I’ve always envied visual artists for an obvious, constantly available opportunity to interact with the medium in a primal, physical way. Paint is always ready to be paint, thrown, slathered, sprayed, blotted up. Even in the most elementary energetic exchange, something is always created. Drop cloths are always beautiful. In fact, it is impossible NOT to make something with materials even if the act of using those materials is contrary to intended, conventional usage, even if it resides in refusal. Any act, even one that seems antithetical to our notions of art production, still winds up with something. From there on it is a complex social, economic, personal matter as to whether that something is SOMETHING.
— from Dean Young’s wonderful The Art of Recklessness
pea river journal 
“Drop cloths are always beautiful.” Dean Young honors the holy flaw. A rollicking inspiration, this book.
Here’s one of my favorite passages: “Poetry is not a discipline. It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect. It is a collaboration: the bad news may be that we are never entirely in control but the good news is that we collaborate with a genius – the language! We cannot make the gods come, all we can do is sweep the steps of the temple and thus we sit down to our desks.”
Yes, yes, yes. I love, love, love this book. It is close to becoming as tattered and scribbled-upon and coffeestained as my second copy of Triggering Town (I gave the first to a student long ago).
Young embraces, celebrates, honors, the holy flaw, yes. And the holy process. It is almost as thought the interaction — that holy collaboration between poet and language — is more revered than the product of the collaboration. And I love that way of cracking open our expectation and misguided ethos.