Dogs and Poetry

Last week my wife Paula Van Lare and I had the pleasure and the privilege of volunteering for a couple of days at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.

More specifically, we worked at Dogtown, as featured on the National Geographic program of the same name.

You may wonder what this has to do with my writing.

Fair enough.

While only a small portion of my writing has involved dogs, last week's experience made me want to share a couple of previously published dog poems. I have another tangentially canine poem coming out shortly (more on this soon), and I am trying to publish a couple of others.

For now I hope you enjoy these two.



Policy

Because Nubians are still enslaved
I walk my dogs twice a day.

Because a child conceived tonight will inherit addiction
I leave my dogs offerings
of fresh water, with ice cubes.
Because envelopes and marketplaces explode
I hug my dogs and even carry them
where no shrapnel flies.

Because a manatee is sliced
by motorboat blades
and the last wild tiger
has been born,
I keep my dogs' tags and shots
up to date.

Now that any fact can be known
in an instant,
the smallest love is news.

Things touch at a near or far remove:
jays pass raspberry seeds
over fresh fields,
armadillos, burrowed into freight,
widen their range.

Word of my program
will ride the jet stream,
and land like a petal,
or it will bounce, devoutly, off a satellite.




Aubade

Dog, and I believe that I can call you that
with a high degree of accuracy,
in a purely denotative sense, though,
unsullied by cultural associations,
please listen,
since I seldom ask that much of you
(the couch is yours no less than mine,
the pillows, past and present, more so):
You would, if you a possessed a consciousness
of cause and effect, self and other
and the mortality that swallows them,
be grateful to know nothing
beyond that which you know right now
because, for me,
it’s seven-thirty on a partly cloudy
Tuesday, forty-five degrees,
with a sixty-percent chance of rain
and the certainty
of a commute and a day’s work
in which I’ll be wagged by—appended to—
devices engineered by men
who get out even less than me.
Really, they exist,
though you might have gathered otherwise
from the long and many evenings that we share—
like tonight, when we’ll
resume this small symposium.
Until then, fellow traveler on the planet,
Don’t scratch that spot behind your ear—
It’s already bare.
A new rawhide bone is on your bed
and, as always, cane mio,
the kibble’s in the bowl.

London Calling

This post is more than just an opportunity to invoke one of the best-known songs by The Clash.

I have a truly dramatic announcement.

To wit, my one-act play "Dig" will be getting its first fully mounted professional production in London, with a scheduled opening night some time in the spring. First published in Rockhurst Review in 1997, "Dig" will be produced thanks to the efforts of Curving Road, a nonprofit registered in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Much of their work involves launching the artistic careers of disadvantaged youth who might not have access to valuable training and connections. In case you wonder about the name, more information is available here.

In this instance, Curving Road placed a call for one-act play submissions from writers over the age of 40 who had never had a play professionally produced. After the inevitable period of waiting that follows any submission, I have learned that my play, along with "Nearly Man" by Scottish playwright Michael Hart, will make up the program.

The Curving Road web site summarizes my play as follows:

" 'Dig' explores through dark humour the power struggle between prey and victim, centering on the dialogue between an executioner and a victim who refuses to dig his own grave."

As you have no doubt already surmised, this is not for children.

Now a whole new sequence of events begins. I am willing to call it a new stage of my education.
I hope to take the lessons learned from this production to the plays I plan to write in the years ahead.

At the moment I have ideas for at least two full-length plays.

New Lists on Top Hat Tap Dance

The list may represent America's unique contribution to humor, and many of us know it best from David Letterman's Top Ten List.

I've recently had a few lists of my own published on the site Top Hat Tap Dance, the creation of Austin, Texas writer and photographer Kristin Hillery, whose work has, like my own, appeared on Yankee Pot Roast.

My lists (or, as some of the kids call them these days, "listicles") appear on the following dates:

October 8

September 22

September 15

September 14

and September 14

(September 14 was a busy day).

I will soon put together another set of previously published humor links, including both lists and longer articles, but the links above can be considered an appetizer.

New Story in Pulp Pusher

I continue not to publish much fiction, but earlier today my Midwestern noir story "Killing the Singer" was posted on Pulp Pusher, the awesome site of Scottish crime writer Tony Black.

Come for my story, and stay for work by and/or about noir folk (Tartan Noir and other) including Chad Eagleton, Christa Faust, Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, Sophie Littlefield, Anthony Neil Smith (no relation) and Andrew Vachss.

What--or who--would you sacrifice for Art?

New Story on Flash Fiction Offensive

I still don't publish much fiction, but my neo-noir story "Neighborhood Watch" appears on the Flash Fiction Offensive site and is eligible for subsequent inclusion in not-for-the-faint-of-heart print publication Out of the Gutter Magazine.

I don't want to ruin the story by saying too much about it, but I follow distantly in the footsteps of one of the most famous works of Jonathan Swift.

If you are wondering what neo-noir is, I would describe it as a descendant of hard-boiled noir and pulp fiction of the twentieth century, but with generally more (okay, much more) profanity and less racism and sexism, and sometimes social commentary. Leading purveyors include Todd Robinson's Thuglit and Tony Black's Pulp Pusher. (Disclosure: My stories have appeared in both.)

Reading my story doesn't take much longer than getting a fist to the face, and it hurts a lot less. What's not to like?

Story in Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men

I don't publish a lot of fiction, at least not yet, but sometimes it happens.

The most recent example is my story "Foolish Time" in the online journal Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men.

Editor Jarrett Haley does not offer a one-size-fits-all approach to who thinking men are, or to what men's fiction should be. He is nonetheless speaking to a clear divide between mainstream publishing, particularly in literary fiction, and much of the male population.

The conventional wisdom in publishing can be summarized as "men don't read" or "men don't buy books." In response to proposal that two friends and I once made for a book targeting men, a literary agency assistant's rejection including the observation that men instead spend their money on "beer, lottery tickets and sex." This comes as news to me and to most of the men I know.

A second problem with those statements is that mainstream publishing, in spite of its dire financial situation, offers relatively little for men to read. Most of us can't relate to the upper bourgeois dilemmas of men usually portrayed in a New Yorker story. We additionally go a long time between the appearances of writers such as Thom Jones or Marc Nesbitt with something to say about the experience of men who feel burdened, cornered or simply "had" by the difference between what they were told to expect and where they find themselves.

Publications like Bull and various independent publishers are trying to meet needs that the mainstream largely ignores.

Second Poem in The Wanderlust Review

As noted in the previous post, my second poem has been published in The Wanderlust Review.

That poem, "Andante," a Valentine to travel in general, can be found here.

You will notice that the poem is an abecedary, where each line begans with and features a letter of the alphabet. In addition to playing with sounds, the abecedary is a way of taking inventory of what's going on inside one's head. I heard Denise Duhamel read an extended abecedary at the 2004 Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Chicago and was eventually enticed to try one myself.

But I will let the poem speak for itself.

Yellowknife beckons.