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Elegy On Toy Piano
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline."
In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline."
In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.
90 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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About the author
Dean Young
48 books106 followersDean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
April 8, 2019
Dean Young's style is seductive yet hard to imitate. It's funny, "random," hip, ironic, but founded on a strong bed of sincere inquiry. A poem says, "DNA is surreal because / a fair amount of it is gibberish / [...] and as such purely artistic," which is funny and authentic and somehow persuasive.
The typical poem is a longish single stanza of free verse lines, a shape Young proves to be versatile. One poem is a catalog of recent deaths ("Two were in their 70s, that's not so old!"); another, a percentage breakdown of how much the speaker likes his friends; another, a True/False quiz, probably the book's most famous creation. I showed this poem to my students in a few classes, had them read it out loud, and respond as honestly as possible to the questions. They found some completely insignificant ("74. Zinc."), others conventional if also intrusive ("87. I believe in God."), and still others to be surprisingly pointed inquiries into their ethical beliefs ("58. Criminals should not be allowed to lift weights.") or their ideas of truth ("34. There are more colors now than twenty years ago.") This poem, "True/False," is a good barometer for the whole book's range, the various ways it engages the reader's mind.
I felt most disengaged from the book when it gets so fragmentary the pieces bear no relation to each other, which happens in predictable ways. Here's a passage from "I Saw My Life Go By in the Coyote's Jaws":
Between queen.
Dream disjointer.
Furry Dionysus
who you never know
which way he/she will go,
everyone perfectly okay
with the vintage then boom
your head's knocked off,
jade monkey crushed,
moon fallen in a mess of kite string.
We're being told the sloppiness of the lines is okay through appeals to dream and Dionysian madness, but it's not really all that fun to read. There's something stale about the "boom," the kind of thing we have come to associate with "voice poets." Also stale: the image of the moon as a kite. It's not terrible, but it's not fresh.
I suppose I rounded this down from, like, 4.4 stars. It's a lovely, funny, charmingly weird book that mostly succeeds in its weird mashup of the elegiac and ludicrous.
The typical poem is a longish single stanza of free verse lines, a shape Young proves to be versatile. One poem is a catalog of recent deaths ("Two were in their 70s, that's not so old!"); another, a percentage breakdown of how much the speaker likes his friends; another, a True/False quiz, probably the book's most famous creation. I showed this poem to my students in a few classes, had them read it out loud, and respond as honestly as possible to the questions. They found some completely insignificant ("74. Zinc."), others conventional if also intrusive ("87. I believe in God."), and still others to be surprisingly pointed inquiries into their ethical beliefs ("58. Criminals should not be allowed to lift weights.") or their ideas of truth ("34. There are more colors now than twenty years ago.") This poem, "True/False," is a good barometer for the whole book's range, the various ways it engages the reader's mind.
I felt most disengaged from the book when it gets so fragmentary the pieces bear no relation to each other, which happens in predictable ways. Here's a passage from "I Saw My Life Go By in the Coyote's Jaws":
Between queen.
Dream disjointer.
Furry Dionysus
who you never know
which way he/she will go,
everyone perfectly okay
with the vintage then boom
your head's knocked off,
jade monkey crushed,
moon fallen in a mess of kite string.
We're being told the sloppiness of the lines is okay through appeals to dream and Dionysian madness, but it's not really all that fun to read. There's something stale about the "boom," the kind of thing we have come to associate with "voice poets." Also stale: the image of the moon as a kite. It's not terrible, but it's not fresh.
I suppose I rounded this down from, like, 4.4 stars. It's a lovely, funny, charmingly weird book that mostly succeeds in its weird mashup of the elegiac and ludicrous.
November 20, 2011
I write and perform poetry. People ask me often what it is I do/did, after hearing a reading. This is because of the American notion of poetry as an antiquated museum device that is only seen in passing through required reading in a high school lit class and, thus not something that is important and evolving. Dean Young's book is one of the first I have read in a very long time that proved my own philosophy for poetry, that it is alive and only as important as the creativity we care to infuse the form with.
Most poetry does belong in a museum. Young's work does not.
Most poetry does belong in a museum. Young's work does not.
May 11, 2013
So it's no secret that I'm making my way through Young again. I got all his books from the ASU library, so if you're trying to get them, I'm sorry and they'll be back soon. This one is water-damaged and in quite bad shape. I miss being able to see the names of others who have checked out the book--they way you could when I was in college.
I was very curious, as I was reading these poems, about Young's process. It feels like he may have written these differently than he did those in Turbulence Lessons, which I just finished. They are more disjointed. There were some moments when I was annoyed to not have enough glue--connections between lines and images. But there's a lot to love here too. Some of my favorites:
"My agony is no sillier than yours/ even if it's riding a tiny unicycle."
"You may think you're breaking a window/ but you're breaking the explanation of a window/ with the explanation of a rock."
"The knife makes a smile in the melon."
"At least turn me over so I can see the sky."
"the ice breaks into pills the river swallows."
I was very curious, as I was reading these poems, about Young's process. It feels like he may have written these differently than he did those in Turbulence Lessons, which I just finished. They are more disjointed. There were some moments when I was annoyed to not have enough glue--connections between lines and images. But there's a lot to love here too. Some of my favorites:
"My agony is no sillier than yours/ even if it's riding a tiny unicycle."
"You may think you're breaking a window/ but you're breaking the explanation of a window/ with the explanation of a rock."
"The knife makes a smile in the melon."
"At least turn me over so I can see the sky."
"the ice breaks into pills the river swallows."
August 18, 2017
there are pieces I loved - quotes, bits of insight, moments in a particular poem - but I think dean young's style is just not for me. the form is long, jilted, and scrambled - done so purposefully, but I still felt a bit let down by how noncommittal most of it seemed. this says more about my expectations as a reader of poetry than his wrtg because it's definitely good..... and I DO like how the style rly comes across as one of those sort of scary experimental jazz bloopy atonal piano pieces. a bit eerie and not what you'd expect and a little befuddled by the whole thing but it sure was a ride
March 7, 2008
This is a *spectacular* collection of poems. I re-read this book every few months or so.
August 8, 2008
crazy poetry
March 13, 2025
I read this spread out over two months of intermittent morning visits, and I appreciated the assisted stretching of my brain and the impossible gestures, but it was a little too silly for me, too wonky, which I think is an easy trap to fall into with surrealism. I definitely connected with some of the poems more than others, and I'd read another book of his if I found one in the library.
February 6, 2023
It has taken me a while to learn to love Dean Young, but I'm on the way. This book helped to turn me around. Here's a thing I wrote on it quite a while back:
In a recent interview, Dean Young said something to the effect that the only way to get past irony is to go through it. This quip certainly highlights Young’s ironic sense and the emotional distance he often creates by his use of contemporary American slang, the pleasure he takes in the artifacts of popular culture, and his exuberant unwillingness to stick to any particular subject. But the comment also suggests that he might want to get past irony to a quieter place, even though he may distrust that place.
Young, who reads at the U-M on Thursday, September 17, is one of a handful of poets now in middle age who have exercised a significant influence on poets younger than they. The ironic distance that paints the surface of many of Young’s poems and the wild jumps between images or incidents–jumps that often happen in the middle of lines or sentences–are the elements that have become most recognizable as a kind of “Dean Young presence” in the landscape of American poetry.
But I am much more interested in the plaintive note that often plays below the surface of the poems. For instance, here’s the beginning of “Lives of the Mortals,” a poem from his collection Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago:
Sad humans. You start out grasping
at something you can’t see
and stay that way. It doesn’t matter
if you’re made of cardboard and glitter
or celestial exhale, you’ve been out in the rain
too long. You try to protect your sister
and she shacks up with Queequeg. You try
to protect your son and he takes up hang-
gliding but he’s not butterfly,
he plummets, he does not hover.
Young’s pleasure in putting a reference to Moby Dick right next to an image of hang gliding is flashy and memorable, but it doesn’t hide the sense of sadness beneath these lines, the unironic, tragic notion that we can’t really influence the facts of our own lives.
In “Evening Primrose,” an earlier poem in the same collection, Young writes quite seriously about the nature of Beauty (using the nineteenth-century-style capital letter), while disguising his seriousness by jumping through examples from our cultural moment in a manner that might confuse readers not used to this technique. Still, in the middle of the poem, he gets to this place:
Can Beauty come back when it hath gone?
Yep. After adolescence. Look at this tree
that was beautiful when its blossoms
twittered in the leftward breeze but
then went through a bark-scab, leaf-
splotched phase but now is beautiful again
albeit kinda spooky.
There is the joking reference to the old use of our language, contrasted with the colloquial “Yep” and “kinda.” And that could give a feel that the whole thing is a joke. But I don’t think it is.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
In a recent interview, Dean Young said something to the effect that the only way to get past irony is to go through it. This quip certainly highlights Young’s ironic sense and the emotional distance he often creates by his use of contemporary American slang, the pleasure he takes in the artifacts of popular culture, and his exuberant unwillingness to stick to any particular subject. But the comment also suggests that he might want to get past irony to a quieter place, even though he may distrust that place.
Young, who reads at the U-M on Thursday, September 17, is one of a handful of poets now in middle age who have exercised a significant influence on poets younger than they. The ironic distance that paints the surface of many of Young’s poems and the wild jumps between images or incidents–jumps that often happen in the middle of lines or sentences–are the elements that have become most recognizable as a kind of “Dean Young presence” in the landscape of American poetry.
But I am much more interested in the plaintive note that often plays below the surface of the poems. For instance, here’s the beginning of “Lives of the Mortals,” a poem from his collection Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago:
Sad humans. You start out grasping
at something you can’t see
and stay that way. It doesn’t matter
if you’re made of cardboard and glitter
or celestial exhale, you’ve been out in the rain
too long. You try to protect your sister
and she shacks up with Queequeg. You try
to protect your son and he takes up hang-
gliding but he’s not butterfly,
he plummets, he does not hover.
Young’s pleasure in putting a reference to Moby Dick right next to an image of hang gliding is flashy and memorable, but it doesn’t hide the sense of sadness beneath these lines, the unironic, tragic notion that we can’t really influence the facts of our own lives.
In “Evening Primrose,” an earlier poem in the same collection, Young writes quite seriously about the nature of Beauty (using the nineteenth-century-style capital letter), while disguising his seriousness by jumping through examples from our cultural moment in a manner that might confuse readers not used to this technique. Still, in the middle of the poem, he gets to this place:
Can Beauty come back when it hath gone?
Yep. After adolescence. Look at this tree
that was beautiful when its blossoms
twittered in the leftward breeze but
then went through a bark-scab, leaf-
splotched phase but now is beautiful again
albeit kinda spooky.
There is the joking reference to the old use of our language, contrasted with the colloquial “Yep” and “kinda.” And that could give a feel that the whole thing is a joke. But I don’t think it is.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
March 19, 2018
I really like his style as he is highly creative! The poetry is complex and I'm not sure, with my understanding, that a lot of what is on the page isn't more of inside knowledge that I'm supposed to accept while reading.
I feel the style is pretentiousness without trying. I had a hard time following the flow of the poem and left shaking my head at the end of most pieces. Don't get me wrong, I really like the choice of wording and lines presented throughout his creative process. I will revisit him frequently to see if his creative direction becomes more clear as I continue to branch out of my comfort zone. Quite a bit of the material races over my comprehension, but I thoroughly enjoyed being confused, and there are some real gems in this cove.
I feel the style is pretentiousness without trying. I had a hard time following the flow of the poem and left shaking my head at the end of most pieces. Don't get me wrong, I really like the choice of wording and lines presented throughout his creative process. I will revisit him frequently to see if his creative direction becomes more clear as I continue to branch out of my comfort zone. Quite a bit of the material races over my comprehension, but I thoroughly enjoyed being confused, and there are some real gems in this cove.
August 24, 2022
Dean Young’s poetry is hard to pin down, and I mean that both in reference to the experience of reading and deciphering it and of describing it. There is a stream of consciousness feel, almost like Whitman but more dense. A dreamlike element in how the images and scenes come together without warning. Or it’s like tuning a radio and trying to get the station to come in clear. It passes in and out of clarity and meaning. When the signal is clear, it’s transcendent. Within any of his collections, there’s a handful of poems that feel like a revelation to me while the rest feel like static. Still, the prospect of finding those few always makes the read worth it.
November 29, 2023
The poems are characterized by a relentless pursuit of the surreal, but this pursuit often leads to a labyrinth of confusion rather than enlightenment or aesthetic pleasure. The collection lacks coherence. While each poem individually strives for originality, the overall effect is one of dissonance and fragmentation. There is a thin line between creative freedom and rambling.
July 13, 2021
Dean Young is just a never-ending word-music feast. This collection was Pulitzer-nominated and rarely misses. As far as contemporary poets go who carry the torch of surrealism and even strains as distant but beautiful as Hopkins, Dean's ahead of the pack.
January 23, 2024
Perhaps the most opaque of Dean Young's books
August 11, 2022
It's rare that a Dean Young poem hits me in a way that makes me feel the lines add up to something greater than their parts. Young seems too eager (by my reckoning) to escape the noose of coherence. He definitely has a knack for surprise, though, sometimes throwing punch combos as long as an arcade dweller hoarding the Mortal Kombat machine.
The pleasure of having my expectations thwarted never grows old, and the absurd humor sure makes it seem like he's having fun, too. But the bound-together poems leave me wishing Young would steer his cart of mayhem down these almost-logical lanes more often. He's definitely one to do his own thing, though, and look how far it's taken him!
Some say that the greatest compliment you can give a poet is that their work makes you want to write. While I'm not sure that's what I recognize as the highest form of praise, it explains my high rating of Elegy On Toy Piano (an all-time great title, by the way).
So, I'll keep feeding off his manic urgency, his zig-zags of thought, and he'll continue to ignore us dumb hicks in the bleachers begging him to make a lick of sense.
The pleasure of having my expectations thwarted never grows old, and the absurd humor sure makes it seem like he's having fun, too. But the bound-together poems leave me wishing Young would steer his cart of mayhem down these almost-logical lanes more often. He's definitely one to do his own thing, though, and look how far it's taken him!
Some say that the greatest compliment you can give a poet is that their work makes you want to write. While I'm not sure that's what I recognize as the highest form of praise, it explains my high rating of Elegy On Toy Piano (an all-time great title, by the way).
So, I'll keep feeding off his manic urgency, his zig-zags of thought, and he'll continue to ignore us dumb hicks in the bleachers begging him to make a lick of sense.
December 4, 2019
I liked a few of these poems a lot (eg flamenco, ghost gash), but for the most part wasn't getting the vibe. Too bad because it's the first book of his I've gotten my hands on, and though one of his other books may be better, I'm kind of feeling I won't pursue it. But hey, wonderful whimsical cover.... smile
May 11, 2010
"We've always been where we are. / We have no memories of escape, / climbing the steps with our collapsed maps, / operating instructions dangling from our necks. / Tide of ions, never let us go."
an excerpt from, "What's Wrong with this Picture"
an excerpt from, "What's Wrong with this Picture"
August 2, 2017
at first I felt like I wasn't "getting" this book of poems. then I started trying a little bit harder to decipher the code and put together the different pieces. that made things more enjoyable. Dean is weird for sure, but I'm glad I read this and will definitely Young again.
September 12, 2014
Death made absurd with surreal, twisted absurdist poetry. Each one is bizarre in its own way, making the mind twist and squint in new ways. Daffy Duck, Walt Whitman, sick robots and the corpses of little black squirrels all make an appearance. Death has never been more fun.
July 17, 2007
4.5 stars. Check out "true/false."
January 10, 2008
Misbegotten pang, open your oh! I love Dean Young. You've got to read him in pieces, but he's a Wowser of a poet. There's something about his imagination that really is unparalleled.
April 27, 2008
Maybe more like 3.5 stars. But I don't see what the big deal is about this guy. To me, his poems feel like they just glide along the surface.
November 24, 2008
Some sadness has no origin
-Dean Young, "Glory"
-Dean Young, "Glory"
May 24, 2010
just never connected with this one
January 19, 2011
Young masters surprising surreal imagery with humor wordplay while maintaining a deep current of sincerity.
"and realism which is a form of surrealism / on a tome-delayed fuse"
"and realism which is a form of surrealism / on a tome-delayed fuse"
October 2, 2013
But of course. Great second time around too.
September 29, 2013
Fun stuff; an enjoyable read. Surrealist, but with a few toes touching ground.
April 9, 2008
kicks ass
August 12, 2008
My favorite Dean Young.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews