The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Thu 5/29/2008)

[RetroLounge]

The Great Loneliness

Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness
but no one could be sure they had it,
it’s impossible to talk about
and comparisons are useless,
like trying to judge butterflies by weight.
You could be folding towels still warm from the dryer
and suffering the Great Loneliness
or suffering falling short of the Great Loneliness
which is like the suffering of crofters
in 18th century novels,
there only to reveal some aspect of character
in the real players. You might as well
be lunching at the healthclub
as holding yourself together in a maelstrom.
You could be a boy who drove a rusty nail
through your foot and now must stay inside
listening through the screen to his friends play tag
or a woman fingering her pearls while
everyone talks about the adulteries of celebrities.
Maybe you only kissed the impossible one twice
for the rose bush to send its thorns
through your insides but still, no knowing.
And your friend, the expert, who turned her freezer
into a diorama of failed arctic expedition
and likes to stand under a waterfall
and scream, even she can’t be sure.
There are tests, of course, autopsies,
an unusual hollowness in long bones,
a bubble in the oblongata
but by then what does it matter
when you’ll never be lonely again,
that puppy who ran into the road,
it wasn’t your fault, licking your face?

Dean Young

*********************



Dean Young’s eighth book of poetry, Primitive Mentor, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2008.

Dean Young (1955-) is a contemporary American poet in the poetic lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Though often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, his work also resonates with the Surrealist poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and if neo-surrealism has a poetic corollary then it is him. His most recent books are Elegy on Toy Piano and Embryoyo, the first of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Young currently splits his time between Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, novelist Cornelia Nixon, and Iowa City, Iowa, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In the past, he has been awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Strike Anywhere, has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002) as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His work has been included in The Best American Poetry anthology (1993 and 1994). He was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania.

In a recent interview,<1> Young said his poems are about misunderstanding and that tying meaning too closely with understanding is not the intent of his poetry. He finds the process of creation to be more important than the work itself, and that his poems are more demonstrations than explanations. He also finds that using mangled quotes from technical journals, as he experimented with in First Course in Turbulence, allows for a kind of collage in which tones confront each other. Citing Andre Breton as a major influence, Young finds Surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between real and unreal.


*********************

:hi:

RL

[lizziegrace]

1. ...

:cry:


:hug:

[RetroLounge]

6. ...

:hug:

RL

[xchrom]

2. ...

Maybe you only kissed the impossible one twice
for the rose bush to send its thorns
through your insides but still, no knowing.

[RetroLounge]

5. ...

Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness
but no one could be sure they had it,
it’s impossible to talk about
and comparisons are useless

:hi:

RL

[Haole Girl]

3. Exquisite

I'm bawling like a baby, though.
:cry:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. My dear Retro...

How very interesting, and exquisite...

I found his comments most illuminating as well! He's really pushing the poetic envelope, I think.

Thank you...