22nd
Goofball Poetics
“The meaning of every word comes from context and whereas context is created by other words, meaning can never be fixed but you can cross a stream on loose, slippery rocks without getting wet by keeping a strong, forward momentum.”
-Dean Young from his poem “True/False” (a list of 100 true/false statements)
“The quality of whimsy is not strained. It falleth from Ashbery like the gentle rain—and it falleth on a lot of young poets now, students in the School of Goofball Poetics, boys who cut their teeth on Ashbery and Charles Simic and James Tate and now show little interest in any poems written before Dada came to town. Dean Young’s sixth book, Elegy on Toy Piano, is fairly representative of the younger generation”
- William Logan, from The Great American Desert in The New Criterion
