Dean Young Quotes

United States, Poet
July 18, 1955

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.

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.

Dean Young
- Poetry
- Beauty
- Pot
Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.

Dean Young
- Fall
- Curb
- Cliff

You want happy endings, read cookbooks.

Dean Young
- Happy
- Endings
- Cookbooks
Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.

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

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

Dean Young
- Poem
- Odd
- Platypus
Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.

Dean Young
- Inside
- Birds
- Cages
There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.

Dean Young
- Feelings
- Spring
- Paint

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.

Dean Young
- Writing
- Willing
- Block
Just because you’ve had enough doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

Dean Young
- Enough
- Wanted
- Because