THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507270595
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
WHAT WITH Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Stewart writing poetry, not to mention Ally Sheedy and Jim Carrey's fright-wigged Riddler, it figures the time is fast approaching when all will think they can do it.
And, in truth, they can, but the results are not always exactly Wordsworth. A good deal of the stuff goes directly and undeniably to the dogs.
Now comes an unabashed volume of verse avowedly aspiring to nothing more - Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs (Crown, 175 pp., $19).
Here find gathered barking bards, mongrel minstrels, pup prosodists.
See Spot scan.
It all started on a fishing trip to the Florida Keys.
An assortment of piscatory scribes sat about a campfire, celebrating the onset of the new year. One surmises they might have been passing around something stronger than New York Seltzer. In any event, the story goes that on this occasion, Frank, writer Bob Shacochis' precocious Irish setter, produced a spontaneous poem titled ``Wind'':
Leaves - I thought they were birds.
Short-story writer Amy Hempel (At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom) and novelist Jim Shepard (Kiss of the Wolf) undertook to solicit similar effusions from the canine pets of their literary pals.
There is, after all, precedent for poets speaking in dogs' voices.
Remember Alexander Pope's incisive 18th-century couplet?
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
The editorial results of the Hempel-Shepard collaboration range from an ambitious epic ``Odyssey'' by Rick Bass' Homer to a tender homage from Denis Johnson's Great Dane, ``Harold's Bowl and Food,'' which begins thus:
Bowl bowl bowl bowl bowl bowl
Food food food food food.
Fido Agonistes, or the Night Riffs of Rover.
Other ventures into versification are similarly to the point. One variation on a familiar theme comes from Karen Shepard's Birch. His complete contribution:
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I'll eat that.
Chewy meditations for a dog day afternoon.
Most of these pieces, like their authors, stand unencumbered with ambiguity. But they are often nonetheless notable for penetrating insight. Take, for example, Anne Lamott's black retriever, Sadie Louise, who concedes of an otherwise upbeat environment:
There is also a cat.
The cat has issues.
Ron Carlson's Max confides, ``When I found out that one of my years was seven of theirs, I started biting absolutely everything.''
Arthur Miller's Lola laments, ``No wonder I bark and menace,/ Who knows who it could be at the door/ 'Specially in these times.''
My own dog, Tim, of uncertain breed, knows but a single trick. When I wave a piece of meat at him, he will come to me. If I wave it vigorously, and he is downwind.
Still, Tim dares to share the Alpo impetus, the Milk Bone muse. Talk about a mute, inglorious Milton. He even seems to possess surpassing critical skills that enable him to pass penetrating judgment on the canine poetry amassed in Unleashed.
Tim's considered assessment:
Sniff!
Doggerel.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB