Poet: Rachel B. Glaser
Poet Background:
Rachel B. Glaser is somewhat of a mystery, at least when it comes to discovering her background on the Internet. Most of the time when I write these ‘Poem of the Week’ features, I find a decent amount of information about the poet from his/her/their website, or there are profiles of them on Wikipedia or one of the big national poetry websites, like poets.org or poetryfoundation.org. For Glaser, there isn’t too much information, and that’s probably on purpose, which I can appreciate--the less of your life that’s on the Internet, the better, in my opinion, and the world doesn’t need to know everything about you anyway.
What I could find is small compared to others, but it gives us a basic picture of Glaser’s background. She has published a short story collection, Pee on Water, two collections of poetry, MOODS and HAIRDO, and a novel, Paulina & Fran, which led to Granta calling Glaser one of the Best Young American Novelists a few years back in 2017. She has also had her fiction anthologized in New American Stories, and published in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and New York Tyrant, amongst a few others.
She attended the Rhode Island School of Design from 2001-2005, and while there she also took many fiction workshops at Brown. She would later graduate from the UMass-Amherst Poets and Writers Program in Fiction, and she currently teaches fiction in the low-residency Mountainview MFA program and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Poem: ‘As dogs’
I try a new way of imagining people as dogs as dogs it makes sense why anyone would be drawn to do anything just as dogs rub themselves in patches of grass or suddenly lick a face
as dogs you can surely forgive your mother because she makes a funny dog with frilly fur and worried eyes and as a dog, is it so bad you spend so much time recalling a certain smell or staring too long and too intently
at a torn leaf in a hot tub
a dog falls ill and says nothing over time, they destroy the things they love
picture whoever is giving you trouble or whatever part of you desires more than it has then see a dog pulling against the chain gripping his neck or barely moving under a bench watch the dog run away from everything it knows do you blame them?
Analysis:
I first stumbled upon this poem because of the ‘Poem-A-Day’ feature from poets.org. Over the past year, I’ve turned to poetry in a way that I never read before the pandemic, and I’m not 100% sure why that is. Part of me thinks it has to do with routine--each morning when I wake up, there’s a poem waiting for me in my inbox from poets.org, and they’re very different and varied from each other, with some longer and some shorter. Even if I don’t necessarily love all the poems, each one is an experience, and I try to feel the emotions that the poets who wrote them want us readers to feel. At the least, it’s a lesson in reading different kinds of poems and discovering what is important to poets in today’s American society. On a side note, the ‘Poem-A-Day’ feature also has a podcast version where the poets usually read their own works and talking about what influenced them to write the poem, and it’s a great, quick listen for your morning commute, whether you drive, walk, subway, or anything else to get to work.
With this poem specifically, Glaser gave us readers a bit of a background at the end of the daily feature: “I wrote this in my notebook on a plane on my honeymoon. Over the past few years, I’ve become more critical of myself and others. This thought exercise helped me embrace human flaws.” While this is a simple explanation, the real meaning of the poem, and what I think Glaser was truly getting at, lies below the surface of both the explanation and the poem itself, and I think it lies in the realm of existential dread and pondering.
Almost everyone has been in a situation where they’re told to imagine people as other things--in their underwear, for example, or as statues rather than real human beings, things instead of breathing creatures. We tell others this when they are nervous, most often when they’re about to give a big speech or presentation, but it also happens a lot more often on a personal level for some people, with anxiety/panic attacks and related happenings occurring to them on a frequent basis. One of the strategies that therapists like to prescribe, outside of medication of course, is to imagine people as other things/objects, and it’s supposed to put your mind at ease. Speaking from a place of personal experience, it often does not work, but you can still try it at least to see if it can even lessen the feelings that assault you at certain times/places/events.
In this poem, it seems that Glaser is stepping into a space like that, where she’s anxious or doubting the goodness of humanity, and she compares humans in general to dogs, choosing an animal that most human beings consider to be completely and morally good. No dogs are ever born bad or aggressive, and the only time that happens is when humans corrupt them through abuse and neglect, like with the situation that occurred with Michael Vick about 15 years ago. Pit bulls, for example, have a horrible reputation only because they are the dogs chosen most for dog fighting, which is a human bastardization of their innocence, and it is infuriating to see the poor reputation that they have. But, I digress—what I’m trying to say here is that Glaser’s use of comparing dogs to humans is not accidental, and, in my reading of the poem, she does this in order to put us in the most innocent kind of mindset possible.
When you look at the first stanza specifically, you get a few different images, and the message seems to be clear—in order to make sense of human nature at times when it appears hard to do so, simply compare it to something else rational, and try to think of the problem through that lens. With this poem, Glaser is examining human behavior, and with this stanza specifically, she points out that, similar to how humans don’t truly understand why dogs rub themselves in patches of grass or lick our faces, humans commit acts and say things that make no sense sometimes. With the examples she gives, the idea seems more innocent than it comes off at first, with the images of a dog rubbing itself in a field or licking your face having soothing and happy connotations to them. What is left unsaid is why Glaser feels the need to compare humans to dogs, and it goes unsaid to emphasize the fact that she is trying to technically hide something in her mind, to think elsewise about a problem that seems to be eating away at her, and she’s trying to put a somewhat positive spin on the problem instead, trying to stay in a good mindset while understanding the existential angst and dread underneath it all.
The second stanza turns darker, and it once again uses cheery and innocent images to mask the gloom lurking beneath the surface. Two specific themes are touched on in this stanza, both of them heavy: the problems that often arise with your own parents as you grow older, with the viewpoints between both parties starting to increase with some people, and the idea that the human condition is a meaningless, endless void at times, with the idea that we as a human species have to combat that by rationalizing our thoughts, deeds, and actions into something more concrete and worthwhile. With the first theme, Glaser doesn’t have to say that she has issues with her mother—she allows the idea of forgiving her mother by imagining her as a funny-looking dog to do the trick instead, avoiding the real underlying issue of their differences. Instead of dwelling on the past and realizing that there is possibly some animosity in the relationship, she instead chooses to think of her as something more cheerful and innocent, and there are few images that fit that bill more than a funny-looking dog. It’s much easier and less mentally-taxing at times to imagine such a farcical concept, but what does that say about the soundness and strength of our mental states? If we don’t face reality and look at the facts of a situation, does that make us weaker, or are we allowed to sometimes morph situations and concepts and images into something that’s a tad bit farcical to protect ourselves from the darkness that is reality at times?
This idea is echoed in the second theme of the second stanza, that of the human condition as being pointless. Sometimes we, as humans, do things that seemingly have no meaning to them, whether that’s sitting in front of a TV for twelve hours and watching reruns of 90 Day Fiancé, or walking around a place like Disney World endlessly on a random Saturday and doing nothing but people watching. Both activities are, essentially, pointless when you compare them to the human idea of what it means to be productive, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Just like dogs zoning out and staring at something for too long like in the poem, humans can do the same thing and not feel guilty about it. But, that’s where the existential angst and problem of the poem comes in—we still often feel like we are pointless when we do activities like the ones I just mentioned, or any activities that don’t actively further our spot in life or something similar, and Glaser needs to compare humans to dogs once again to feel justified in her idea of the pointlessness of the human existence at times.
The third stanza, one that’s short and clipped at two lines, is nonetheless arguably the most devastating: Glaser dwells on the idea of humans getting sick and hurt and literally ill but not saying anything at the same time, something that also seems to happen with age (I would argue that the Baby Boomers, especially, hate to admit that anything akin to feelings or sickness exists, and they just like to pretend that everything is fine and they think the problem will magically go away), and also one of the worst realities of being human—we often ‘destroy the things [we] love,’ and we do it both accidentally and on purpose at various times. You can compare that to instances where a dog destroys something, such as a shoe or a beloved toy or your homework, and they don’t do it out of malice or anger—they do it almost innocently, with the idea of them doing it on purpose totally foreign to reality, and they don’t realize the problem until afterwards, when you’re standing there chastising them for ruining that new pair of shoes you just bought. No matter what we as humans do sometimes, we still make mistakes and hurt those whom we love the most, and that’s just the reality of the world. It’s a depressing thought, but it’s also one that’s realistic.
The last stanza doesn’t get that much brighter—the main message of it, based on the supremely depressing images of a dog fighting against a chain around its neck, a dog cowering under a bench, and a dog running away and getting lost, is that we shouldn’t be surprised when people lash out and make a mess of their situations when things metaphorically ‘put them in a corner.’ Similar to how a dog runs off because he/she is scared, even though it could spell the end of them or, at the very least, panic and depression until the dog is returned, humans sometimes lash out against those whom we love and need the most, and we either injure or put ourselves in situations that end up doing nothing other than harming us, similar to the way a dog pulling on a chain on their neck is doing nothing but choking itself. It’s a dark and bleak message to end the poem on, but I’d argue that Glaser also tries to spin it in a somewhat positive way—by shining a light on the darkness, it allows us to morph the depressing image into that of hope, illuminating how we can make positive situations out of circumstances that would otherwise beat us down.