Faith Shearin's poem, "Retriever": Dogs, Poetry, Music, and Complexity

Fido Fetches Dollar Bills from the Orange Tip Bucket and Delivers Them to the Master.

Or, So Much for Dignity.

Or, "The Idea of Order at Key West"









Left: "The Master"




It's very hard to write a dog poem without going sappy, but I think Faith Shearin's "Retriever" succeeds. The speaker's relationship with her father adds some essential complication to the Old Shep theme. In fact, for another kind of complexity, I might hear some jealousy in the speaker as she considers the pooch a replacement for her, her siblings, and her mother. I'm not sure that her happiness is the only note I hear in the last line, and that's a nice ambiguity. On the other hand, the Retriever of the title is "retrieving" from the past the father she longed for, as well as a happier man.

(In stanza 7, line 2, "fan" should be "van." Note that that's two poems of the last three that have been marred by a typo--and this on rather prestigious sites. Next time I sound like an anal grammarian, remember this. It's a short step from typos to significant errors in meaning. The devil's in the details. Well, until the video-internet generation came along with its cognition bingo and "speed is god" mindset [anti-mind?]. Speed kills. If you love it, spell it. Do not set it free; it cannot fly, and it cannot read a map).

Retriever by Faith Shearin | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Can we say that an important difference between most music and most poetry is that music gets to be more sentimental? It gets to say "ain't" and "baby, baby" because the element of the music complicates the lyrics, no matter how simple or sentimental each may be alone. Composers like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and others challenge my point, but the fact remains that I can cite them as exceptions to the rule.

Speaking of music, simplicity, and sentimentality, especially if you're one of the millions who liked the movie I Walk the Line, look what I stumbled onto at good ol' YouTube (of course, I forget what I was looking for, and I never got to it). June Carter and Johnny Cash made a great team, but it seems right to remember that June was alive and kickin', long before Johnny came along. To its credit, the movie was fairly clear about that.

YouTube - june carter-grand ole opry

I'm not sure our current approach to country or other popular music is any more sophisticated than you see here, and it strikes me as less endearing, though that might say more about me than it does music or popular culture.

(I have absolutely no doubt that I have at least one typo or grammatical error here and in every post. I am not a prestigious site with paid, putatively educated editors).


YouTube - june carter-grand ole opry

Retriever by Faith Shearin | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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