Poet Young Discusses New Book

David Young is known to many on campus as Oberlin's Longman Professor of English and Creative Writing. Tuesday, Young read from his new collection of poems, At the White Window, to a lecture hall filled with appreciative listeners. The poems, while cast in a variety of forms ‹ free verse lyric, prose poem, formal meter ‹ consistently explore the intersections of the natural world and the human, of memory and the present. At their best they create a realm of personal myth which, while at times sad and at times playful, is gently illuminating in the realm of associations and insights it unearths. I sat down with Young to discuss his new work.

Colin Booy: I'd like to begin with the elegiac section which opens the book. Several of these poems are described as landscapes ‹ 'Landscape with Disappearing Poet," 'Landscape with Grief Train" ‹ but as elegies, there is a sense of absence that seems to lie beneath the idea of landscape per se.

David Young: Certainly there are things in the book which are a product of being in one place for 40 years. But I think the breadth of the book is broader: I'm responding to developments in natural history, science, philosophy and phenomenology, among other things. I was struck when I reread the book by the prominence of the dead in it. I think the connection to shamans I make helps here. For me, talking about the presence of the dead and talking about nature are both approaching the same perceived and ephemeral whole ‹ whether this amounts to memory or something more mysterious.

CB: Like the positive and negative spaces of the Chinese landscapes you reference?

DY: Yes. So landscape can encompass a great deal of this.

CB: I imagine that from your perspective Oberlin must seem a rather ephemeral place, with students coming and departing as they do.

DY: It is like a Cloudstown, which is sad in a way. It reinforces this sense of ephemerality, which I think is characteristic of our culture. But it is a melancholy that can be instructive as well ‹ thinking about place, about making a kind of value out of living with and in it.

CB: There are these epiphanies in some of the poems, expressing a sort of metaphysical contentment: as in the ending of 'Wind, Rain, Light": 'no longer needing to know/what anything means."

DY: I think we're often looking for a moment of oneness, a feeling of rightness in the present through all of this.

CB: Yet it's often mitigated or hard-won.

DY: It's these rhythms of experience and searching which interest me. A mystic would long to stay in that moment and be unhappy outside it. As a poet, on the other hand, I pay attention to the spaces and stages along the way.

CB: Who have been your poetic influences ­ who have you learned from most strongly?

DY: I'd say firstly those poets who I've translated. In translation one enters the voice of another poet across culture and time ‹ it is an intimate experience: Rilke, Yu Xuanji, Miroslav Holub Š

CB: Certainly, as a Czech, Holub knew the transiency of nations.

DY: And as a scientist of the natural world Š No American poet could work without Whitman and Dickinson ‹ we all lie somewhere between their two poles ‹ Whitman's bardic and Dickinson's hermetic.

CB: Where between them do you lie?

DY: I'm in my time in not viewing the artist as genius. I see art as highly collaborative, even when practiced in solitude. As if language is, in a way, using me.