Seth Pollins, a poet and the nephew of Dean Young, has generously shared a remarkable letter that his uncle wrote to him awhile back. It's already been getting a good deal of attention, but, in the spirit of sharing this beautiful piece of writing as widely as possible, I can't resist bringing it to this space as well.
2/17/98
Dear Seth,
I was very happy to get your letter, and my mom sent me your story which I want to get to but things have been so busy lately, what with school here and all those demands, and I've been flying around doing readings, and always feeling that I'm not devoting enough time to anything, even my cat, I figured I'd better write you soon, even if it was before reading your story, because I guess you're off across the seas soon. I don't know if I can really help you through your uncertainties, but I think I understand what you're feeling, and wondering, and maybe doubting. As far as missing out on life because of devoting your time to writing, I don't think you need to worry about that: life will happen to you no matter what you do. There will be joys and celebrations. There will be nights crossing bridges you don't know the name of when some unspeakable beauty envelopes you. There will be nights looking from windows upon the staggered lights of some town when some unspeakable sadness envelopes you. There will be people you love who you can no longer find your way to. There will be new discoveries, new clouds that resemble strange and terrible things, tangerines and hangovers, and long, long telephone calls made of almost entirely silence. There will be enormous pains and small pains that are almost pleasurable. There will be haiku that suddenly make sense, and the feeling that something has been taken from you, and songs, always songs. So don't worry about missing life, it's like missing the sky, you can't, you'll always be under it and in it and sometimes high in it, but often just on the ground, moving from thing to do to, needing, crying, making people laugh, although it's hard to tell what they're laughing about because it seems you were just talking about how terrible life is. But one thing that won't just happen to you, like life, is teaching yourself to write well. So whatever time you spend doing that, can stand to spend, and need to spend, all that time that seems wasted and those rare moments that seem volcanic and so sure, is the time that must be spent, otherwise you'll never become the writer you want to become. And there's a funny thing about that, too. One is that you'll never become the writer you want to become. You'll never be satisfied, never really know if you are any good. You'll never be certain. I mean to you it probably seems I have some sort of certainty, I've published some books which sometimes show up in used bookstores right down there with Yeats and John Yau (who?) and just in the last couple of years or so people have started to hear of my work, of me, and now I'm teaching at this la de da writing program and poets who I think of as giants are treating me as a friend, which is, I admit, great, but there is flattery and there is the truth and one can never tell where one stops and one begins. My own sense of my my own writing is what have I done lately? It's the writing-nowness of it that matters, and in that we're all equals in the fog, each of us with a single flashlight with the batteries only lasting so long and we're not sure if we should signalling to some landing airplane or is that the galloping of horses we hear coming our way, or should we be just trying to find house again, that place where we were born, where some huge, beneficent force would lift us from our groggy tatters and fit us into a voluminous bed....
Read the rest of the letter here. And please consider stepping up to support Dean Young in his urgent search for a new heart--there is a lot you can do to help.
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