"Son of Fog" by Dean Young: Is Fog a Gas?

You science people, is fog a gas? Are you sure?  In Tipton, Indiana, you can refill your tank at the Sherrill place, a combination diner and filling station. But in both pit stops and poetry, watch out for double meanings.

In Dean Young's fine and perhaps startling poem about fog, you'll find, among other lines, these winners:

Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned   

nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle   

of mortality. A foglike baby god   

picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely   

then goes back to playing with her feet.

    Or this, toward the end: 

   What a mess. We stand at the edge
    of a drop that doesn't answer back,
   fog our only friend although it's hell  
    on shrimpboats. 

        But don't take my word for it; read it all.

Son of Fog by Dean Young : Poetry Magazine



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Dean Young, "Scarecrow on Fire," Part Two

FISHING




Dean Young, “Scarecrow on Fire,” continued . . .



I'm suspicious of Young's trail of associations, yet my instincts tell me to trust him, not necessarily because I agree, but because he more or less announces, "I'm guessing about some big things here. Come along and guess with me, if you wish." He's been simultaneously careful and strange enough to make me think, "Okay, I'll keep re-reading. For now, I believe you were being straight with me."

One spot where Young steps away from this credibility is the arbitrary and puerile use of “Hell” in “Hell, even now I love life.” There’s that excessive love of the casual and conversational again, this time barging in on a poem that is otherwise all poem, a hard slider down and away, despite its appearance of chat.

Some readers might also object to Young’s assuming the privilege of grand proclamations about life. In fact, the poem opens dangerously in such a vein: “We all think about suddenly disappearing.” Or in lines 11-12, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.” And maybe, in lines 16 – 18, “Whenever you put your feet on the floor / . . . it’s a miracle.” However, those three lines are probably metaphorical enough to rise above didacticism.

A poet is always on a tightrope with declarations like these. Even if the statements are true, who is he to speak for us? But Young more or less gives us a drop of metaphysics, then jumps back to the specific and concrete world and its puzzles, as if he’s aware of how easy it would be to go too far, to step into presumption or pamphleteering.

Along these lines, I also think of Sharon Olds’ line in “On the Subway” (March 9): “I will never know how easy this white skin makes my life.” I think she and Young, among others, are saying things they know to be provocative; maybe they also think we need to hear these thoughts because we act as if they haven’t occurred to us, or we haven’t cared enough about them on our own.

Too many conversational or prosy poems of the last few decades fail to offer this gift-and-challenge package, which I also see as an oath of honesty: "This really is the way I see the world, and this is the only way I can say it. Anything else would be inaccurate or dishonest."

The absence of that oath and those gifts is what I was complaining about back in January and February. Everyone of us is guilty of posturing; that doesn’t mean we have to like or respect it, in ourselves or in a poem. It might mean we should admire poems that are free of it, poems whose voice is genuine, no matter how quirky.

And the wonderful problem is, we’ll never entirely agree on which poems, or even short passages, are the pretenders and which are the real article. Is there anything better than that to talk about, to fight about?

Dean Young, "Scarecrow on Fire"

Scarecrow on Fire | American Poetry Review, The | Find Articles at BNET

Like Sharon Olds (March 4, March 9 and back on Sept. 17, 2009), Dean Young is one of those poets whose style is conversational (see the discussions here on January 14 or January 31, for example), but his trains of thought are more unusual than other poets we call conversational or "accessible." Young is also an example of a poet who lays a gift or challenge upon us in just about any two- or three-line passage, whether or not we feel we've followed the whole of his argument.

I won't pretend that I always follow his train of thought or emotion, or the trails through layers of subconscious association, but almost always, I'm intrigued by the journey. Most importantly, in today’s “Scarecrow on Fire,” I rarely or never feel that Dean Young is intentionally yanking me around, being narcissistically avante-garde, a mind unveiling itself like a melon full of ellipses.

"Scarecrow on Fire" offers the very kind of gifts as a poem that it talks about in life; it puts "something small / into your hand, a button or river stone or / key to I don't know what." And "I don't know what” is Young’s honest admission that he’s wondering much more than he’s making declarations.

The title's “Scarecrow on Fire” is an image of a fake man, on fire, dying. So the poem might be a farewell from a man who's recognizing the mortality of his flesh and bones, his sticks and stones.

The speaker wonders "What counts for a proper / goodbye." Maybe the poem itself "counts," with its tentative statement at the end, concerning souls. The images of stones, black angels, and ladybugs lead magically to the conclusion that poems are like boiling water that "cajoles" souls into freedom, agitates them out of their comfort with the "solidity of the boards, the steadiness / coming into the legs."

How many lesser imaginations have linked the "breath" of poems to the vapor coming off boiling water—and then that breath and vapor to the human soul? Notice that, with appropriate modesty, Young introduces that whole chain of images and thoughts with "Maybe."

Maybe our bodies, our mortal selves amount to the inert physicality of a stick-man. It's humbling to think of ourselves as that lone bundle out in a field, trying to scare away crows (like ravens, a bird often associated with death). Yet in the end we have souls that can be "cajoled" into freedom.

That's enough for one day; my latest posts have been too long. But I have more about "Scarecrow on Fire" and related matters, might add it tomorrow.

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