Poetics of Control

Page 14 American Book Review Poetics of Control Frank Giampietro Like few other contemporary poets, Dean Young, in his new book, Primitive Mentor, straddles the line between the avant-garde and the conventional . He is an experimental poet in the disguise of a more conventional Billy Collinsesque poet. That is, he is able to satisfy readers who appreciate the likes of JohnAshbery as well as those who disdain the avantgarde . How does he do it? He begins each poem in Primitive Mentor with a strong premise. Of course, any good poem should have a strong premise. But a Dean Young premise is particularly inspiring. After reading the title and only a few lines, the reader is reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wellloved quote “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” over and over again. For instance, in “Desert Ode” Young begins with a very interesting assertion: “When you look into the still, deep water, / you can feel it looking back, / trying to come up with the proper punishment.” So we have poem after poem in this collection with particularly good and interesting premises. Often the titles in and of themselves are inspiring: “Sex with Strangers,” “What Form after Death,” “Learning to Live with Bliss,” “An Orgasm Is a Spaceship,” and “The Pure Intention of the Hornet.” But it is in what happens in the next and in successive lines that these poems stop making sense and show the particular genius of DeanYoung. To go back to “Desert Ode,” watch as he turns the excellent premise on its ear in the next line: “Fucking water, who made you the boss?” After this, anything’s game. In this poem, he moves easily and wonderfully from pornographic movies in the desert, to feeling like he is made of broccoli, to brain surgery with a stone knife, to athletic beverages. They begin in a world of Billy Collins as he ruminates on taking out the trash and end in the process on the page from the mind of John Ashbery. But Young fans have allowed themselves to be happily siphoned into the mind of Dean Young in this way through three books now. What’s different about this book is how much quicker, poem by poem, he goes for the absurd. Ninety percent of these poems veer, with lightning speed, into the land of non-sequitur leaping. Where his poems used to rely more heavily and more often on premise and content, these seem to use premise and content as the slightest of hangers on which to hang his $10,000 robe de l’absurde. The other ten percent of the poems are more conventional in that they are clearly about something from beginning to end. But the something they are about is not so remarkable. Rather they are interesting in terms of their placement in the book. “Dear Reader” tells us that this book will be about the act of interrogating the self (a well-trodden path for poets of any generation). And like a kind uncle, in the last two subject-driven poems, Young brings us back to the world of sense. There’s still leaping in “Exit Exam” and “Afterward,” but it’s leaping with a purpose. They both ground themselves in the topics of the poems and the book itself—the interrogation of the self. In this book, Young shows remarkable control. He turns the knob of the avant-garde phrase or the conventional trope up or down as if adjusting the treble and bass on a stereo. While his contemporaries struggle to succeed in one of the two main schools of contemporary poetry, Dean Young shows he is a master in both. Another thing worth mentioning about this book is the way Young employs the “you” voice. He uses it with such frequency and with such fluency one can almost hear, at times, the “you” revving its engine. And Young knows it; he knows he is writing well when he employs it. Indeed, one poem is even called “You.” What’s great is, rather than the use of second person alienating the reader, in...