C. Dale Young

Divided into 4 parts, The Second Person by C. Dale Young examines first the physical body with its emotions and sensations, then moves into the scientific where death and sciences attempts to heal become a major focus before moving into a 27 poem series of triptychs that merge the two. Finally, the book shifts focus and expands its view to examine the world. Young’s poems comfortably flow between the inner and external world as is common in other current poets, but they also shift between scientific and emotional views of the world: one poem for example, shifts between the idea of the mathematical notation of summation that the symbol represents and a less literal view that moves the purely scientific term into the emotional world of the patient who is saved by the summation of the Doctor’s education.

C. Dale Young’s greatest poems are where he demonstrates his own dual nature as a medical doctor and a poet. While his poems about life and love in the first section of The Second Person are well-written and powerful in their own way, they do not serve to separate C. Dale Young from other current poets who write one similar topics such as Carl Phillips. It is not until the second section of The Second Person that one is able to see the true power of Young, and where his unique experiences and perspective shifts his poetry away from the mass of writers. By this I mean that his first section of poems doesn’t resonate as much has the latter sections and, in turn, his poetry doesn’t shift from being “good” to being “memorable” until he begins focusing on his unique perspective.

though infinite, can never meet © by Norma Desmond

One of the most powerful lessons for myself in this book is the power of finding one’s own voice and one’s own topics. What makes a poet memorable for me is not necessarily just the skill in putting words on a page, but what separates the poet from his (or her) contemporaries; for example, I find both Byron and Wordsworth excellent poets, but I prefer Byron because of his unique perspective on the world and the uniqueness of his poems about the mind in contrast to Wordsworth’s focus on nature like many of his contemporaries. It’s very hard to imagine Carl Phillips writing a poem about mathematical notation but not one about lying in a lover’s arms. While there is nothing wrong with writing about similar topics to other poets – after thousands of years, everything has been written about at least once – bringing a fresh and unique perspective to poetry is what makes a poet the most memorable for me.

The subject of science with poetry is especially interesting to me due to my dual Physics and English background; I’ve found that the most useful lessons I’ve had is learning to balance separate elements for science and humanities. As I see how Szymborska balances wit with seriousness, Phillips with experience and body, or Young with science and art, I’ve come to see the importance of balancing a poem’s content on the cusp of ideas rather than forcing one way of thinking through the poem. The most powerful poetry does not have to be all knowing, and it is possible to acknowledge that one does not have all the answers.

There is always the risk in writing a poem to end with a period: not a period that marks the end of a sentence, but the end of an idea or thought as if there is nothing further to say on the topic. As Kenneth Koch warns, there is a tendency to end with a grand idea or a reference to the sea, but Phillips’s poems work against this trend (indeed, in “Gold on Parchment” the end of the poem turns its back on the sea) and the poems themselves are a diary of struggling with a thought or an idea. However, this “diary” never becomes prosaic because the poems risk becoming intellectual; that is, they do not grasp readers by the hand and pull them along; instead, the syntax of the poems are carefully trimmed so that the ideas are presented clearly though there is a certain ambiguity to them. This careful ambiguity is especially strong since many of Carl Phillips’s poems deal with the sensually erotic where one feels the erotic nature of the poem more fully than one sees it on the page.

Poetry © by CarbonNYC

Aside from this ability to question himself, Phillips has also has mastered subtly integrating questions for the reader. These minute asides that appear in the body of his poems are all the more striking as one finds themselves silently answering the question as they continue moving through the poem. The questions are almost always phrased as in “Distortion,” “Do you see that too” that is, “have you had this experience?” The reader is invited to momentarily weigh in as Phillips then continues his thought. In “Distortion,” he moves on to Augustine’s view of passion and eroticism, which is followed quickly by a rejection of the hard logic Augustine used and “falls back” to a more naturalistic view. This playing with the reader draws one further into the poem as it becomes more of a personal appeal on the part of the poet towards some idea.

While Phillips is not a confessional poet – his poems do not confess that his “mind’s not right” nor does he seem to have anything to confess – he seems more confessional than any of the “confessional” poets. It may just be how close he allows the reader to get to his mind, or it may be that he deals with the duality of the intellectual mind and the passionate body which tends towards issues that many people believe are private, but Phillips’s comes across as a very personal poet, and one, at times, feels that they are talking with a dear friend or surreptitiously reading another’s diary. It is Carl Phillips’s ability to balance dualities in experience and the mind that makes him a strong poet and it is one of the lessons that a younger poet can learn best from his poetry.

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