with the body Poetic. From a young age he knew that he would likely die prematurely, and yet, for all his dark humor, and fearless pronouncements, a circus-tent heart transplant allowed him a continuing, stubborn, unbridled love: a love for rocks and toys and friends and pets and sentences and poems.
"Dean Young was a good friend whom I first met right before he learned that his heart was failing and he would need a transplant. There weren't any safe spaces for him. The trauma and ravages of those years of facing his mortality were lightened somewhat when he was gifted the heart of a younger man. The ensuing years brought poems that were magically, incredibly alive and amazed at living--even while he toed the line of the abyss."
Wiegers shared the final lines of Young's latest manuscript:
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.