Dean Young's New Book Is Out

I googled "American Surrealism" and this is the first image that popped up. Taa-Daa!

(Which plays directly into the hands of those who say American Surrealism, if there is such a thing, is derivative. Alas.)

There’s an interview with Dean Young in The Pedestal Magazine archives from a couple years ago, that I just came across. But it’s interesting to me right now as his new book of poems, Fall Higher (that I didn’t know was coming out, and that I haven’t read, but that I’ve already gone ahead and predicted as the next Pulitzer winner [Hey, it worked with Kay Ryan, so I thought I’d do another “guess without reading” exercise. {I will pat myself on the back as also predicting Rae Armantrout's Pulitzer, but I did that after actually reading it.}]) is just out, and for the fact that in the interview Young touches on Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, Stevens, Surrealism, American Surrealism, and the divine (if only he’d have mentioned Michael Palmer it would be a complete set!) . . . So here are the most relevant bits (PS, what a boy-heavy list of names above.):

LR: I’ve got a few questions about poetic heroes. You’ve often been called an nth-generation New York School poet. I notice, for instance, that Elegy on Toy Piano is dedicated to Kenneth Koch. Who in that first-generation group do you feel a particular affinity for, and are there any that you don’t?

DY: The Big 3 have been hugely important to me, Ashbery, O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Kenneth was friendly towards me. Ashbery has been nice. O’Hara, of course, was dead by the time I picked up his books. But more importantly, theirs were the first poems in which I felt a kind of living presence that I understood. I felt like I could somehow join the party of poetry. That I had people before me. Lord knows, everything about them as people is quite different from me. All three of them were well-educated intellectuals, and I’m not exactly that at all. But there’s something about the poetry.

With Ashbery it’s the associational mode, where he’s able to tap into so many different discourses of poetry in other ages. That’s so extraordinary. And O’Hara, along with all his wildness, there’s the familiarity. I think with all three of them, the familiarity is very important. Ashbery, for instance, is a very companionable writer. With Kenneth, it’s that his poems are so flat-out inventive. One feels in reading his poems that there’s a great joy in them, a great joy in making poetry. It’s fun. Poetry doesn’t necessarily have to be a measurement of suffering.

Those three are very, very important to me. And in the second generation, Ron Padgett and Paul Violi are two poets who constantly amaze me. Padgett’s incredible, screwball, goofy charm has evolved in the past few years into a lucidity and decorum that has both amazing gravity and lightness about it. Paul Violi is just an amazing inventor. One of the great things he does is to colonize various mini-genres and use them for poetry.

LR: How about Surrealism? An article in Wikipedia claims that “if neo-surrealism has a poetic corollary then it is [Dean Young].” How important is surrealism to your sense of yourself as a writer?

DY: Surrealism is part of my heritage. I thought you were going to say, how important is Wikipedia to me? I think in that same entry they claim that Rimbaud and Apollinaire are Surrealists, and they’re not. So that pretty much takes off the table what they’re saying. It speaks from a deep ignorance, I’m afraid.

The quality of invention is at the core of Surrealist poetry, the importance not only aesthetically but also philosophically of the imagination.

Robert Bly is really good about pointing out the difference between French Surrealism and Latin American Surrealism. He points out, and I think he’s right on the mark, that Latin American Surrealism has a whole bunch of emotive force behind it. Whereas with French Surrealists, they’re French after all. Surrealism arrived in the world not as a mode of artistic production, but as a means of transforming consciousness. So the imagination plays a more active role in our being. So I return to their poetry to get brushed up, to get the cobwebs knocked out of me. It always seems fresh and dynamic and exciting and unpredictable.

Association is at the base of what I do, and at the base of what many, many poets do.

LR: Can you comment on American Surrealism, if there is such a thing.

DY: I don’t know if there is such a thing. I don’t think of myself as a Surrealist, but Surrealism as a historical movement and practice and philosophy and concern has had an endless influence on my work.

LR: Also in the latest APR is an essay by Tony Hoagland entitled “The Dean Young Effect” in which he characterizes your relation to Surrealism thusly: “The poet is a channel for the cosmic Eros of the poem….Surrealists are not psychologists, working through neuroses, but devotees—language is their way of wooing the divine.” Is that an accurate description of what you’re trying to do with your poems?

DY: I don’t know if it’s an accurate description of what I’m trying to do with all my poems, but I think it’s not a bad reaction to Surrealism. You look at Tony’s work, Tony’s by no means terribly influenced or interested in Surrealism, but I think what he’s saying in that article is quite smart.

LR: So while it might be true about Surrealism, it’s not necessarily true about your own work?

DY: It sounds a little bit inflated. Access to the divine? Not really. I’m not really sure about that.

LR: I think modesty is always good when approaching the divine. I wanted to ask you about Wallace Stevens? Is he a model for your work, an inspiration?

DY: I hope he is. His work is extraordinarily beautiful and, God, sad! This is an interesting thing about Stevens. A lot of the time he’s just messing around. He’s able to evoke a sort of intellectual gravity but inhabit it with a kind of goofy play. But as his work goes on, there’s a darker vision that comes through in everything and with it the decorations drop away. His poems get barer and darker and more lonely, mourning the fact that there is no God, maybe, no connections that make sense of our life. The beauty of his language and the weirdness of his poems I find very inspiring. I also find it daunting. John Berryman in one of the Dream Songs says about Stevens: “Him hurt Henry’s head.”

Full interview:

http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=6809