C. Dale Young SAN FRANCISCO, CA C. Dale Young practices medicine, edits poetry for New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Friday: 06.16.06 | Permalink | Comments (14)

I would be neither a poet nor a physician today had it not been for the statement made by a very wise teacher of mine in graduate school. When I started college, I never dreamed I would become a physician. And no one could have convinced me I would be writing poems in the future. But after my second year of college, I dropped all aspirations of becoming a painter. I became involved with fellow students who worked at the college literary magazine. It is funny to think back on it now, but once I realized these people were writing poems, I started writing poems. It seemed, at the time, somewhat inevitable.

But I am straying from the point of this post . . . I would be neither a poet nor a physician had it not been for a teacher’s statement. In my last year of the MFA program at the University of Florida, a poet who offered me kindness despite the fact I never thought I deserved it, sat listening to me have a mini- nervous breakdown in his office. I had deferred starting medical school for two years, and that time was coming to an end. I was in a kind of panic. I was worried that medicine would silence all poetry in me, that it would drain me of any creative impulse whatsoever. I was contemplating studying for a PhD in Literature; certain this would keep the poetry flame alive. But my teacher looked perplexed. He already understood something that I wouldn’t understand for years to come. It was then the poet, my teacher, stated, somewhat matter-of-factly: “We always find time to do the things we want to do.”

The poet who listened to me and reassured me was Donald Justice. I am, even to this day, deeply indebted to that man. Some would think it was his knowledge of poetry that impressed me. He did, after all, appear to know virtually every poem you could cite, many times by heart. Others would think it was his brilliance as a teacher that drew me to him. In fact, despite learning more from him than from any teacher I have ever had in my life, this is not the case. I was drawn to Don Justice because he possessed a kind of wisdom, an ability to listen, to make you feel as if he cared about you and your work. Mark you, he was a demanding teacher, but you always believed he was just trying to make you a better poet, a better person.

“We always find time to do the things we want to do.” Is there a more true statement? We always find the time. I carried that statement with me all throughout medical school, internship, residency, all the way into my current practice of medicine. There have been times when I have felt overwhelmed by the study or practice of medicine, but I rarely worried about poetry. I knew I would always find my way back to it, that I would always find the time to write, no matter how small or scattered that time was. I learned slowly what Don Justice already knew: I could not and cannot not write poems. Medicine taught me discipline as a writer, but what made me survive as a poet was Don’s simple statement. He somehow knew I belonged in Medicine. I think he knew also, while I sat in his office so many years ago, that I might have given up that dream and that responsibility in order to write poems, when really I didn’t need to give up either. In a strange way the man, and his statement, gave me permission to do what I needed to do, what I have continued to do.

It is funny. I teach occasionally at conferences, and now I teach in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson. I find, at times, the way one hears their own parents’ words rise from their very mouths, Don’s words and cagey questions escaping my own lips. It is unlikely I will ever be as a good a teacher as Don was, but from him I have learned to listen, to ask questions, to lead people to the answers as opposed to simply telling them. It is a trait I use not only in the classroom but also in the clinic. It is strange: I know full well that Don passed away, but it is hard for me to believe it. I always expect to receive a postcard from him, or a note about something that he recently read. Sometimes, on a foggy evening in San Francisco, when the slightest of winds slips through the portico leading to my front gate, I can almost hear the cadence of his voice. No, I am not psychotic: I do not hear his voice. I hear the pattern of it, something like a sigh, something exasperated but hopeful at the same time.

We are all biased, all prejudiced, whether we admit it or not. I often think about this. I am a man of dark thoughts. I have long given up trying to change that. I admit here that up until about three weeks ago, I was prejudiced against poems written by people who have been incarcerated. I know this is silly because many fine minds have been locked away, sometimes specifically because of their fine minds. That said, early in my tenure at NER, I read several submissions from men who were incarcerated. The poems were terrible. I somehow added the two together in my head so that incarcerated equaled bad poems.

This isn’t the only example I can give of my poetry prejudices. When I first started editing, I kept reading poems in various journals that held Opera and its machinations as the subject. I made a vow never to publish poems about Opera, spurred by a conversation I had with a poet friend of mine. But, of course, someone would come along to break my resolve. An unknown, to me at the time, poet named Jennifer Grotz, sent me a poem titled, “The Last Living Castrato.” It silenced me, as many good poems do. And it forced me to rescind my refusal to publish anything about Opera.

Likewise, a few years later, I kept reading poems about sports, specifically baseball and basketball. Again, I placed a moratorium on such poems. I felt as if every magazine I picked up had a “sports poem” in it. Again, an unknown, to me at the time, poet named Patrick Phillips submitted a poem that challenged my ideas on the situation. His poem, “To the Muse from Way Downtown,” was simply too good to pass up.

But I am getting away from the original premise of this entry. I held a prejudice not just against a type of poem, but also against the situation of a certain class of poets. I had convinced myself that if incarcerated one simply couldn’t write a good poem. How I came to this conclusion is not entirely clear to me, even now after having written the first paragraph of this entry. But what I can say is someone came along to prove me wrong, to show me my base prejudice, to make me step back and reevaluate.

Not long ago, I received some poems from a gentleman named Malcolm Alexander King. As is my usual custom, I don’t read cover letters unless one or more of the poems in the batch interest me. In this case, that policy was a good one. Had I read the cover letter first, I may have let my prejudice have the better of me. Not only that, but the cover letter was written in pencil. I am sure I would have thought that unprofessional. Anyway, here I had this beautiful poem playing with the idea of light, the physics of light and the speed of light, all as extended metaphor for experience captured in a work of Art. My socks had been knocked off. I was silenced. And when I read the cover letter (written in pencil because Mr. King does not always have access to a computer or typewriter), what I felt was not only joy but also shame. We are all human. We are all biased, prejudiced. Unavoidable, I think, at times.

Malcolm Alexander King is a name I will never forget. Something tells me if he weren’t incarcerated, I would seek him out as a friend (much the way I befriended Grotz and Phillips after finding their poems). Sometimes the stars align in just the right way to show you how stupid you really are. I am glad that sometimes when that happens to me, I actually recognize it. In many ways, this is my first step toward befriending King. And sometime, in the near future, despite his incarceration, I will have to write to him and explain why I am grateful to him, both for his poem and for the very fact of him.

Though serendipity is rampant in the world at large, I am not convinced it is the standard way people enter a role such as Poetry Editor. But in my case, it was almost entirely serendipity. Many people have asked me, over the years, how I started editing poetry for a literary magazine. This is usually followed by questions about why I keep doing it. With regard to the first, I have little to offer about how someone becomes a poetry editor because my path is not likely a typical one.

When I was a graduate student, one of my good friends was a fiction writer named Jessica Dineen. Jessica and I had both worked at literary magazines in the past as interns. We both lamented the work we saw in various magazines, as many young writers do. We kept joking that when we graduated we were going to start our own magazine. We wanted a magazine to reflect what we believed to be the best writing out there. But we never started a magazine; starting a magazine is something many discuss but rarely do. After graduation, I began medical school and Jessica took an editorial position at Ploughshares. But we stayed in touch. We kept discussing literary things.

Two years after graduation, Jessica had already been promoted to Associate Editor at Ploughshares. I was getting ready to leave the lecture hall for the clinics and wards. Jessica applied for, and obtained, the position of Managing Editor at New England Review. When Jessica arrived in Middlebury, she discovered or, more likely, admitted to herself, that editing poetry was also part of her job. She called me up and asked if I would be willing to help out. With a shift in Editorial makeup, the magazine had halted production for a short time, and there was a very large backlog of works to be considered. It was 1995. She promised me I would just be helping out for a couple of months and that she would make it up to me.

For months I carried around submissions. I read them in my down time in the hospital. We had no editorial assistants then, no readers for poetry. I was the entire poetry staff. But I am a fast reader (thank God because I don’t think I would have made it through med school otherwise), and I cleared out the backlog within a few months. Jessica and Stephen Donadio, the magazine’s Editor, asked me to stay on to help out with poetry. I was given the title Poetry Consultant. A year or so later, I was promoted to Associate Editor for Poetry. And a short while later, I became NER’s first Poetry Editor. Jessica left the magazine, and Jodee Stanley arrived. Five or six years later, Jodee left to edit her own magazine, and an even newer Managing Editor arrived. Strangely, I am still there. I have been editing poetry at NER for over 10 years now. This fact is both exciting and frightening to me.

Editing poetry for a national literary journal is both a scary and rewarding thing. The scary part, which I try to forget, is that your job means rejecting thousands of poets. This doesn’t always sit well with those poets. Some actively dislike you for rejecting them, despite the fact rejections many times have more to do with the volume of work already accepted, other poems accepted that are similar, time of the year, special issues, etc. etc. We receive around 40,000 poems each year, but we only have space to publish 65 to 80 of them. But the rewarding part of the job is what has kept me going year after year.

Finding a striking poem is always exciting, but finding work from poets early in their career is even more exciting than I can explain here. Many of the poets whose first poems appeared in NER during my time with the magazine have gone on to publish books, some are even at the second and third book stage now. They have earned awards and critical recognition. I try to stand behind every one of them. So, every time I sit down to read submissions, I am always looking for poems to “knock my socks off.” And if that poem happens to be from an unpublished poet or one early in their career, I get even more excited. I look at the poem and wonder if this is the next Natasha Trethewey, the next Cate Marvin, the next Nick Flynn. The possibilities. The excitement. It is what has kept me editing for so long, why I continue to do so. In this, I know I am not alone. It is what keeps many editors doing what they do.

There have been some discussions lately about themed manuscripts of poetry. Some of those discussions have taken place right here in this space. And although I respect the idea that themed manuscripts are more palatable to publishers, to a wider audience of people, I find myself very resistant to the notion of the themed manuscript. Call it a contentious bone in my body. Call it resistance.

I have read a great many poetry collections written over the past two centuries. Rarely is a strictly themed subject encountered throughout the entire book. Of course, there are elements that bind the work together: structure, syntax, music, style, if you will. But rarely are they so singular in subject. This seems to be, more and more, the case with manuscripts today, especially first book manuscripts. What holds many of the poems together is a subject, not necessarily a style. There is a subject and, many times, even a narrative arc. It makes for a poetry collection that is more palatable, a collection that carries a “story.” Well, the last time I checked, the genre of fiction was still alive and kicking. I am reminded of statement made by John Ashbery: “I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.”

Of course there are poets for whom subject and style are so interwoven they are the same. I think of Carl Phillips’ work. His style is instantly recognizable: that syntax, that struggle between the corporeal and the ether, the fixation and magnification not only of the body but of its urges. His collections seem organic in that they seem to represent the obsessive mind of the poet. What binds the work in those collections together is not a story, but the mind of the poet, the poet’s “voice,” for lack of a better word. They do not seem fashioned from the outside but from within.

It would be foolish of me to say I worry about this trend. Worrying about poetry and its trends is like worrying about water moving in a stream. It is pointless. The water moves. It takes its own course. It follows no ordained plan, each drop of water bound by the body of the stream. But I am foolish at times. And I do worry. I carry worry around with me all the time. I worry not about the poets, but about the editors and publishers out there. Will they have the guts to stand up for poetry they believe to be good and not just poetry that is marketable? Will they champion the next Marianne Moore or the next Frank O’Hara? Or will poets like them seem too quirky and stylistic, unmarketable? I have no answers to that.

Recently, I ran across a book from a young poet named Richard Siken. His book, Crush, was selected by Louise Glück as winner of The Yale Younger Poets Award. I was bowled over by it. Here was a book as obsessive and wonderful as anything I had seen in recent years. Like Phillips, the book felt organic, the style and “theme,” if you can call it that, arising from the need of the poet to reevaluate, to make the visible world visible in a different way, over and over again. The diction serves the mania. The violence in the poems serves the hurt and violation the world has to offer, despite the fact we can so easily overlook them. This is a book that does not feel orchestrated, manipulated. Crush is, quite simply, one of the best books published in the last decade. I used to say it was one of the best first books published, but I have revised that. It is simply one of the best. I am grateful for Richard Siken’s book, but I am also terribly grateful to Louise Glück. I can only hope the future will reserve spaces for people like her in the world of publishing, people willing to put their neck out for a poet, for a poetry of style, one that has risen not from calculated steps to incorporate a subject, but from the obsessions that fuel, and continue to fuel, Art.

I virtually always know the last lines of my poems first. Almost always. I have friends who start with the title and then proceed. I know others who know the first line and come up with the title as the poem progresses. I find the various ways poets compose fascinating in a nerdy kind of way. I am sure I would have a mild heart attack if tomorrow I woke up and knew the title of a poem I was going to write. It just never happens that way for me.

Several years ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Susan Hahn about this. She found the idea of knowing the last line first a somewhat scary prospect. She commented that it was like Cassandra writing prophecy, to know the end first. But I never encounter drafting of poems that way. For me, the joy of writing the poem is to see how I get to that final line. Sometimes, in the drafting or revising, the last line must be changed, but this is rarely the case. The last line comes, then the first. The lines in between don’t come in any particular order.

I have joked with many that Medicine taught me discipline as a writer. I should better explain that. Medicine steals my time, but it has also taught me ways of storing information. I can see three to five patients for up to 1 hour each, listen to their stories, look over their information, and then, even 48 hours later, dictate a 3-5 page consult letter. All of this with very little written down in terms of notes. Once I dictate, however, it is gone. Blank slate. Literally, once dictated, the information is gone. The reason I can do this is nothing spectacular or secret. Virtually any physician in clinical practice can do the same. A Consultation, a History & Physical, has a standard format, a schema, so to speak. The information is stored within this framework in much the same way over and over. The Identification or Chief Complaint is followed by the History of Present Illness, which is followed by the Past Medical History, followed by Medicines, Allergies, etc. It is always the same format, though different specialties will modify it slightly. Medicine teaches its students how to route information in short-term memory for a specific reason, to dictate, to write it down. Once down, it is purged to make space for another “story.”

My point is that having to learn that schema opened my eyes to how the mind stores information. Even to this day, I can work on most of my poems in my head. I have different schemas for poetry I carry with me. When lines start to stick with each other, I start to organize them, shift them around. Usually, when I sit down in front of the computer to draft a poem, I have anywhere from 12 to 28 lines of it in the order they should appear. Once I draft, the lines are gone from my head. But they are there on the screen for me to revise and tinker. There was a time, before Medicine, that I wrote everything longhand and transferred it to type via a typewriter (later, via a computer). But I don’t have that luxury of time anymore. If the line doesn’t carry some weight, I won’t be able to carry it around with me in my head. If the poem has no urgency for me, it will die. Lord knows, there are more than enough bad poems in the world. I feel no impetus to add poems unless I have to do so.

I have enjoyed my time here this week, among these virtual pages. I have enjoyed this time I have had to think inside these sentences. On a talk show recently, I listened to a man lament the waste of time he called Art and Culture. It saddened me. Now, more than ever, Art and Culture are necessary. They are among the few things left in our world that slow us down, that prompt us to think, to converse with ourselves and converse with the dead. I suspect it is part of the reason there is a slow resurgence of interest in Poetry. It is an ancient Art, a necessary one. I will never stop believing in its power. It changes, as it was so famously written, nothing. I would rephrase that to say it might not change things, but I still believe that it can change someone. I know many will call that idealistic. But when it comes to Poetry, I remain an idealist. How can I not?