PRELUDE to POODLE

THE ALMOST COMPLETE POODLE   2018  Tim Fitzmaurice

“He is poodlishly ridiculous … “

(Goethe, “Faust”)

When my son Jason was born, in 1970, I was not schooling or working, except at home. I read Goethe’s “Faust” to him in his crib. I came across this scene in the edition edited by Stephen Spender and translated by Louis MacNiece:

Wagner: … It’s in the evening one really values home—but why do you look so astonished, standing there, staring that way? What’s there to see in the dusk that’s worth the trouble?

Faust: The black dog … Do you mark him ranging through the corn and stubble?

Wagner: I noticed him long ago; he struck me as nothing much.

Faust: Have a good look at the brute. What do you take him for?

Wagner: For a poodle who, as is the way of such, is trailing his master, worrying the scent.

Faust: But don’t you perceive how in wide spirals around us he is running fire eddies behind him in his wakes.

Wagner: I can see nothing but a black poodle. It must be your eyes have caused this mistake.

Faust: He is casting, it seems to me, fine nooses of magic about our feet as a snare….

Another transaltion by Kaufman translates a later part:

Hund! Abscheuliches Untier!

Dog abominable monster!—Change him, oh infinite spirit! Change him back this worm into his dog shape, as he used to amuse himself in the night when he trotted along before me, rolled in front of the feet of a harmless wanderer and, when he stumbled, clung to his shoulders. Change him again to his favorite form that he may crawl on his belly in the sand before me and I may trample on him with my feet, the caitiff! …

This dog became for me a figure of the poet, myself in my imagination, who is persuaded that he or she is refined into a purposeful purposelessness and not always for the good. So I used him in my way as a persona and this was before I had read much of that kind of thing.

I think it reflected that sense of difference that I felt as a young person, a person who chose to study to be a priest quite seriously because I thought it would be magical to speak Latin to people on Sunday. When they changed the mass to English I quit the seminary for several reasons. But certainly made a shift to doing poetry consciously when I was a sophomore in high school. I had not poems but I bought a Chesterfield overcoat for two dollars because I saw a another kid wearing one and he wrote long thin poems that I admired but did not read very carefully.

I connect my poodle poems with Berryman’s “Dream Songs” and with Pound’s personae and before them with Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and impersonations. But I wrote the first Poodle Poems before I read any of that. These poems were a way of being someone else, all the someones I might be able to imagine, and not worrying about the codes that I had absorbed and that I might run into that would deter me from saying something I could imagine. I wanted to express what came to mind.

There was another reason for pursuing Poodle. I was doing readings at the college and in bookstores and elsewhere. I heard people give readings of their heart felt work and heard the audience moan after each poem. I heard them groan with appreciation—I think—after I read something. But it seemed they were not really listening. How could they be expected to pay attention to such profound work.

I wanted to avoid being so continuously impenetrable and obscure and especially so serious in tone. I mean I know that I am often thick and I love that. It is my childishness. It is like speaking Latin to those who don’t know the language. But in readings, I wanted to be accessible and funny and surprising and entertaining. I will admit it. I thought readings I heard were ponderous and boring and much too self-indulgent. I could be other indulgent with poodle and hide my selfish impulses in plain sight.

Besides Poodle could be funny at times, simple and profound as well as very wrong. What role did choosing to masquerade as a poodle mean for the hyper male gender expectations that were pretty strong in 1970 and persist. My history includes being physically threatened for my sensitivity or what was perceived as that. Writing poetry was not all that macho a social choice even after Jim Morrison took over for Rod McKuen.