“They say a poet can never write a purely happy poem about a dog greeting the sun and what it has done to rain. I don’t know about that."
so writes Analicia Sotelo in her poem “Grace Among the Ferns”
Does that hold true for the two dogs who author (or are the voice) in these poems read by Billy Collins?
In talking about his poems, Collins says that putting a dog into a poem makes it harder to avoid the sentimental. The dog voices in "The Dog on His Master" and "The Revenant" seem to be able to do it, though neither is "purely happy."
I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you — not one bit.”
The dog in Mark Doty's, “Golden Retrievals” (from Sweet Machine) I imagine being his golden retriever, Beau, who he wrote about in Dog Years: A Memoir (P.S.) who along with his black lab partner, Arden, helped Mark through a very dark period in his life. Beau uses a sonnet form.
On their walk, the dog is full of joy and in the moment. But the poet?
"... Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,
a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
In "Grace Among the Ferns, "our model poem on the website for this month's prompt, the poet envies the dog. Grace, who like Beau in Doty's poem, finds delight in exploring the late spring ferns. The poet says:
"I am not sure I have ever had such a joy,
either in discovery or expectation..."
The call for submissions for May is a dog poem in the voice of the dog. Let's take Collins' warning about over sentimentality into account. Let's remember the joy and Zen of Beau and Grace. You don't have to have ever owned a dog to know the voice of one - but having a dog that owned you will certainly change how to approach this prompt.
Whitman at age 35, image used as the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass - a steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison
The daily Writer's Almanac reminded me that today is the birthday of the poet Walt Whitman. He was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819) and he lived in many places but he lived out the last part of his life in Camden, New Jersey until his death in 1892.
My first memory of Whitman was reading his short poem "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" which was in the high school sophomore anthology we used in English class.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
That poem resonated with me. That person in the astronomer's lecture who gets bored and going outside and seeing the stars of that lecture and is much more pleased and in awe, reminded me of me. At first, I identified as a high school student and later as a college student in a classroom bored with theories and wanting practices. I also began to understand that people interpreting poems, literature, songs, art, films, and the natural wonders of Earth and the universe were far less interesting than the things they were interpreting.
I will admit that I didn't love Whitman's much more famous Leaves of Grass which is often mistakenly thought of as a single poem but is a collection of poems that are loosely connected. It is considered an American classic.
Walt was really into self-promotion with Leaves of Grass. In 1842, Charles Dickens came to America for a tour and is sometimes credited for started the book tour. He could reasonably have been billed as the most famous writer in the world after Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers. Perhaps, Walt had that in mind when he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.
Though self-publishing your writing once had a bad name (still does, sometimes) Whitman did so with the collection. He even did most of the typesetting for the book himself. He wanted the book to be small enough to fit in a pocket. He paid for the publication of 795 copies. He was 37.
It might surprise a 2020 reader that some of those poems were criticized for being openly erotic. Reviewers at the time said it was “a mass of stupid filth” that promoted “that horrible sin [homosexuality] not to be mentioned among Christians" and that it was “full of indecent passages” and that Whitman himself was a “very bad man” and a “free lover.”
Henry Thoreau, not a fan, wrote, “It is as if the beasts spoke” but his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson said the collection was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”
Whitman was always revising. He added 146 poems to his third edition. He spent those New Jersey years revising and expanding the collection until the 1891 eighth and final edition.
Walt had no social media for self-promotion but he had a journalism background. In 1855, he got at least three anonymous positive self-reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in the United States Review, the American Phrenological Journal, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The one gain with an overly confident statement that we have "An American bard at last!"
Whitman was open about those reviews and his self-promotion and viewed it as he did the initial self-publication - a necessary way to get his work out to the public.
I think if Walt had been writing in the 21st century, he would be on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, posting videos on YouTube and offering his book's first edition as an Amazon Original. Walt would have loved the self-promotion of social media.
And today he might be an openly gay author but when he was asked about his sexuality even at the end of his life, he declined to answer. At the end of his life he said that sex was “the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood — that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world.”
He was unorthodox in his life, his writing and his way of creating the image of the "The Gray Poet" not unlike a modern-day Bob Dylan or any celebrity artist who has created a persona that mixes reality and fiction.
In the film Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) alludes to Whitman's poem "O Captain! My Captain!" and other passages from Leaves of Grass. When Keating is fired from the school because his unorthodox teaching, his students use the poem to salute him.
I rediscovered some of the Whitman poems individually through other sources. "I Sing the Body Electric" came back to me through Ray Bradbury using it as the title of a short story and the title of his story collection. Earlier it had been the title of a Bradbury episode written for The Twilight Zone in 1962. Of course, I went back to the poem and though it had not changed, I had and so did my appreciation of the poem.
That poem is a good example of the versions of the poems in the collection. Originally, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, it did not have a title and it didn't have the line "I sing the body electric" until the 1867 edition because "electric" was not a commonly used term in 1855.
Last summer was the 200th birthday of Whitman. I went to an exhibit at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, "Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy," much of which was about Leaves of Grass.
About 20 years ago, I visited Whitman's New Jersey home in Camden which is now maintained by the state. Touring the modest home wasn't inspiring. Unlike some other author's homes I have visited, I didn't feel Walt's energy there.
I'm reading poet Mark Doty's new book,
What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, which begins with Mark's visit to the home. It's about the connections he has made personally with the poet and Leaves of Grass. His visit also seemed to be less inspiring than expected, but he works his way through the poems and Walt's life and looks for how it has influenced his own life and work. It's an interesting journey.
You might want to "attend" a special event with the Library of Congress on Friday, May 1.
Last year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and By the People teamed up to host a webinar on the day the Library of Congress launched the “Walt Whitman at 200” Campaign which invited us who are online to transcribe, review and analyze primary sources.
All of the 4,000 Whitman papers released last year have been transcribed, but 1,400 still need to be reviewed. Review is a crucial part of the process–it’s an opportunity for someone to check that a transcription matches the original document, and either edit or approve it. In this new webinar, there will be tips and suggestions about how to incorporate book history approaches to textual analysis into your teaching.
Everyone can take part (NCTE membership is not required to be part of this event).
I have just started reading the brand new book, Mark Doty's What Is the Grass, his personal look at how Whitman entered and changed his life, which I plan to review for the Paterson Literary Review, so I'm interested in what will be said in the webinar.
Mark Doty is an extraordinary poet and has felt "haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self."
In What Is the Grass, Doty addresses many questions, including Whitman's own question of "What is it then between us?" Doty also asks "How does a voice survive death?" And the book's title asks the big question from a reader of Whitman's Leaves of Grass - What is the grass?
My own focus today is on publishing online and online poetry resources. The OnlineColleges.net website listed 100 poetry links, but that's a bit much. Here are a few in different categories - not meant be be exhaustive.
POETS ONLINE also has a frequently updated links page with links on classic and contemporary poetry, publishers, poets, workshops, readings, festivals, and books for poets.
There is certainly a lot of poetry to read online. Here are a few sites that offer primarily classic poems:
Bartleby one of the largest free collections on the web.
There are sites on writing poetry, but I find this to be the most disappointing category. That's not surprising because it's tough enough helping people write poetry in face-to-face sessions. Also, amny writing workshops that are online have a fee. Of course, I must recommend our site which always has a current writing prompt, and one other interesting site - Poetic Asides.
You might actually find more writing help by connecting to a group or network online.
PENAmerican: An association of authors working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.
Poetry Magazine: Follow the Tweets of this great publication.
Poets & Writers: A source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers and poets.
And there are lots of poets talking about poetry, posting poems or just sharing their writing life through BLOGS.
Mark Doty's blog is an easy one to recommend today. I'm guessing that most poets blogging are in the "less-published" category, because it's a great way to get your work to an audience. Mark's blog is interesting to me because it's not really about poetry (though poetry comes in and out of it).
Chicks Dig Poetry - like many poet-bloggers, Sandra talks about her own work, the work of others and poetry events.
Poetry Instigator - prompts and a forum with a connection to George Mason University.,/li.
Spindle: Spindle is an online literary magazine with a twist, featuring creative non-fiction, poetry and short fiction by, for and about New Yorkers.
Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University literary review.
One of the great things about the Net is that the entry is so gentle that small groups and niche audiences can have a great space online. One example is Disability Writes which is an online forum for disabled writers.
Featuring poet Mark Doty, winner of the National Book Award, reading Monday, October 19 at 8 PM. Mark will also participate in the Poetics Colloquium on Tuesday, October 20.
The colloquium will offer workshops and panels for a wide range of participants, including educators, students, and the general public
This event is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is requested. Please register by calling (908) 852-1400, ext. 4669, or by emailing: salasa@centenarycollege.edu and indicate which workshops or panels you plan to attend.
Notice to NJ Certified Teachers: Full-day attendance will earn 6 professional development hours through the Centenary College Teacher’s Academy. Mention you are a teacher when you register.
Full disclosure: I will be presenting as part of a panel on publishing at the event talking about publishing and resources online.
This month we considered the poem "Dog's Death" from John Updike's Collected Poems 1953-1993 (Knopf) as the model but I didn't originally mean to have everyone submit poems about dogs or other pets or even exclusively poems about death.
I mentioned on the site that it's not a sentimental poem. I wouldn't give it to a friend on the occasion of their pet's death as consolation. It's not about a funny and wise pet like Mark Doty's "Golden Retrievals".
It's certainly about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, this desire many of us seem to have (thank goodness) to do the "right thing".
I personally look at it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death - "Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her / Nevertheless she sank".
Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" (also in his Collected Poems) which begins like this:
For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave
in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected..."
"John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature. While maintaining a highly literary elan and readership, he has managed to avoid the obscurity and ostentation associated with "highbrow" authors...
Amid his Nashian poems of the past four decades, there were innumerable moments of incredible grace and depth. For instance, his poem 'Dog's Death', though rarely anthologized, is recognized as that unusual thing, a genuinely sad poem. It brinks at every turn the slope of sentimentality that drops down into the chasm of maudlin corniness, but it manages to hold its footing... It is perhaps one of the rare times that a reader might apply the description "sentimental" without intending harm to poem or poet. "
I like Updike's lighter verse too. Here's a small sample:
Sunday Rain
The window screen
is trying to do
its crossword puzzle
but appears to know
only vertical words.
which reminds me of something that Richard Brautigan might have written.
So, this month's prompt is asking for you to put form to any of the themes mentioned above, and to follow its rather wide road without driving into the dark woods you are passing through.
, editor of Double Room, publisher of 
