Dean Young, Elegy on Toy Piano

Reading another Dean poem ("Rabbit, I Love you"), I'm once again thrown out the window--a great ride. The connection between language and feeling "skids." Feeling is there, usually sadness, but there is a refusal of sadness. This may be because coherence itself is a lie, particularly the kinds of coherence that allow poetic posturing, usually around sadness, as in "I'm a terribly sensitive (read, "sad") person with feelings out to here" (add gesture). "Having feelings allows us to do nothing/ but still feel something is getting done." A comment on poetry? You bet, but also a comment on a culture driven by narcissism. Note, too, that it IS a comment. In the middle of a poem in which a glacier "demurs," an octopus is glad, and Superpoet, even in a dream, fails to "grab the arrow/ about to pierce [his] father's chest." Death of the father: a large occasion for sadness. Further comments on poetry include the ironic use of "poetic" inversions to "elevate" feeling, as in the opening line, "The capacity to feel is good to have." ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall," too.) The poem then goes on to show us what shaky ground feeling is on which to stand. "Feeling--you can have it/ under control them wham-o..." the point being that you can't. Unless, that is, you make it your life's goal to be sure you do have it under control and speak only the partial truths ("the best that has been thought and said," as Arnold said) that makes up most of literature. If, as Yeats said, the poet is not the same person who comes downstairs for breakfast, but some enhanced version thereof, is it any wonder "nobody reads poetry." Dean's poems, among other things, take on the job of dismantling this deceit. Notice I did not say "deconstruct." The book is in many ways an homage to Kenneth Koch, who had similar incentives. Dean's elegy itself--the title poem--pulls the rabbit of happiness straight out of the hat of sadness.