Dean Young Quotes

• Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

  Dean Young

  Oddities, Lobster, Looks

  Dean Young (2010). “The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction”, Graywolf Press

  45 Copy quote

• A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

  Dean Young

  Iron, Odd, Should

  Dean Young (2002). “Skid”, University of Pittsburgh Press

  37 Copy quote

• Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.

  Dean Young

  Fall, Errors, Dumbasses

  8 Copy quote

• There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.

  Dean Young

  Spring, Feelings, Ordinary

  Dean Young (2005). “Elegy On Toy Piano”, University of Pittsburgh Press

  17 Copy quote

• Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.

  Dean Young

  Sea, Enough, Slaughterhouses

  Dean Young (1999). “First Course in Turbulence”

  10 Copy quote

• Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.

  Dean Young

  Bird, Cages

  Dean Young (2011). “Fall Higher”, p.86, Copper Canyon Press

  7 Copy quote

• You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

  Dean Young

  Moving, Life Is Hard, Darkness

  Dean Young (2002). “Skid”, University of Pittsburgh Press

  7 Copy quote

• Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

  Dean Young

  Dream, Writing, Sleep

  Dean Young (2010). “The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction”, Graywolf Press

  7 Copy quote

• You want happy endings, read cookbooks.

  Dean Young

  Want, Happy Endings, Cookbook

  Dean Young (2007). “Embryoyo”, McSweeneys Books

  8 Copy quote

• Just because you’ve had enough
  doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

  Dean Young

  Mean, Too Much, Had Enough

  Dean Young (2007). “Embryoyo”, McSweeneys Books

  11 Copy quote

• Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it.

  Dean Young

  Heart, Way, Pebbles

  Dean Young (2007). “Embryoyo”, McSweeneys Books

  12 Copy quote

• but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud.

  Dean Young

  Rain, Taken, Clouds

  Dean Young (2007). “Embryoyo”, McSweeneys Books

  6 Copy quote

• I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

  Dean Young

  Sleep, Want, Pages

  Dean Young (2011). “Fall Higher”, p.75, Copper Canyon Press

  10 Copy quote

• Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.

  Dean Young

  Mean, Errors, Mirrors

  Dean Young (2010). “The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction”, Graywolf Press

  4 Copy quote

• I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

  Dean Young

  Block, Believe, Writing

  8 Copy quote

• You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

  Dean Young

  Song, Lying, Coats

  Dean Young (2012). “Fall Higher”, p.33, Copper Canyon Press

  15 Copy quote

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