Dean Young (poet)


Dean Young is a contemporary American poet in the poetic lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, Young also derives influence and inspiration from the work of André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the other French Surrealist poets.

Life

He was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA from Indiana University.
In 2008, Young became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
His most recent books are Bender: New and Selected Poems, Fall Higher and The Art of Recklessness.
In an interview, 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: 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 Breton as an influence, Young finds Surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between real and unreal.
In 2011, Young had a heart transplant. The possibility of his death and encounters with impermanence are frequent themes in his poetry, especially in Fall Higher, which was published days after his transplant.

Awards

He was 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 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 multiple times, dating back to 1993.
Elegy on Toy Piano, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Dean was the Poet Laureate for Texas in 2014.

Collections

TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Another lethal party favor2013