The Art of Recklessness Quotes

“Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Desire is perpetual transformation.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

“Our poems are what the gods couldn’t make without going through us.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction