Dogs and Billy Collins

In a PBS interview for a new collection of Billy Collins' poems about dogs, it is said that nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless they have had a dog. Collins agrees. 

The former U.S. poet laureate is a literary lion of the New York Public Library and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently released his 12th collection of poetry titled Dog Show.

Billy Collins, a dog lover and owner who's been writing about them for decades, he's now pulled together a selection of those poems in a volume he's dedicated to 85 dogs, those of friends as well as his own. The book is illustrated with Pamela Sztybel’s watercolors,

Watercolor illustrations by Pamela Sztybel help show what's beguiled Collins ever since he got his first dog as an only child. 

When we got a dog from the pound, my father said: "We're going to get a dog, but, remember, we're buying a heartache," which was, the dog's going to die before we will, which is a fact of dog and human life. Somebody said, the only -- dogs are flawless, except they die too soon. 

That's what we're trying to avoid, is the -- bring up the violins and -- but I do have that poem of -- you know, I think, "A Dog on His Master."

A Dog on His Master.
As young as I look, I'm growing older faster than he. 
Seven to one is the ratio they tend to say. 
Whatever the number, I will pass them one day 
and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods. 
And if this ever manages to cross his mind, 
it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

On the craft of writing poetry:

I think the craft part comes from having taught English literature for many, many decades and having this kind of Rolodex of poetic stuff revolving and teaching semester after semester, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Hardy.

On the voice of his poems: 

So the voice in my poems is very straightforward. It's without guile and even kind of chummy with the reader. Someone said no line must sleep. Every line needs to be aware of the lines around it, as opposed to prose, where the sentences just drive forward. Poetry is a language that means more and sounds better than other written expressions.

Billy reads two poems about what dogs think (probably)

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Prompt: The Voice of the Dog

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Photo by Paul Moody - Flickr 

“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?

 

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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.

   

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