Dr. C. Dale Young creates inspired, beautifully crafted poems, likely enhanced by his full and diverse life: he practices full-time as a Radiation Oncologist at Sequoia Hospital, teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and edits poetry for the New England Review. His poetry certainly carries the weight and intelligence of a multifaceted approach to living. I'll be profiling a triptych of poems (based on observed theme--not necessarily offered as such by Young): "Paying Attention," "Or Something Like That," and "Sepsis." In addition to tomorrow's interview, Young has generously offered commentary on the genesis and composition of these poems in particular; his words are embedded in bold.
"Paying Attention," originally published in Poetry International and forthcoming in Torn (Young's newest book), is my favorite of Young's work. Wound tightly through seven quatrains, the poem proceeds as a focused first person narrative. The poem begins with rain--the self-reflective narrator offers a rhetorical wonder--but the movement is toward ownership of a personal sense of God.
The second stanza is a visceral presentation of God's hypothetical power: it's a bodily disruption, a shock to the corporeal. In fact, this entire poem is about suffering in a very physical fashion: in a way, Job with tangible pain. This feels like the archetypal God of the Old Testament, and yet this poem is deeper than a complaint and lament. Here are the final 5 lines:
He leaves the large red
imprints of his fist against my back,
sometimes flowering on my face. He showers
me with expectations. He lifts me up
to remind of my foolish fear of heights.
"Flowering" is the perfect choice, and raises the stakes of the line. The enjambment of "showers" is equally reverential, and "expectations" reminds the reader that this poem lives within the Kierkegaardian schema. And I love Young's careful control of the masculine pronoun within this poem: rarely has "He" taken on such grandness in narrative verse, and the final sentence of the poem reaches another level. Such ambiguity exists in this final sentence: Young engages the traditional symbols of ascension and Godly fear, but this narrator has more agency than usual, and his usage of "foolish" is more complicated than some innocent misunderstanding.
It's a fantastic poem about the divine, at a time when typically the craft-level of poems about divinity are low. In my original "manifesto" for The Fine Delight, I tried to differentiate between purely devotional and imaginative Catholic literature, and was entirely willing to accept the complications within all of those modifiers. Young's work is imaginative in the best of senses, and his treatment of God in this poem (and in others) arrives with fully realized and complex meditation on that complicated subject. Young's work is alive, never the "dead language" so lamented by Paul Lisicky during the first interview at this site.
Young carries and controls these final lines, infusing such personality into the God of this text that I feel as if I'm reading a modern apocryphal work. It's also quite circular, as the complaint of this God--inattention--is satiated by the extreme attention and care of the narrator/poet (I'm reminded of the self-awareness of Hopkins's "To R.B.").
C. Dale Young on "Paying Attention":
On a train trip from New York City to Saratoga Springs, I overheard a woman talking to another woman. I was struck when she blurted out the two sentences that make up the epigraph to the poem. As I sat on the train, I kept going back to this snippet of conversation and the truly odd nature of that question. I wanted to respond. I guess this need to respond germinated in me for days because when I eventually sat down to work on the draft, it came very quickly. I wanted to write that God is different to each and every person, but this is what came out instead. In many ways, the God in my poem is a disturbing amalgam of my desire to know God and odd details about myself.
I'm equally attracted to the second poem, "Or Something Like That," originally published in Linebreak.
As I intimated above, Young has such a clear control over the line as a metric unit: there are no cheap tricks and breaks here. Instead, Young moves across lines, allowing the line space to breathe and maintain a certain integrity. The first two stanzas of the poem include deliberate usage of commas, both to give form to these lines but to also control the pace of the work--and in doing so give the narrator a particular agency and importance.
The narrator admits "dark thoughts" here, and in the same way Young was able to demand my attention toward the divine in the prior poem, I'm fully aware of the "darkness" here. By establishing setting in the early lines (pine needles, light, leaves), Young locates and grounds the reader, holding that reader attentive to the importance of the conversation.
This is a poem about doubt, and yet doubt's existence is necessary in that it forwards conversation with, and contemplation about, the divine. If I accept God's existence with the same ease that I accept the table and computer in front of me, am I not defining and deflating God in the same swift motion? Young's poetry--I'd venture--almost reestablishes the currency and complexity of God, and this is a God worth noticing and embracing.
And as in "Paying Attention," I remain with the narrator until the end, with the conclusion enveloped in this beautiful final stanza:
I know what they mean. I get what You are trying
to get at. I am here, God, I am here. I am waiting
for You to blind me with a sunstorm of stars.
This narrator is calling for God--he has his doubts, and he bases them on personal experience and the reference to the "counselor." What a human poem!
C. Dale Young on "Something Like That":
I was troubled by a newspaper article I saw about a 14 year old boy who, worried he was gay, went to speak with the guidance counselor at his Catholic Prep School to only then be raped by the guidance counselor. Stories like these always bother me. I turn them over and over in my head, and I return to them as if they were wounds slow to heal. The poem came as a prayer would, slowly and surely in its voice but utterly confused in what it wanted to say, what it wanted to ask. If "Paying Attention" is an imagined conversation with that woman on the train, then "Or Something Like That" is definitely a conversation with the Divine and with the self.
"Sepsis" is the final in my self-defined triptych of Young's poems. God is mentioned twice within the first stanza, and I am not surprised, based on the location: we are placed firmly in the ER. I love each of these poems, but on a re-re-read, this might be my favorite. Look at this sentence:
I have coveted sleep, God,
and the toxins I studied in Bacteriology took hold
of Your servant.
The poem is as much a lament as it is a tightly viewed narrative. The phrase "I have coveted sleep" earns the repetition, and we can feel the sadness here. "Servant" is implicitly repeated, and the collective of the poem speaks to the duality of doctor: the power of healing and the converse, the humility necessary to admit the weakness of great powers (of body, perhaps, and even more).
There is a passing here, and yet Young shows us that the world moves and moves. Here is the final line:
Dear God, how does a sinner outlast the sin?
I, for one, would like to know that answer.
C. Dale Young on "Sepsis":
This poem is a difficult poem for me. It is one of two poems I have written that are incredibly difficult because I see the events behind the poems. Although "Sepsis" represents an amalgam (there is that word again!) of experiences from my Medical Internship, it also is a dangerous glimpse into my personal life in that I do wake sometimes early in the morning in sweats reliving some of the more awful moments I have witnessed as a physician. Always I have the same question: "Could I have done more?" It is an unanswerable question. I hoped by writing this poem I would find some respite or some semblance or relief, but in that I was wrong. I was terribly wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment