Sean Penn Anti-Ode

After reading through True/False over and over again, I became curious about Dean Young’s other poetry. I went searching through the Poetry Foundation’s website that was posted on the blog and found this awesome poem by Dean Young:

Sean Penn Anti-Ode
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178396

Although the Sean Penn Anti-Ode does not structurally resemble True/False in any way, both poems have that same “preachy” (could not think of a better word) tone to them; the “this is what I am saying”, and “this is how it is” attitude.

Let me start out by saying that this is the funniest poem I have ever read. I have always thought of Sean Penn as rather “pompous,” so I had to see what this poem was like. Right off the bat, the first three lines immediately made me think of Sean Penn’s face. When I read Young’s interpretation of Sean Penn’s face and imagined what his face actually looks like, I chuckled due to the surprising accuracy. It does have that “scrunched up” look to it. This particular line is very comical but it is also wonderful image. He then pinpoints Penn’s very whiney and uptight personality by connecting him to a child who looks as though he is about to explode if he does not get “the first whack of the piñata.” He also states that there is enough pressure in his pinky finger that could kill a gorilla. I really like how Young used the “pinky finger” concept because people usually associate the pinky finger as being weak and useless; but in this case it is capable of killing a gorilla. The lines that talk about the young brat growing up to be Sean Penn to “straighten us out about weapons of mass destruction” made me think of every celebrity who tries to be an activist of some kind. The lines that almost seem as though they are trying to give advice, such as making sure you never bump your car door into Sean Penn’s car, are trying to say more than what is on the page. When I read these lines, it made me think of Penn as an activist but also a man that is too self important to ever be bothered.
This poem seems more like a story the more I read into it.
I definitely feel the best lines of the poem are:

The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.

I found it funny that he comments on the video by saying that only the bored can watch it, yet he knows what the movie is about. One of my favorite things about poetry is unique randomness; how much more random can you get than “architectural details about Batman’s cape”. This is also where the poem begins to go in another direction, steering away from ridiculing Sean Penn and almost seemingly begins to discuss how mundane and ordinary life is. The second half of the poem may still be discussing Penn, but it is too subtle for me to pick up on. For me, I wish that there would have been more descriptions of Penn himself, perhaps introducing what his hair looks like in a silly way.

In general, this poem is a unique interpretation of a person. I found this type of poetry to be much easier to interpret because you already know the subject matter; ridiculing Sean Penn.


----Albert Sementa