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“How to Be a Dog” by Andrew Kane | Rattle: Poetry

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Andrew Kane: “I spent much of 2019 listening to The Roches, especially their eponymous 1979 debut, which includes the song ‘Damned Old Dog.’ This poem is my response to that song’s central refrain, ‘Do I want to be a dog?’ and an exploration of what it would mean to both be a dog and to be a person who takes on the mantle of a dog’s life, which is to say, to be a person actively palpating the vastness and the limitations of their own empathy. (There is, too, a healthy dose of Thomas Nagel’s ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ which was collected, also in 1979, in his book, Mortal Questions.) Above all, though, this is in fact a poem about dogs.” (web) SHARES “What Can You Do?” by Charles Bukowski October 9, 2015 “Meeting the Buddha” by Craig van Rooyen January 6, 2017 “Dullahan” by Julie Kane October 19, 2013 “Black Water” by Todd Davis February 19, 2014 “The World Beneath” by Devon Balwit May 25, 2023 “Dispatch from an Inland University” by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn June 28, 2018 If you love p

December 23, 2020 Andrew Kane How to Be a Dog If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak, you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to speak unless you absol

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