Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Writing this poem was a years-long process. Part of a longer manuscript called “The Cloud Understands Our Scarecrow Hearts”, this piece in particular involved an extensive reading list, editing, reading, revising, rinse and repeat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
Of poetry, Wordsworth said that it’s “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… [which take their] origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The emotional, literal center of this poem was unexpectedly having to have my dog put down, the ensuing grief, and the struggled in my agency in making the choice to do so. Nora, a lab-beagle mix, was a rescue dog given to me by my Mother, and the last daily reminder I had of her.
Copyright by Jonathan Travelstead.
While I had never before read a poem on losing a pet that hit the tenor of what I look for in poetry, a still-fresh sense of loss made it impossible to work on anything else at the time.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. When I began this poem, I was sitting on the rail of my deck overlooking the fenced-in corner where I buried Nora the day before. In the following days I would plant a Japanese maple directly above her– it’s flourishing now– and set posts for a hammock and chin-up bar on the remaining periphery.
In the early drafts of the poem I knew it hadn’t yet found its reason for existing. Not wanting it to remain a poem floodlighting the speaker’s grief, I kept working on it, mapping my way towards a moment of insight. Something from which I could bridge that feeling we all experience towards something strange, something grotesque to elevate the poem towards something social. At this point I was three years in on my writing project– near-future science fiction poems. Having not yet found the right poem to explore the ethics of cloning, I knew this was the perfect piece.
I was a number of books in on one of various ‘top science fiction’ lists I was systematically reading during the first years of “The Cloud Understands…”, and while I would return to many of those books for this poem, what I returned to most often was the film “Her”, written and directed by Spike Jonze. Rarely had I found such pathos in other stories within the NFSF genre which could sustain the work I was doing on this manuscript.
Working on Dog is the Machine’s Language involved trying to stay present in the sense of loss and the ‘bargaining’ phase of the grief cycle, reading and viewing sci-fi stories that also spoke to that, and talking through the implications of expectations we have on others with my counselor over the period of nearly eight years.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us?I’m afraid that any and all lines that didn’t make the final cut were intentionally forgotten. I figure that if they would ever be important again– for this, or any other piece– I would remember them. I see writing as a kind of mapping the dark by headlamp, identifying dead ends, remembering them, and then doubling back to the fork. The way I see it, only what could possibly belong in this poem already is.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? If someone were to ask me what I want readers to take from this poem I would first admit that I usually try to redirect from that questioning. Likewise with telling a poem from a podium, or poems with objectives. However, since Dog is the Machine’s Language is such a topical poem, I want my readers to be haunted by the gravity of the decisions we’re capable of making when engaged in the grieving process. During the first few months of work on this piece, I corresponded with a company in South Korea about the possibility of cloning Nora. This was a possibility I soon decided was fraught with too many moral and ethical consequences for myself as well as for the cloned pup. Choosing to clone her would have been harmful for my grieving process, and incalculably harmful to her for the reasons that any clone would be forever compared to ‘the original’, the standard of which the clone would never be able to live up to. Also, the idea that a cloned being may not ever be able to truly branch out into themselves under the watch of a parental figure who knew the donor. And then the Nature versus Nurture duality further muddies the mess.
However, explicating or even referencing any of these issues directly would have certainly harmed the poem. Ultimately, with the exception of the title, I intended that the poem remain one that tried to resonate to the reader through their heartstrings first, instead hoping that readers would be led to such dilemmas through imagery and the speaker’s grief.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The most emotional and difficult part of the poem took the longest to complete, which is the last line. “… Each of us pawing at nothing but air”. That final line took nearly eight years of mapping before I could write it. A parallel, I think, with the idea of waving goodbye to the dual grief of losing my someone and the decisions we hope we never have to make.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem was previously published in The Collapsar Review in Spring of 2017.
Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and as poetry co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he also turns a lathe, crafting pens under the name Scorched Ink Penturning. His first collection “How We Bury Our Dead” by Cobalt Press was released in March, 2015, and “Conflict Tours” (Cobalt Press) was released in 2017.
Copyright by Jonathan Travelstead
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