Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9

Photo by Lynn Lundstrum Swanger

Kai is serving here as place holder. He has the attitude and manner of famed *Uncle Dog, though not the "mongrelness" of that legendary animal, a nine-year-old's vision of a Chicago garbage man's dog.

Uncle Dog was the first animal I ever saw who seemed to have some sense of purpose, dignity, pride, and self-regard. Fuck the human species. This Heinz 57 mutt refused to cringe or bark, or in any way even acknowledge other dogs. ‘Uncle Dog.’ He was the one who rode around with the once-weekly garbage man. This was Chicago back in the mid-1940s, and we lived on the second floor of a two-flat apartment. Rent: $65. a month. And the best of it was our back porch where I hung out with animals. But never my favorite, the garbage man's dog, dog of dogs!

I think of him now in our age of "companion animals," "designer dogs," a time when 69 million American households have dogs--73.9 million dogs! Dogs. Dogs. 39 billion dollars a year goes for the care and feeding of American pets.

Anyway, more than any family member or school teacher or, for that matter, yoga instructor... it was Uncle Dog who taught me the importance of carriage and self-regard. Self-respect. We’d gotten dogs from that notorious Cook County prison (c. 1940), the Chicago Humane Society and, no fault of their own, those canines were a sorry lot. Three hungry days in a cage and, broken-spirited... either they were“selected” by some dog-lover or were gassed. That's where we got some real "suspects," canines picked up off the street... dogs without street smarts, without credentials, without license. without class ...victims of human self-regard, the ruling class, "human exceptionalism."

Uncle Dog. The mongrel prince of princes. Dog of dogs.

In 1957 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I wrote the thing. And, surprise! it got accepted by the Chicago Review. Then the Chicago Review Anthology, Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, David Swanger's The Poem as Process, and some others. And, in low moments, needing publication to nourish my ego, to do for me whatever needs doing... needing inspiration, a voice from the past... no barking, no, speaking rather...

I can hear him now: Woof, woof! Woof fuckin' woof!
---

*UNCLE DOG: THE POET AT 9

I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him.

Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford

Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.

Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:

Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.

Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at everysingle can.

I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.

I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man.

Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless

Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat:

His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog--sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced

With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman's dog
and not a simple child-dog

Nor friend to man, but an uncle
travelling, and to himself--
and a bitch at every second can.


(from Four Incarnations, Coffee House Press, 1991 and The Collected Poems,
Black Moss Press, 2006, Literary Press Group, distributor.)

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9 (revisited)

Kai is serving here as place holder. He has the attitude and manner of famed Uncle Dog, though not the "mongrelness" of that legendary animal, a nine-year-old's vision of a Chicago garbage man's dog.

Uncle Dog was the first animal I ever saw who seemed to have some sense of purpose, dignity, pride, and self-regard. Fuck the human species. This Heinz 57 mutt refused to cringe or bark, or in any way even acknowledge other dogs. ‘Uncle Dog.’ He was the one who rode around with the once-weekly garbage man. This was Chicago back in the mid-1940s, and we lived on the second floor of a two-flat apartment. Rent: $65. a month. And the best of it was our back porch where I hung out with animals. But never my favorite, the garbage man's dog, dog of dogs!

I think of him now in our age of "companion animals," "designer dogs," a time when 69 million American households have dogs--73.9 million dogs! Dogs. Dogs. 39 billion dollars a year goes for the care and feeding of American pets.

Anyway, more than any family member or school teacher or, for that matter, yoga instructor... it was Uncle Dog who taught me the importance of carriage and self-regard. Self-respect. We’d gotten dogs from that notorious Cook County prison (c. 1940), the Chicago Humane Society and, no fault of their own, those canines were a sorry lot. Three hungry days in a cage and, broken-spirited... either they were“selected” by some dog-lover or were gassed. That's where we got some real "suspects," canines picked up off the street... dogs without street smarts, dogs... victims of human self-regard, "human exceptionalism."

Uncle Dog. The mongrel prince of princes. Dog of dogs.

In 1957 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I wrote the thing. And, surprise! it got accepted by the Chicago Review. Then the Chicago Review Anthology, then Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, and some others. And, needing publication to nourish my ego, to do for me whatever needed doing... I draw inspiration from...

I can hear him now: Woof, woof! Woof fuckin' woof!

Canadian or American? Saul Bellow, Chicago and the University of Victoria

Jack Foley, in his Introduction to The Collected Poems, calls me "in truth, a citizen, at heart, of both countries. At once a Canadian and American poet, one with a foot in both worlds, Sward also inhabits an enormous in-between," he writes.

As an epigraph to his Intro, Jack quotes Saul Bellow saying to me, "You don't look like a Canadian." I was setting up recording equipment in Saul Bellow's office at the University of Victoria. He was Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence, and I was interviewing him for Quill & Quire, a national trade publication for Canada's book industry. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize and The Dean's December was his first book following that announcement. The Dean's December was getting negative reviews and Bellow speaks about the novel's reception. (Note: This 1982 interview appears on my website, http://www.robertsward.com - Click on Poems and scroll down for Interviews.)

Anyway, there we were, two Chicagoans. Bellow, though born in Montreal, looked "Chicagoan." He had that look. And, for myself, I suppose I hadn't lost the "Chicago look" either. But did he mean Jewish? Or did he mean something else?

Although gone so many years from the States, at that moment I wanted nothing more in life than to go back to the U.S. Seeing Bellow made me homesick.

My wife once asked, "What was it like anyway, teaching at the University of Victoria?"

"Well, I remember the first faculty party, September, 1969. I found myself talking to this portly, red-faced, jowly, steak-and-kidney pie academic. Head of the University's freshman English program. He asked what I thought of Victoria. 'Provincial, quiet, friendly... clean... and, strangely, every home I've seen so far has a well-tended flower garden." No accident, either, Victoria being home to the famous Butchart Gardens.

He seemed pleased to hear I'd been living in New England--writing at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

"My family moved here from New England, too," he said. "We left because of the Revolution."

What? At first I thought he was saying he too was a new arrival. Maybe someone who, in 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam era, had grown fed up with Nixon, and decided America was on the brink of revolution. There were some at the time who thought that way.

"What do you mean, Revolution?" I asked.

"The American Revolution. My ancestors left America after the Boston Tea Party. We're United Empire Loyalists."

Suddenly America seemed really very far away.

Chicago, 1930s, 40s...

I miss the place. Now and then an image like this winter scene appears and I'm right there. Yet, when I think back to my childhood in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s, and compare that with the present, it is as if that earlier time were like... not only another lifetime, but (life) on another planet. Yet the pang... homesickness... and, oddly, living in Toronto (1979 - 1985), a city that in many ways reminded me of our old Albany Park / Lawrence Avenue neighborhood in Chicago... never quite satisfied that feeling, that sense of what was missing. I longed for home.

So the Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia postings (Dr. Sward being my father, not me), they're like love letters, is that a joke? love letters to... Chicago... 'cause that's home, that's where it started, mother, father, podiatry, Jewishness and all the rest. Melancholia included...

And the most real thing from the 40s and 50s was what? The dogs. Fluffy the spaniel and the sickly pathetic mutts we'd rescue from the Chicago Dog Pound. "The Pound..." as in impounded. We're impounding your dog. And the truck the Dog Catcher would use to carry 'em away... and the gas you'd see escaping when the door swung open... and the dogs and what I felt for them. Sentimental slop, but it hasn't gone away. So something about that time may be "another lifetime... life on another planet..." but I haven't forgotten the dogs and my feelings for the city are constant, my feelings for the dogs are constant... if there's a NOW, it's dogs, city and heart. And family, too.

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9

First published poem

My first role model was a dog, the garbage man’s "sharp, high fox-eared, cur-Ford truck-faced" mutt, a mongrel, a Heinz—a 57 breed dog.

As a kid I was morose, a loner, an outsider from Day 1. Adults struck me as unpredictable, arrogant, full of themselves with little or no interest in children. We lived in Chicago and I mostly hung out with the family dog, Fluffy, a cocker spaniel with low self-esteem. From the back porch of our two-flat apartment building, we could see into the alley. There we’d observe the garbage man lifting and heaving trash into the back of his truck. His canine companion, a junk yard mutt with class, kept his head up, eyes forward, ignoring the filth and stink.

The dog had a natural dignity. He wouldn’t deign to run about sniffing for scraps. If he was hungry or thirsty, he gave no sign... the dog had poise... he appeared to be calm, self-assured, more stable, more graceful than my parents or Peterson Elementary School teachers.

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9 appeared in The Chicago Review in 1957, my first publication. Carolyn Kizer picked up on it, bless her and, later, it started appearing in anthologies, A Controversy of Poets; The Voice That Is Great Within Us; The Contemporary American Poets, American Poetry Since 1940, and others.

Listen to Uncle Dog.


UNCLE DOG: THE POET AT 9

I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him.

Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford

Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.

Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:

Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.

Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at everysingle can.

I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.

I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man.

Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless

Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat:

His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog--sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced

With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman's dog
and not a simple child-dog

Nor friend to man, but an uncle
traveling, and to himself--
and a bitch at every second can.


--Robert Sward © Copyright, 1957, 2003, 2007
Recording by David Alpaugh, Nov. 12, 2007.

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9, Putnam & Co., Ltd., London, 1962
Half A Life's History, Aya Press, Toronto, 1983
Four Incarnations: New & Selected Poems, Coffee House Press, 1991
The Collected Poems, Black Moss Press, 2003