Katrovas opens the poem with details, almost as though it were an article in a newspaper. We don’t simply get the friend’s name, we get the friend’s FULL name. We get the name of the city, the name of the state, how old he was.
From the details, we go into a lot of specificity about the friend. Character development, really. We learn about his glass eye, what he smokes, and the very jarring and shocking phrase “how he fucked his sister.” I don’t know about you, but this line jumped out at me and and really caught me off guard.
But as soon as Katrovas throws this phrase out, he pulls back and becomes much more general: he uses such abstract terms as “contempt” and “authority.” As though to allow us time to recover from the preceeding line, he describes Joe’s rebelliousness almost as a way for us to regain our balance. In a very few number of lines, suddenly Joe goes from some unidentified person to someone who has a very bizarre and compelling history to him.
A glass eye? Smoked when he was twelve? Fucked his sister? Who IS this guy? These are the thoughts going through my head, reading the poem.
Next, Katrovas reminds us about the dog and sets up for the final sentence of this poem. Starting with “It’s about a garbage truck…” Katrovas then takes the subsequent sixteen lines to bring us into the moment of the dog’s death. Notice his use of “and” to string the phrases together, and how even though this is written in the past tense… the way Katrovas describes things it almost comes across as present tense.
In looking back, I’m in awe of the final sixteen lines. They pull the eyes downward, and it’s though you’re unable to stop the action – you’re simply there witnessing this terrible moment.
(Sidenote: I’m reminded of my friend Bruce Machart, who was a fantastic fiction writer I met while a student at OSU. He wrote a short story that involved the death of a dog, and in reading Katrovas’ poem… I’m spotting moves that both writers made, to great effect.)
What I find fascinating about this poem is that Katrovas broadcasts the death. He lets us know, right from the very start, that a dog has died. Even within the title of the poem itself, he leads with “Dog” before “Boy,” preparing us for the emphasis of the dog over the friend.
But by going in to the details of Joe’s history (the smoking, the eye, the sister), our attention is suddenly riveted on Joe as a character, as a person. We forget about the dog until the final sentence, where Katrovas pulls us directly into the moment.
Joe is protrayed as a rather dislikeable person, and yet Katrovas mentions his capacity for love early on in the poem. The final lines show that, despite all the things we find out about Joe’s history… we find him wholly capable of suffering, of loss.
Katrovas could have written a poem that talked only about a friend’s dog dying, but these facts alone would have made the poem come off as sentimental. Simply describing loss wouldn’t have made this a strong poem. Instead, Katrovas, using specificity and details, is able to shift our attention to Joe, who comes across as a very real person with a very real history.
Any one of us is capable of mourning the death of a dog, of this “beautiful Lab.” But for Katrovas to give us someone as unlikeable and contradictory as Joe? And to see such a person suffer and mourn so passionately? Through Joe, Katrovas makes the suffering in this poem very real and very believable. Because the grief is tied specifically to a person, because Joe seems like an actual person, his suffering resonates as actual suffering. And we identify with it all the more.
This is a remarkable poem to me. I keep re-reading it, in awe at how deft Katrovas is in leading me through the story, the details. I’m in awe at the order with which he reveals things to us, and how quickly he moves us from the unflattering introduction of Joe at the start of the poem, to the Joe we see at the poem’s end, howling in the street at 5 AM. —–
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