Belief in Magic

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Belief in Magic," by Dean Young, who is recognized as one of the most energetic and influential contemporary poets.

He was influenced by the New York School poets, and Surrealists such as Andre Breton. Young’s poetry is full of wild leaps of illogic, extravagant imagery, and mercurial shifts in tone. His poems often blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. The American Academy of Arts and Letters noted, “Dean Young’s poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. Before his death in 2022 Young taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and at the University of Texas-Austin where he held the William Livingston Chair of Poetry.

Berlin shares a few notes about the poem:

• First, the poem refers to Alexander Vvedensky (1904 –1941), an avant-guard Russian poet and dramatist who was arrested for "counterrevolutionary agitation" in September 1941. He was shipped to prison but died on the way.
• Second, a “wee sleekit” is Young’s nod to poet Robert Burns who used this term to describe a field mouse in a line: Wee sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.