Creature Feature
By Dean Young
(Copper Canyon Press, 2026, 81 pp $17)
Is surrealism still a dirty word? Not as pertains to Dean Young, in whom the American surreal has come to rest—odd barnacle that it is—like a “ready flaming punctuation mark,” the poet declares in Creature Feature (Copper Canyon Press), his posthumous collection. In it, Young, fast approaching the end of his life, is no less the clattering jester of the American free verse experiment, still gaily racked with that trademark recklessness (“Ecstasy is willingness,” he writes), risking dust “in the confetti factory of the ant farm of consciousness”—only now with a drop of hard-won pathos worthy of a lifetime of elegant clowning:
…heavy odds on heartbreak.
Tried not to let the dew get me
with its shimmer-for-a-moment ethos,
but also accept how all things vanish
with nothing more than whiffs of accelerant,
smudge.
Tried to keep my hand steady
painting the background shrubbery
in hopes the master would give me more to do. (57)
We’re nearly two decades removed since Tony Hoagland, writing in The American Poetry Review, described what he called the “Dean Young Effect:” poems of “breathless acceleration and wisecracking asides” that spiral in and out, with a “disjointedness of development.” There is a “Crackerjacks quality of the imagery,” he writes, “which combines beauty, smart-aleckness, irony, vulnerability, and kookiness.” A poet for both English and physics PhDs but also, Hoagland notes, the hot-dog-chowing baseball crowd, Young’s considerable erudition is, has always been, tempered by his “regular-guyness,” which owns the kookiness, most of the smart-aleckness, probably—and a smidge (or smudge) of the beauty.
To Young’uns, the result of all this is familiar enough: an easy sophistication; a deeply voice-driven poetry, expressed in the velcroing of objects, ideas, and phenomena in strange, harmonious association; poems mirroring an acid trip owing, in part, to the sheer variety of human experience evoked—but something assuredly chaotic, lively and daring. In a 2015 interview with poet Matt Hart, who helped edit this late volume, Young tried to get at the getting at it: “When I don’t sense something cellular in a poem, I’m not happy and there sure better be a giraffe in the mathematics.”
Half grizzled rocker, half Hugo Ball in his cubist costume, Young may well be the antic “cosmonaut” Matthew Zapruder memorialized in his latest chapbook How to Continue; but throughout his writing career—and no less at its conclusion—he kept close to the sensibilities of the little guy. Slapstick, self-deprecation, and more-than-occasional profanity take the edge off, and Young’s “Who knows why anyone does anything” (“the whole fucking shebang stays unexplained”) ethos is a great leveler, much as it can sometimes feel like an overindulgence or the motor sputtering out. But it could be said that Young’s lunch-pail bona fides outlasted his tenure as the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, whatever the concerns may have been. (In a poem titled “When Dean Young Talks About Wine,” Hoagland once worried that California would have “turned him into a sushi-eater in a cravat;” but Young, whose professed literary torture device is the cattle prod, reassures us in “How to Wake Up Laughing” that, in fact, he never intended on becoming his colleagues, even though his building credential indicated otherwise: “Never listen to Wagner before talking to a realtor. / Never let an English professor near your children,” he writes in the poem’s opening lines.)
Hoagland’s characterizations of Young’s style have held up through the tail end of what is surely by now a complete, or nearly complete, body of work. And there’s been little adjustment to the formula and dosing in Creature Feature; probably because there was little need. Young’s gift is his freewheeling, his slate-wiping jazz, his every poem like a rock collection, a catalog of factoids, curbside scraps, and other half-musings. Concerning the slate-wiping, his poems elicit, due to a mix of user urgency and restless efficiency, a feeling of this-message-will-self-destruct—and they usually do. They manage to yo-yo far enough out into the unknown before returning to home base, always with something interesting left in their wake. Picture a cabinet of curiosities, or wunderkammer, reminiscent of Joseph Cornell, whose own surrealism is certainly in orbit with Young, Charles Simic, and others. Endless rabbits, endless hats. Start anywhere, let ‘er rip, end with an accretion of life in every direction, plus a touch of Keatsian foreboding:
The weather’s damp
The poor people are damp
The city stinks
Out here death produces shine
I wish I didn’t feel so separate from everything. (69)
To be sure, homeostasis is always heartbreak (“heavy odds”). And Young, living on borrowed time since a 2010 heart transplant, is more sentimental here, cutting through the reliable ironies and repetitions of his style in ways that point to a fundamental human vulnerability, one that he’d always been alluding to since his heart began to fail nearly two decades ago. The acid-trip excursions and surreal riffs are sometimes punctuated out of the blue with tender admissions: “I remember the voice of my father,” he interjects at one point, after declaring that the “soufflé I made stood up” and that his “cat lived a long good life.” Young’s philosophical romping and general ticklishness of spirit sometimes produce unintended echoes that are poignant, often staggeringly so, as when “This starstuff we’re made of / Never forgets where it comes from” prefigures lines in the book’s final poem: “Some cries never reach us / even though they’re our own.”
If you’ve read Young practically to smithereens (Elegy on Toy Piano (2005) or Embryoyo (2007) are good places to start), the patterns and motifs are clear: bodily fragility; extreme contradiction, wildness, and contrariness; and a sense of life as requiring a set of useful fictions and frequent outright delusion (“The body throws up its careers of spun glass, / the world wouldn’t last a minute / without our hallucinations of it.”). Packaging these sentiments, Young adopts a mood and a style that bridge the creative destruction of French Surrealism with the subversive freedoms it would later help unleash in a flowering of midcentury movements and voices: from the New York School, James Tate, and Dara Wier to the likes of Simic, Bob Hicok, Rae Armentrout, and others. He would articulate his own practice in what would be his only prose work on the subject, aptly titled The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. Its expression is a language of assertion and intrepidity (“I dare you to find a river any other way. / I dare you to breathe.”).
But the force of that assertiveness, in the poems, is more redolent of cartoon violence: Jerry’s comically large mallet nullifying the relentless shelling of contradiction and invention-for-invention’s-sake. Put it all together, there is whimsy, vigor, and boyishness, but also pleasure and sadness, as in the opening lines of “In the Wild,” which nods to French writer Gérard de Nerval, who famously used to walk around Paris with his pet lobster on a leash:
In the Wild
my little dog is avant-garde so I am avant-garde
a spine is a wick that ends in a mind
much like a firecracker
try to remember the last time you were really kissed
a mind is a terrible mist
just try not to stop for any reason
running with hedge clippers
walking a lobster on a leash … (49)
When Federico García Lorca says something like this, as he does in Poet in New York: “At twelve midnight, cancer wandered through the corridors / and spoke with the documents’ empty snails” (trans. Greg Simon and Steven F. White), there’s hardly a flicker of recognition about what he’s on about. But when Young, “contemporary avatar of avant-garde populism,” according to Hoagland, enters a poem, as he does in “You Have to Make a Doll Close Its Eyes,” with: “I love early in the scary movie / before the creepy caretaker’s tour / and the blind crazy old lady laughing,” he pulls off something worth noting. By making the tropes of mass culture plainly legible, he invites the reader to take a swing at them too. The poet establishes trust with the reader in this way: he manages, time and time again, a sort of parody without mockery. With a wink and nod, Young effortlessly takes apart convention only to put it back together all cockeyed. The poet’s semi-ironic “love” of pop cliché grants us permission to think and feel whatever about it. It creates the feeling that you could be sitting with him watching that cheesy horror flick, slapping your knee all the while at the welcome crudity of it all.
These maneuvers have endeared me to the late poet for years, and I would venture that they’ve helped others stomach the screwy surreal stuff. I recognize that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Not long ago, poet Ted Burke said as much, noting that such comedy is “typically hilarious to a circle of friends tuned to the same punch lines or who have seen the same movies, the same books, the same TV shows; but if humor isn’t able to reach beyond the camp fire circle and hit a broader population with funny bones, it is merely snark and sarcasm, regardless of apologetic explication.” He goes on to say that Young’s accomplishment is that “he cannot make you care about his not caring.” Fair enough. But there’s something in Burke’s irritation that vindicates Young, who you couldn’t put it past to join in on his own takedown. Indeed, open things up too much—to the “broader population”—and you get technical documents and instruction manuals. That stuff Joseph Fasano serves up. I’m more interested in (Write it!) style and voice; in all the bright cones around the construction site. The split-second decisions in a poetry of such whizzing velocity as Young’s. I prefer my poet so far out on a limb he’s practically floating.