Dean Young Quotes

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.

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

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

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

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

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

You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

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.

You want happy endings, read cookbooks.

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

Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it.

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.

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

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.

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.