Round 'n' Round with Poets 'n' Dogs

(references to a review in POETRY of Dec. 2006, a review by Joel Brouwer, poet-blogger Greg Rappleye's review of Brouwer's review, and my own review of Brouwer's own poem.)

I'm amused. A day after shaking my head over those literalists who deny that any interpretation is involved in their reading of Scripture (see my review of Rob Bell's VELVET ELVIS) , I find this statement by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, quoted with commentary by Brian Phillips in POETRY:

"The poem is, after all, the solution to a problem only it has raised, and our reading of it necessarily entails determining what that problem was." But since this process is inevitably speculative, it also means that the reader creates the writer, that we can bring to reading anything we like, that the poem has no end.

The "problem" is to communicate an experience with any inner effects or reflections, as succinctly as possible. Of course, ye literalists, of course, the readers will bring their own background to an interpretation. We know this from the usual Law School Jury 101 experiment, in which the class witnesses some extraordinary event and immediately writes accounts of the event that disagree. When the event is also meaningful, the room for interpretation expands.

Minutes after reading the review in POETRY, I was checking blogs for comparisons to my own review of Joel Brouwer's wonderful poem "A Report to the Academy" (see "Joining the Moments, Enjoying the Moments", Dec. 10). Along the way, I found an illustration of this phenomenon: two poets disagree on how to read a third poet, and I disagree with both!

The blogger-poet Greg Rappleye at Sonnets at 4 a.m. decries "Joel Brouwer's ice-axing of Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism (Northeastern University Press, 2006); a review that appears in this morning's New York Times Book Review. "

Rappleye presents the following poem by Jacobstein, and follows with his own comments:

THE DOG RACES IN FLORIDA

He can't stop thinking
of his mother, contorted
in her last bed, her voice

Running to empty, able
only to repeat A point, I need
a better point, and unbidden,

he flashes to the dog track
in Florida, the loudspeaker
growling over its own static

Here comes Swifty--and they're off!:
a mass of yelping greyhounds
chasing that tiny tin rabbit

trailing the black Buick coupe.
Around and around the tamped
dirt the pack strains. Anyone

would have bet the dogs
had learned by now no matter
how fast they run, Swifty runs

faster. Then the point breaks
clear: They know and run anyway.*

I read the poem as an original (and nearly cynical) comment on the futility of life; a suggestion that many of us will choose to go on living in futility no matter how unwise that choice is. I do not read it as a sentimental comment about anyone's mother, as a sweet insight about the "Great Chain of Life" metaphor, or whatever it is that Brouwer claims the poem to be.

So Rappleye sees cynicism in Jacobstein’s poem, and Brouwer sees a sentimental message in it.

What I bring to Jacobstein’s poem is the way my dogs enjoy running for its own sake, chasing and barking at each other with no "point." So, I don't see the cynicism, and I don't see the sentimental message "Life goes on," but I do see an insight that I consider to be more positive than either: that the "point" is beside the point, as running is what the dogs do well and enjoy. Good for Swifty, too bad about the mother who wanted more.

Enjoyed as well the fact that Brouwer in his review derides "the 'anecdote + reflection = insight' school", while my whole review of his poem makes much of the fact that it reports an insight reached by reflection on an anecdote.