Dean Young

Hear from that book, Fourth Grade.

It begins with this epigraph by Dean Young.

Everyone is a wonderful poet, through third grade.

The fish can no longer be of whatever color it please God.

I don't think it's, I don't think of myself as a funny poet.

Like I'm not, you know, Dean Young or, you know, Bob Hickok or something, but I do, but I do.

And thank God for

that.

And so for me, then negative capability has been such an important thing to introduce to students to say, like, look, there's a tradition here.

of this kind of more experimental, more playful Dean Young's idea of kind of recklessness and just doing this other thing.

And so I think that youthful energy and borrowing negative capability for those purposes has been important for me as a teacher here at a small liberal arts school.

It's been an important kind of an idea and a catalyst for kind of inviting students to experiment

But I think there's a... there's a life-affirming quality in his poetry that I'm always struck by.

As much as his life story, and as much as a lot of his writing is about suffering and bad stuff and pain, he found a way to, you know, go from being a medical assistant at surgery without anesthesia, right? Imagine the pain and suffering he's witnessing there.

And Dean Young has a great poem about Keats in the surgery room.

But despite all that, and Keats would say, and he makes this argument in a letter, that it's because of that, right? Like we have to be schooled in a world of suffering to become a soul.