Anyway, here’s some of “True / False” by Dean Young, from 2005’s Elegy on Toy Piano.

So, yes, these lines play the autobiography game, but that’s nothing, really. It’s gossip-slash-commentary-about-gossip and it’s interesting to that extent. And also I really like the writing of all three of those people, so I always hope they’re happy when I meet them in their poems.

But it’s the poetry of it that’s killer. The transformation in that last one? #66? Where it transfers from pointy-headed theory discourse to an action image of crossing a stream—an action image with religion, yo: walking on water w/ out getting wet? That rules. I don’t mean that. It’s not about ruling.

As I write this, I’ve learned that Press Assistant Sarah Roberts, at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book has produced a 23-foot-long, accordion-folded print version of this poem, published by Inflorescence Press, which sounds magnificent to me.

All of this has been my long-ass way of saying Dean Young’s new work is great. It’s on fire, you know, in all the ways you’d want to be on fire. Actually, Elegy’s not even Young’s most recent book—there’s one called Embryoyo that’s DUE any day. Ha ha.

But I loved Dean Young’s early work at a time when I needed to learn to love stuff. The nights were long and cold back then, in Grand Forks North Dakota—that’s a shout-out to Grand Forks, by the way: is anybody out there? Of course you are. I lived in GF when I was 22 & that book came out and a few of us were into new poets. My friend Kevin Marzahl is great at reading poems and finding all manner of cool shit to look at, so I kind of got Dean Young as a gift from Kevin. I’d learn a lot from Kevin’s poems, too—his poem “Kiln” won a contest at The Southern Review right about then, when he was 23 or so. I couldn’t find it on the internet, but I’m told that text archives exist.

I meant what I said about love, though. Maybe it comes easy to some people, but for me I have to learn it—this is sounding hokey, so I’m gonna leave it at that. Here’s a poem I loved called “Legend,” from 1992’s Beloved Infidel.

You know, that poem uses some conventions of poetic speech that might now seem… what?… culturally enforced?… to a poet as advanced as Dean Young. I mean, these days, Dean Young is making dynamic moves on so many levels that this sustained first-person narrative might seem naïve. But I admired the speaker of those poems, & wanted to live like him. That guy in those poems—Dean Young or not—was a friend to me. He knew interesting stuff—he had apparently been a med student at one time and there was one poem where he showed an open brain. Cool. He’d had a wide variety of romantic and sexual relationships, knew something about drugs, not to mention reggae (I mean, in “Legend,” that’s a good analysis of the little bob-slash-groove of reggae dancing—I wanted to analyze stuff like that!). That poetic speaker also had hip, activist friends. Those poems seemed to want the world to be a good, or at least better place. And the speaker of those poems was possessed of this ability for vision. I wanted to absorb what I saw like that speaker absorbed those spark-spurting workers in the girders. I was learning from those poems how to see, I guess.