“A shape invites you to fill it,” Jerome Stern writes in Making Shapely Fiction, his book on fiction’s archetypal structures (3).
I think of this poem as a triangular one—invested in the little triangulations of arrival that make up our interactions with other people and animals in the public sphere.
In a formal sense, “Woof, This Heat” has nothing triangular (or even divisible by three) to recommend it. The poem is in quintets, with lines somewhere between 5-8 syllables long. However, I think the poem’s form evokes the triangle in its inherent primeness—its resistance to simple divisibility, and the sense that each stanza requires another to fully complete its thought.
One of Stern’s shapes, driven by an inciting event, is the Visitation—an unexpected arrival that appears in “the shape of an intrusion” (37). This is a poem about intrusions, or perhaps more about ideas turning up in unexpected places—one of the exciting conditions of living life in public. Like a triangle, “Woof” contains what might be defined as three corners, or “events,” in which the unexpected arrival of a third party or voice totally changes the dynamic of what’s already happening between two people. Each of these events contains an intimate moment playing out in a public setting: a medical office, a public school, and the sidewalk in front of my house.
The first arrival is a simple one: a Taylor Swift song playing over the office speakers at the dentist. But the entry of this song into the scene leads to the poem’s strange, titular exclamation, which seems to reflect the tension or pressure of what it means to be approaching middle age. The second event begins with the quotidian tension between me and my daughter over whose turn it is to choose the music in the car; the importance of this negotiation to her only becomes clear once we’ve arrived in a different space—the door of her preschool classroom, where she and her teacher have a different bond. Her tether has shifted to a different host. I’m the person about to leave.
The poem’s third and final incident is a different kind of arrival: a neighbor visiting my doorstep to present his treasured pet duck. Observing this scene, I was reminded of the way figures are often arranged triangularly in Renaissance paintings—the older kid and these two smaller figures of my daughter and the fowl. The tension in the scene is really in the emotional play happening between the three of them, as pride, curiosity, and a form of mutual joy emerge.
There are many ways of finding threes in poems: in the prevalence of tercets, for instance, or in the rhetorical relationship of three quatrains followed by a couplet in the Shakespearean sonnet. Yet these three scenes that accumulated together in “Woof” surprised me.
They surprised me because I did not particularly know, before I wrote this poem, that I was feeling anxiety about getting older. I was not thinking about how arrivals have been provoking in me a particular and new sense of loss or nostalgia. The poems I wrote around the time of “Woof” are interesting artifacts, for me, of a past self emerging from my limited COVID sphere. I see myself figuring out how to come back into these kinds of public spaces more fully—not running past people in masks, but taking the time again for casual, messy conversations, where we might reveal, accidentally or intentionally, parts of ourselves. I see the constant measuring that happens between the “before” and “after” of COVID, but less a clear vision for what will be new. Perhaps a reflection of this problem is the fact that I wrote down the first two events in the poem over the course of a few days, but then it took me at least another week to stumble upon the third interaction (the duck) that felt like the poem’s resolution. The poem was searching for its third point: what the future holds. In this case, the unfilled third corner of the poem was an invitation to take a leap—to name what the forward-facing point might be.
When I look directly at these three events in relationship—for whatever reason, I imagine an isosceles triangle—I notice that they seem to be, paradoxically, both separate and harshly juxtaposed in relationship to one another.
Perhaps it is because of this paradoxical tension that the impulse to connect the triangle’s corners—to consider what has drawn these ideas together—feels a bit like an interrogation or a confession. As the sides of my imaginary triangle fill in, ideas leaning toward one another, a label appears on each side: fear, aging, obsolescence. The tension I have established in this poem, by saying these things explicitly, is ultimately resolved by the triangle’s own shape.
I find hope in another premise of the triangle: that the distance between any two of three things cannot really be all that far apart. The surprise and discovery that comes with tracing those connections is a great source of pleasure for me as a writer. It feels like establishing a sturdy foundation from which other structures can emerge.
Notes
1. Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).
