Notes from the Hatch: Belief in Magic

Sunday, July 28, 2024

Frederic Edwin Church, Rainbow over a Hilly Landscape (c. 1867)

Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. For this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour, I shared a poem by Dean Young. I knew Dean well—he taught at the University of Texas in Austin, and though I never studied with him, he was a mentor to several beloved friends. Stylistically, he was influenced by the New York School of Poets; active in the 1950s and 1960s, their poems were conversational, humorous, and surrealistic. All three descriptors can be applied to Dean’s work.

Dean had a degenerative heart condition, and when I met him, he’d been in congestive heart failure for more than a decade. However he’d recently taken a turn for the worse, and he’d moved to the top of the list for a heart transplant. Within a year, he got the call—that a young man in Oklahoma had died in a motorcycle accident, and his heart was on the way to Austin. The transplant successfully extended Dean’s life by eleven years. It’s an impossible calculus, measuring the young man’s tragic loss against Dean’s gain.

The transplant and the strangeness of chance was something Dean wrote about again and again. As he said in interview with NPR, “Everything in life is molecules bouncing against molecules. Somebody had to die; it had to be a fit; my blood and his blood had to not have an argument; the heart had to be transported; I had to get it.”

We had a glorious hour of meditating on Dean’s poem and the idea of magic and mystery. Below you’ll find the poem and a few of my thoughts on it. You’ll also find three journaling prompts and a link to the community chat where people wrote about their own moments of magic and chance encounters and how this poem shed new light on them. May it do the same for you.

Much love,

Carmen