Marvin Bell
Oh pretty dogs that reap the rage of benefactors in good times.
Oh dogs shorn of the outdoors, oh clipped, oh shaggy shaggy shaggy.
The dead man's dog does not sit up and beg.
from the book
Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems /
Copper Canyon Press
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the newest series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write.
![Tanya Larkin on Emily Dickinson’s “[I started Early—Took my Dog—]”](https://poems.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/The-Essential-Emily-Dickinson.jpg)
- December 10, 2019
James Cagney
Let me answer the question you have of me: No.
You were my idol. Of course I don't know how to love
but I know how to be shamed
& no two tears fall or taste the same.
- December 9, 2019
Emily Dickinson
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –
- December 8, 2019
Willy Palomo
Imagine tongues hungry for everything
but your name. Imagine being here
for millennia only to be called exotic.
- December 7, 2019
Sasha West
Cows calve, horses foal, goats kid, but women do not child.
Another verb separates us from the noun of it, a distance between
cells that split in my body, my body, and her wet fur on my stomach.
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