I’m not going to post a bird poem. Instead, I will follow the lead of someone I met recently who loved McKay’s poems about dogs. I find this fitting since I met first met Don McKay at a professor’s house, tirelessly throwing a spittle-soggy rubber ball for said professor’s terrier. Perhaps “good poetry” isn’t supposed to make you go “Awwww,” but this good poem certainly has that effect on me.

LUKE & CO

1.

Shriek of brakes spiked

with your spirit splits the evening suddenly

this is it    everything leaks    we draw heavy

outlines trying to keep stone stone

boot boot shovel shovel

shovel this raw mouth into the earth

and feed you to the meadow.

2.

Each time he settled on his blue-black sofa Luke

went out, invisible except for small white patches

on his chest, left forepaw, and the tiny paintbrush

tufts on his tail and prick-sack, winking when he

wagged or recomposed his curl:

milkweed

growing on this wild unspecial

patch of ground

let your silk slip

gently    to the wind.

3.

A dog on his sofa, a dog

underground, a committee of dogs which

circulates beyond the bounds of decency

sniffing crotches

raiding garbage

stealing from the butcher

begging from the banker

befriending nasty Mrs. Kuhn, convincing folk

that every act is sexual and droll.

Raggedly

they range the meadow,

alternate hosts for all our seminal ideas

(soft sell, the revolving

door, the interminable

joke) tucked in snug cocoons behind their wise

unknowing eyes:

underground

they spread contagiously, freelancing dreamlife to

dreamlife through networks of long rambling after-

dinner anecdotes    Mr. Glover had an old blind

terrier could fetch a ball by listening to it hit

and roll, I don’t know, could be he smelt it in

the air    sure well Luke followed his nose the

way Ezekiel followed God, he’d vacuum up your

trail like you had fishline paying out your arse

you’d double back it didn’t matter he would find

you up a tree    thing is, like they only partly

live in this dimension since they smell and hear

things that do not exist for us so on their level

it’s like synesthesia is common sense    well, you

know Alice Dragland had such ears folks said her

mother was part fruit bat she would practise

flying when the family was asleep and when she

swam (for miles) behind the boat she mostly sailed

and then of course there’s breakthroughs

                                                                                     as when Luke

discovered down-filled pillows and extrapolated,

grazing the surface of soft

improbable objects with exquisite

fish-bites, chien stupide, chien

brillant, trying to tease feathers

from the cat the sofa and at least one

English professor of each rank and gender,

chien comme une tasse de la nuit, he wouldn’t

let himself become embossed with discipline

but played it like melody

(Perdido Blues) from which he improvised in long

irregular loops

exits

entries. Letting him out in out to chase a

car bike jogger snowplow (caught, tossed in an

otter’s arc of snow) rabbit motorcycle train the wind

whose speed

was with him even in repose a space

left in his doggieness for metamorphosis and style

where once

right here in this kitchen, Luke ate

three-fifths of Hemingway’s For Whom

the Bell Tolls, fell asleep on his sofa

wrapped in the perfect fur sleeping bag of himself.

(from Camber, p. 100-04)

Heck, some days I miss the bats that got and subsequently resided in my brothers’ closet, well over 60 of them–Dad and I stood out on the porch one night and counted as they flew out until we were too tired to count anymore, and they just kept coming. Some days I miss the squirrel that snuck into Dad’s office and dodged, bouncing, every attempt to chase it out with a broom. Recalling our visit to Florida and the tourist trap where we’d watched gators be made to jump for chickens suspended above them on a stick, Dad dubbed it “The Squirrel Jumparoo Show.” I don’t miss the skunk that got into the basement and had to be lured out with a trail of dry cat food, its way out blocked off by bales of peat moss, my mom crouching behind them in fear and occasionally popping her head up to check if it was gone yet. But I do recall that day with fond amusement.

It is easy to forget that we are animals, especially when we find ourselves trudging through malls and up streets that like to pretend fauna and flora don’t exist. It is easy to keep forgetting when we seek our “back-to-nature” downtime in botanical gardens that cheerily mingle plants from disparate continents as if they coexist in some natural habitat, somewhere. It is easy to forget when we’re theorizing the world. But animals we are.

I wish I could say that the “authentic encounters with the wilderness” in my life have reminded me of this. I wish I could put on my Wordsworth face and claim that they opened floodgates of perception. They didn’t. What they did was cause me to pause for a little while, to be reminded that “MY places” are not “human territory”.   

If our ways of categorizing, of thinking “myself” separate from “other”, of dwelling on the space rather than the proximity and overlap between these points of reference, is what keeps our consciousness fenced off from experiencing wilderness (and it is surely not the only thing), then what are we missing? What is “wilderness” anyway? Don McKay, a contemporary and remarkable Canadian nature poet, offers a definition that (in my opinion) says more about what wilderness is not than about what it is. Perhaps that is the best that can be offered, since it is a trick of language, itself a medium more of describing than existing, that “being” is impossible to articulate.

McKay:

By “wilderness” I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations. That tools retain a vestige of wilderness is especially evident when we think of their existence in time and eventual graduation from utility: breakdown. To what degree do we own our houses, hammers, dogs? Beyond that line lies wilderness. We probably experience its presence most often in the negative as dry rot in the basement, a splintered handle, or shit on the carpet. But there is also the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat hanger aasks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy–its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (Don McKay, Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness, p. 21)

Greenberg does not overlook the question of subjectivity, offering instead a lucid interpretation:

…it has become clearer, too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and the aesthetic don’t just overlap, they coincide (as Croce suspected, but didn’t conclude). The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing–an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realized or realizable everywhere, even if for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, “raw,” and unformalized (which doesn’t mean “formless,” of which there is no such thing). And because this art can and does feed on anything within the realm of conceivability, it is virtually omnipresent among human beings.

This “raw,” ubiquitous art doesn’t as a rule move anybody more than minimally on the aesthetic level, however much it might do so on the level of consolation or therapy or even of the “sublime.” It’s literally and truly minimal art. And it’s able to remain that because in its usual privacy it is sheltered from the pressure of expectations and demands. Art starts from expectation and satisfaction, but only under the pressure of heightened expectation–expectation as schooled and heightened by sufficient aesthetic experience–does art lift itself out of its “raw” state, make itself communicable, and become what society considers to be art proper, public art.

Duchamp’s “theoretical” feat was to show that “raw” art could be formalized, made public, simply by setting it in a formalized art situation, and without trying to satisfy expectations–at least not in principle. Since Duchamp this formalizing of “raw” art by fiat has become a stereotype of avant-gardist practice, with the claim being made, always, that new areas of nonart are being won for art thereby. All this has actually amounted to, however, is that public attention is called to something that was art to begin with, and banal as that, and which is made no more intrinsically interesting by being put into a recognized art context.   (“Counter-Avant-Garde,” Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, p. 13-4)

Pull up a cozy chair, pour yourself a cup of tea, and enjoy.