You are waking up in your sleep
A speedy music flows all around you
And you are walking down a deep corridor.
You open a door to be torn by
the sight of your lover in bed with someone else,
You walk further down the hall,
Ashamed, no mortified at being
Suddenly naked at a concert.
You continue and open another door
And it reveals the heart of the void
suddenly being filled with large white clouds
Against a powder blue sky and you feel a clench
of fear as you drop into them and
you are filled with the terrible sensation of dropping
at high speed as you plummet mile after mile
through layers of cumulus.
You find youself waking, slightly alarmed
and you are on an airplane at 5a.m
attempting to read a magazine
while a song emerges in your mind.
The words become ants on the page
and crawl onto your hands.
You put your headphones on your head
of jet black hair over your big lobes like
old Buddha statues.  You were told big
earlobes were a sign of wisdom.
The song fills your mind as you look out
into falling rectangles of orange and yellow
outside your window, dawn is rolling deep blue clouds.
I pray the clouds stay safe beneath you.
Is music a disruptive influence?
It was feared that Mozart's music would
make women tear open their bodices and
run bare breasted through the streets.
Jazz was accused of being the "devil's music."
Endorsing the worst "vices" like dancing.
Conservative critics are probably glad music
c.d.s can't be spun backwards to look for satanic messages.
"Purple Rain" had a backwards message.
?uoy era woH. olleH
A friend told me to just stop listening to that stuff.
Music is so much more intense while your heart
is young. A strange new music captivates you and
intensifies even the most ordinary of life's experiences.
Enormous waves are set and rise and
your headphones will melt in your hands.

Ruben 1999  Revised 2005

The following blog was written on the early morning of April 4, 2007:

On Dean Young, The Abstract Surrealist of Action Writing

When I walked into Dean Young's office at a prominent private university, I noticed posters of geniuses that were dead, Van Gogh, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.  I sat in his tiny space squeezed between the bookshelf against the wall behind me and his desk in front of me.  I proceeded to tell Dean about my life in slant ways and straight forward ways.  He just blinked and looked like he wanted to tell me to see a therapist.  I told him, back in the mid 1990s' that I haven't read many of the contemporary poets and he gave me a copy of Mark Strand, Gerald Stern and New American Poets--where he was anthologized--to read and return.  I always appreciated that and the fact that he gave me "A"s in most of the writing courses.  I have memories of him walking through the fierce winds of Lake Michigan with his tie blowing back over his shoulder and I began to associate him with William Carlos Williams, because I learned that he was a nurse once.  WCW was a doctor once and his story "Use of Force" is one of my favorite short stories.  It's as good quality as the O'Henry Contest stories where his wife's--Cornelia Nixon--story "Risk" was published. I remember sitting in the library just before it closed reading his early books of poetry, thinking I'm in the presence of a man who is aware of the beauty of Rothko's yellows and John Lennon's music.  But something had changed after Dean Young taught us Robert Bly's book about surrealism called "Leaping Poetry." He discovered American satire and surrealism.  He reinvented satire, by giving it a touch of the terrifying and the sweet. What terrifies Dean Young is not so obvious, but always present like Lorca's sense of death called "duende." 

Dean wrote many thought provoking comments on my poems, but sometimes he read through some of my "pretenses."  I bought his book "Strike Anywhere" when it was published and he inscibed it to "Friendship and high expectations."  I remember him mentioning Dickens in one of my office visits and I read "Great Expectations." It's now one of my favorite books. 

I read the books that followed "Strike Anywhere" and was kept in a constant state of wonder over his command over language.  Dean has always loved the sound of words, like Wallace Stevens.  He can use the words "nomenclature," and "whatchamacallit" just because he likes the way it sounds there.  I start to hear the soundtrack for the film "Stop Making Sense" when I read some of Dean's poems. 

He once sent me a letter after I asked for a recommendation for grad school and said that he could see forever from his place.  Maybe he was thinking of the possibility of immortality or how thick the fog is in San Francisco sometimes; no one can see beyond anything.

After I graduated and became a homeless man in New Orleans for a little while dealing with Bi polar disorder and an ipod, I realize what I gave up in my life for poetry.  Poetry is not to blame for my bi polar disorder.  That runs in the family.  Poetry, when it's not being a destructive force, as Stevens once wrote, it contains ideas that are healing, funny, strange and interesting and new with language. 

The only thing functional about my poetry is that if I print it on soft paper, you can use it to blow your nose. It's time that Dean published a collected works.  I may not be the one to edit them, but tomorrow, if I see him at the www.poetryfoundation.org's Poetry Off The Shelf reading, I'll ask him to do so. 

Dean Young may be too satirical to be the U.S. Poet Laureate but that doesn't make him irrelevant.  Some ideas used in his poetry are brilliant and sound's like Emily Dickinson's idea of "slant" poetry, which just means off center.  Yet it makes you laugh like Dickinson's line, "Why did I get shut out of heaven?/Did I sing too loud." 

Dean like Dickinson has "selected his own society" of poets but his words are always there on the page, not to be dissected like a frog, but to be painted like abstract lines of color splashed onto a canvas. 

Dean has made it to the Paris Review, Poets.org and was even nominated for a Pulitzer for Elegy on a Toy Piano.  That doesn't take frivolous word lists, that takes talent. 

For more information about me, feel free to send a message to me at Myspace.com/earthcircle. 

Ruben Santos Claveria
Chicago, IL

For inspiration go to Www.google.com and google "Dean Young"

Here's a site about Art and Abstract Expressionist Painters I found after I searched Henry Geldzhaler:http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/pdf/artsince1950.pdf

Search Bi Polar disorder on www.wikipedia.org that claims was something Virginia Wolf suffered from.  I told Dean on a university shuttle bus ride that I was reading The Waves for a class and he mentioned the book To The Lighthouse. The sky was darkening over the lake as the bus sped through Lake Shore Drive.  Dean was staring out at the condos while I stared out at the beaches.  Why hasn't anyone writing a wikipedia page for Mary Reufle?

The Hours is one of my favorite books and films.  I like the minimalist music of Philip Glass in that movie.

***

April 5, 2007

I went to a poetry reading last night, sponsored by www.poetryfoundation.org. It was Dean Young and Tony Hoagland, two poets that I have been reading since college over ten years ago. Dean was my advisor and teacher at Loyola and his reading brought tears into my eyes. He has an amazing way of reading into the soul of things. I told him that his words keep me in a constant state of amazement. I told him about the blog I posted about him calling him, "The Abstract Surrealist poet of Action Writing and Interpersonalism." 

I bought four books and had them signed by them. Dean even signed my old copy of Best American Poetry 1993, where his poem "The Business of Love is Cruelty" was published. The title was taken from a book called "Pictures of Breugel/Journey To Love" by William Carlos Williams that won a Pulitzer for poetry.  I also had the American Poetry Review where they were published signed by them. They were very nice about it. I did ask them a tricky question about suffering in art and said, "I've always thought that suffering can kill an artist and it's the healing where beauty is found." They began to explain there idea of suffering and pain that was very articulate and original like their work.
I tried to ask another question but they told me to give time to someone else, which made people laugh. They even called me by my name in front of a couple hundred people. I blushed but felt like it was made personal, which made me feel special in some strange way. 

I gave them a couple of some of the poems that I wrote in 1999. I told them about my blogs on myspace.com/earthcircle. I told Tony that I had a copy of his book Sweet Ruin and had memorized his poem, One Season and recited it to a few people.  It's still one of my favorite poems. 

Dean Young's book "Elegy on a Toy Piano" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize of Poetry.  It should have won.  I've read some interesting poets because of him.  Poets found in the Anthology "New American Poetry" where he was published.  He made me aware of that book during one of my office visits as a student.

I heard Kenneth Koch and Robert Hass--the former U.S. Poet Laureate.  Kenneth signed my copy of his book, "On The Great Atlantic Rainway."  I've read a great book of African American poetry called Neon Vernacular, because I read some of those poems for a workshop with Dean. 

 After reading "One Train Hides Another"--a poem you can hear Kenneth read at www.poets.org --I called Kenneth Koch on the phone and he was willing to talk to me.  He even gave me an address where I could send a poem I had written in the late nineties about him.  God rest his soul.  Koch was a great teacher.  I still think that the book "Sleeping On The Wing" is great.

Go to www.PoetryX.com or www.PoemHunter.com or www.PoetryHunter.com  to read more poetry for poetry month. Thanks for sharing.

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