Dean Young (poet)

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Dean Young (1955-) is a contemporary American poet in the poetic lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Though often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, his work also resonates with the Surrealist poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and if neo-surrealism has a poetic corollary then it is him. His most recent books are Elegy on Toy Piano and Embryoyo, the first of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Young currently splits his time between Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, novelist Cornelia Nixon, and Iowa City, Iowa, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In the past, he has been awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Strike Anywhere, has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002) as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His work has been included in The Best American Poetry anthology (1993 and 1994). He was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania.

In a recent interview,^[1] Young said his poems are about misunderstanding and that tying meaning too closely with understanding is not the intent of his poetry. He finds the process of creation to be more important than the work itself, and that his poems are more demonstrations than explanations. He also finds that using mangled quotes from technical journals, as he experimented with in First Course in Turbulence, allows for a kind of collage in which tones confront each other. Citing Andre Breton as a major influence, Young finds Surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between real and unreal.

[edit] Bibliography

• Design with X (1988)
• Beloved Infidel (1992) Originally published by Wesleyan University Press.
• Strike Anywhere (1995)
• First Course in Turbulence (1999)
• Skid (2002)
• Elegy on Toy Piano (2005)
• Embryoyo (2007)
• Primitive Mentor (2008)
• The Art of Recklessness (TBA)

[edit] External links

• Poets.org - A brief biography.
• PoetryFoundation.org - A very brief biography with links to several poems.
• PoemHunter.com - Some poems by Dean Young.
• Ode to Hangover - text and audio file of Young reading the poem aloud.
• The Paris Review - "Poem Without Forgiveness" by Dean Young (four more poems available with paid membership).

[edit] References

1. ^ Jubilat, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002. ISSN: 1529-0999.