Dean Young is a poet I often forget to mention when listing my favorite poets and for whom I later kick myself for forgetting. I love his stuff. His thoughts seem free associated, but it they keep revolving an idea like a fist that keeps materializing all around you getting closer and closer until it smacks you in the jaw. I can’t find it online, but the first poem I read by him is “Rabbit, I love you.” Here is an excerpt:
Also,
Luciferin
There is something about the way he writes that makes me trust that if I sit and think long enough the spaces in between the ideas connect. And I do and they do. And then, I imagine, I experience what Young might have experienced writing it. It feels like when I’d come across an unexplored part of Baird Creek nature reserve as a kid and find several paths that stem out from that point. Some of them I know would bring me back to familiar places, but some head in a direction I’ve never been. So, I have options and will return for each, giving me a better picture of the whole. It reminds me that our experiences affect our experiences, old affecting new, of course, but also new affecting old. That we don’t build on where we’ve been but we add to the Rubik’s cube of our total accumulation of experiences. So depending on how we twist and rotate it there can be new realizations not only from what is just added, but also from what has been collecting dust.