Enduring the Storm: Dean Young in Strike Anywhere

Abstract

Enduring the Storm:Dean Young in Strike Anywhere Mark Halliday (bio) Dean Young died in August 2022 at the age of 67. I met Dean in 1992 and our friendship—argumentative and tempestuous but amusing and stimulating—lasted through the 30 years. Our ideas about the basic purpose of poetry were fundamentally opposite. I always wanted poems to clarify life and provide (in Frost's crucial phrase) a stay against confusion. Dean wanted poems to admit to and vivify and embody and protest the confusion he felt was constant and inevitable. We argued and we mocked each other in dozens of letters on paper and conversations and emails. All this seemed to me wonderfully unboring, an enhancement of life. My essay on poems in his 2019 book Solar Perplexus "Dean Young and the Madding Flood" appeared in 2021 in The Hopkins Review. After his death I wanted to think further about his work; my essay "Dean Young: Prince of Our Lostness" on poems in his 2011 book Fall Higher appeared in Copper Nickel in Spring 2023. And here I am again, wanting to honor his work in a critically serious way. When Dean's third collection, Strike Anywhere, was published in 1995 (by the University Press of Colorado as winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Charles Simic), our ongoing debate was already in full swing, and I saw the book as a decisive step in the wrong direction—toward surrender to chaos, toward frantic swimming in the storm of incomprehensible experience. Because of this impression, I did not read the book very carefully. I was busy worrying about my own aesthetic, and it was easy for me to survey the book quickly and say, "That's Dean; he does what he does." And some of that attitude informed my responses to his many later books. But as Emily Dickinson said, "Death sets a Thing significant / The Eye had hurried by"—and now Dean's poems call out to me, deserving recognition of their vigorous, resourceful, authentic expression of his sense of life as storm. Dean felt that any person who is really awake is deluged and swamped: experience pours over us so uncontrollably that our plans and policies and theories are riddled with delusion. There are two ways to transcend—intermittently, temporarily—our typhooned condition: love and art. Some of Dean's poems encourage us to seek help from love and from art but always with anxiety about the nearness of the storm. I want to say, of course, that commitment to poetry—to writing it and reading it—is inherently an [End Page 183] escape from the storm, from our overwhelmedness. Dean did love this idea, as poets do, but he was tensely wary of settling into it complacently. In Strike Anywhere, when we come upon a poem entitled "Instructions for Living," we immediately assume it will be satirical and will expose the absurd pathos in any wise, authoritative life-guidance. And we're right; yet the poem, at the same time, conveys that we do have to live, and we can make some good choices. At different spots in the poem, the advising voice says, "Do not despair overly." "Love without reason." "Do not / be afraid of being ridiculous." We can imagine a good, sincere poem that would include these counsels without sentimentality—though sentimentality would not be far off. But Young mixes his instructions into a flow of warnings about our inevitable befuddlement. The poem begins this way: You will never know enough.You will never know when to stop.One day you'll wake mid-afternoondistant from yourself as if someswitch has occurred in the nounsof the summer novel of your life. You've becomea log hauled from the brawling surf,no, someone named Myrtle, no, a needytranslucent thing squallingin the yellow tub. I am not about to argue that the sequence of images there has the kind of poetic rightness we like to praise in great or very good poems. The summer novel sentence successfully calls to mind the unmoored feeling of having lost the plot thread in a long narrative; but the log and Myrtle...