Dean Young
"I'm much more interested in a poem you can never 'get' than the poem you can get after reading it once."
— Dean Young
"Readings are social events. I think poetry is written in isolation and is best understood in isolation. I want readers; I don't want listeners."
— Dean Young
for Creatives | reading, writing, poetry, solitude of creating, reaching your audience, writer-reader relationship, Dean Young
"The rhyming, the singing made the reality of the poem. It's not about something outside of the poem. It's the poem itself, and it rivals the world. It becomes the world, as real and substantial as the world we think we're living in."
— Dean Young
"If there's anything that bores me in poetry, it's consistency. Consistency is for insects."
— Dean Young
"For me, one of poetry's jobs is to negotiate the irrational and the incomprehensible. Not to reconcile with those things."
— Dean Young
"The reader is free to stop reading, to close the book, to not buy the book. That reader's frustrations are entirely valid, and that reader should read something else. I just put it out there, and it is what it is."
— Dean Young
for Creatives | reading, create for YOURSELF, writing, Dean Young
"To open windows in these notions that get passed down to us about what reality is and what we're capable of—that's what keeps me going. That's what makes me write every day—waiting and hoping and trying to make that happen: to write something that seems to open up a passageway into something else that we can't understand, but has a presence, feels utterly important and true."
— Dean Young
for Creatives | magic/mystery of creating/art, writing, Dean Young
"Kenneth Koch talked about how language is so fast. You can say, 'Hannibal crossed the Alps,' and it's done. That's power."
— Dean Young