A fellow Young-lover

I found it really hard to relate to the review of Tony Hoagland's review of the "Dean Young Effect". It seemed way too subjective both on the part of Hoagland loving Dean Young too much and the reviewer of Hoagland's hating Hoagland too much. Honestly, I don't think I have anything to say about that blog post...

That's why I really loved getting Professor's email about reading the EMBRYOYO review. If it weren't for that I'd probably to this moment still be sitting dumbfounded in front of my computer trying to figure out a blog post in response to Hoagland's review. But reading Sewell's review was great! He had a lot of great things to say about Young, and I felt he summed up my opinions very well. Sewell said, "Reading Young's poems requires a sizeable amount of trust on the part of the reader, as it is clear we're going to be rapidly moved around to wherever Young's feelings take him. This can be exciting, but also confusing, even, at times, exasperating." On my previous post regarding Dean Young, I believe I referred to young's poems as miniature "adventures", and Sewell seems to agree.

Sewell appreciates Young in a way that I do. He said, "Young's idiosyncratic babel is not trash...riding his impish persona to illogical ends, making something out of an awful lot, combining all the disparate elements he fancies into one big jumble of a successful poem." I agree with Sewell, and I think Sewell really understands Young's process. He mentions Young's juxtapositions, his surrealism, and his use of absurdities as well as wit and imagination. These are all of the reasons I was kept so entertained while reading Young, and I think Sewell would agree that these reasons strengthen Young's poetry.

Because I really saw eye-to-eye with Sewell, I found it interesting how my I really grew to trust his words. Before reading this review, I didn't have ANY bad thing to say against Young, and I obviously had a hard time hearing anything against him (hence why I hated the other review?) so it was really interesting how Sewell was able to show me some critiques of Young that I never would have had the ability to see (biased much?). Re-reading the first few lines of "Sean Penn Anti-Ode" showed me just how infatuated with Young I was the first time around that I coulnd't see that these lines really weren't all that brilliant. I'm glad Sewell was able to give me that perspective because I shall now be aware of this tendency of mine to be blinded by love of poets and their writing that I don't pick up on the flaws.