Dean Young, Elegy on Toy Piano (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005),
pbk, 93pp., $12.95.

     In a recent review from The New Criterion, the poet/critic William Logan associates Dean Young with what he calls “the School of Goofball Poetics.”  Although Logan’s term is meant to be more dismissive than appreciative, many fans of Young take pleasure in his poetry precisely because of Young’s style of goofy and incongruous humor.  In his sixth full-length collection, Elegy on Toy Piano, the follow-up to Skid (a finalist for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Prize), Young continues to pepper his poems with smart-aleck antics.  Such antics include, but are not limited to: odd and arcane diction (“Much fisticuffs in the penetralium”); the deliberate mixing of high art and pop culture (“I can’t get back to the old country / of the great works of Western Art / restored to the luminosity of Loony Tunes”); the parodying of familiar poetry—in this case, lines from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” (“Something there is that does not love / a construction of roller coasters”); the parodying of familiar poetic techniques (“So now I’m supposed to explode syntax?”); inane rhymes (“Think long before throwing anything away. / The Buddhists have satellite for the NBA”); old fashioned slapstick (“Mung magph naagh, replies the heroine / still in her gag”); and wry self-commentary (“After a while it sounds the same. / Saaaaaaammmmme”).

     Does Young’s poetry indeed sound the same?  Is it merely a monotony of wisecracks and one-liners, however witty the wisecracks may be?  His range, to be sure, is not as commanding as that of his New York School predecessors; his humor is not as surprising or endearing as, say, John Ashbery’s, and his sincerity is not nearly as powerful (cf. Ashbery’s Houseboat Days).  Young, however, can do more than just goof around and his intention to engage the elegiac as well as the lighthearted is well demonstrated in the book’s title poem, an elegy for the late Kenneth Koch.  There are perhaps one or two false notes in the poem, but the first and last stanzas are tonally perfect.   Both have the aphoristic quality of genuine wisdom: 

                                You don’t need a pony
                                to connect you to the unseeable
                                or an airplane to connect you to the sky. 

                                … 

                                When something becomes ash,
                                there’s nothing you can do to turn it back.
                                About this, even diamonds do not lie.   

     Despite the fact that Young borrows many of his techniques from the historical avant-garde, such as the nonsense of Dada and the jarring juxtapositions of Surrealism, his poems are, in many ways, conventional, and deal with common lyric topoi such as love, mortality, and the passage of time.  His poems poke fun at poetic conventions but never reject the conventions of mainstream poetry altogether.  Every so often, he allows a well-turned trope or simile:             

…We were inseparable
like two sides of a page on which was written
an argument against dust,
how everything becomes it. 

One could say that Young’s book, as a whole, is an argument against dust and an acknowledgement of how dust triumphs over everything—even diamonds.   

     In the face of dust and death, a heightened attention to the present, to ongoingness, offers a powerful solace for the living—elegies, after all, are for the living, not the dead—and ongoingness is exactly what Young tries to capture in his poems.  Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” a poem that meditates on both the dizzying vibrancy of New York City during O’Hara’s lunch hour and the death of his friends Bunny, John Latouche, and Jackson Pollock, is no doubt a model for Young’s poetics of ongoingness.   Its rhetorical question—“But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?”—is a resonant echo behind many of Young’s rhetorical questions that contemplate both death and transience:       

                                Will we never see our dead friends again?
                                                      (“Thrown As If Fierce & Wild”)         

And how to get at the fullness of life,
                its quivering and rush
                first with blunt scissors
                then symbolic notation?
                                               (“Fire is Speaking”) 

What can surpass the bounty of this moment? 
                                               (“Shield of Moon Dust”) 

Because of his interest in ongoingness, Young values speed and current, which are both ways of keeping up with, as he calls it in Skid, “time’s winged whatchamacallit.”  They are also ways of handling the heterogeneous matter of his poetry, as he explains in the contributor’s notes to The Best American Poetry 2001: “[In ‘Sources of the Delaware,’] I was trying to get a bunch of rather disparate material to fly in some kind of formation, weird art-world events, pseudo-myth, something I’d written about a phone conversation with a friend. What seemed to be wanted to hold this stuff together for me on the page was a sense of current, of unavoidable and unopposable forward flood. So of course it turned into a love poem.”     

      At their best, Young’s poems gain momentum despite their off-kilter errancy—like snowballs that, however much they zig and zag, accumulate force and mass as they go.  For this reason, Young excels at longer, more capacious poems such as Skid’s 123-lined “Whale Watch” or Elegy’s “True/False,” a list of 100 true/false statements.  The latter begins: 

1. Usually my first answer is correct.
        2. I want to break things.
        3. I hear voices.
        4. I am good at following orders.
        5. I like jury duty.

 Number 66—the longest entry in this list—gets at one of the cruxes of Young’s poetics: “The meaning of every word comes from context and whereas context is created by other words, meaning can never be fixed but you can cross a stream on loose, slippery rocks without getting wet by keeping a strong, forward momentum.”  Momentum, Young would probably say, brings one into the bounty of the moment.  The bridge of loose, slippery rocks here offers a tempting metaphor for a typical Dean Young poem—the stream being the very “quivering and rush” of language itself.  One can nimbly traverse the apparent meaninglessness of a poem’s parts like “It’s eschatology kegger night” or “Flinchclatter dovespun sundrove” or “My tetrahedron is a chiseled meltdown, / my tv listing” as long as one keeps reading at a brisk pace without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.  Yet one can also read a Young poem slowly as well, taking more time to examine the strange textures of the various rocks.  Take this one for instance: “Tangential to the chewy nougat, the caramel.”  Or this one: “Roses are blue, the quality of mercy / in chow mein, first thought butt-shake.”   Where exactly such a bridge would lead is another matter altogether.       

     One of the strongest poems of the collection is also one of the shortest.  In the impressionistic “Flamenco,” Young explores the anguished sublime of Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende.  There is a certain Rilkean compression here (see Rilke’s “Spanische Tänzerin”) that is far different than the casual looseness of “True/False.”  Here is the poem in toto:  

                        Sad song, thousand-mile voice,
                                the crows throwing their existential
                                shadows about.
                                About what?
                                Sad song little while.
                                Little wheel.
                                So the red petticoat flashes.
                                The singer claps.
                                O love of my life, our flesh
                                is pulled away no matter.
                                Foot slam.
                                How we try.
                                Foot slam.
                                To hold each other in our mouths.
                                So now we can see better the forever part?
                                Moon statuary.
                                Stones
                                stacked up to mark a pass.
                                Outer
                                space
                                teething through the night. 

In a poem with such sharp and rapid movements—the hand clap, the foot stamp, and the bright flash of petticoat—the word “teething” in the final line is utterly surprising.  It radically retards the movement of the poem at a place where one would expect “hurtling through the night” or “rushing through the night.”  The word play of “little while”/“little wheel,” the pun of “our flesh / is pulled away no matter,” and the performative spondee of “Foot slam,” represents Young’s verbal alchemy at its most intense.  “In this book I’ve tried to embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception,” says Young. “Flamenco” displays exactly this kind of duplicity even in its very first line—the song may be sad, but it is sung with the exuberance of a thousand miles.             

— Michael C. Leong