Dean Young Quotes

I still love the sound of breaking,
the tearing of the page

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.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds
that don't have names either.
I do not remember the word dew.
I do not remember what I told you
with your ear in my teeth.

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

You want happy endings, read cookbooks.

When you are 70% sure, act /
because the other 30% is reserved for hope /
which is doubt turned upside-down.

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

Kissing a rose is a dumb thing to do
not just from the rose's point of view.
But it's a start
like driving off a cliff's probably a finish.
In beween you'll probably want to go to Mexico,
get so drunk you think what you're doing is a dance.

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

When you look ito the still, deep water,
you can feel it looking back,
trying to come up with the proper punishment.
Fucking water, who made you the boss?

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.

No one believing you is a symptom of telling the truth.

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

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

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.

Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers

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.

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.

Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers' market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

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

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.