Poem: [Dog Is a Way of Thinking]

Magdalena Zurawski’s intrepid use of caesura — a pause in a line of poetry — reinforces the theme of disciplined attention in “[Dog Is a Way of Thinking].” The poem’s frequent midline interruptions of otherwise overflowing (enjambed) lines creates a gentle resistance to the ordinary flow of thought. This formatting allows the reader to slow down and take notice. It’s almost as if the poem is using attention itself as a material, while at the same time proposing to describe attention: the poet’s receptiveness to language and the dog’s keen-nosed present sense. Dogs thrill at palpability. Dogs are experts at living in the moment. Poets could learn from this, too. But the real thrill here is for readers, in that the poem through its subtle formal play allows us to experience the appreciability and immediacy of language itself. In the hands of a skilled poet, even a mere comma can be the conductor of time. Selected by Anne Boyer

[Dog Is a Way of Thinking]

By Magdalena Zurawski

My language, which likes
to prove I am not

alone, wants
to talk to me again
today. It’s

telling me, Don’t
forget: you want
to be less like Homer and
not at all like Milton, but
more like your dog. Your
dog, my language
says, knows things are
there, doesn’t want
blindness to see
a world, only a nose
to know what’s
knocking now, who’s on
her way home. There’s
no yesterday.

Your dog, if he could
talk, my language tells
me, would, every
day, like a radio,
catch an air wave and
say, “Today. … ”

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Magdalena Zurawski is a poet whose most recent collection is “The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom” (Wave Books 2019). “Companion Animal” (Litmus Press, 2015) won a Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her novel, “The Bruise,” was published by FC2 in 2009. She is currently a Fulbright scholar in Warsaw and teaches at the University of Georgia.