SJ Fowler's 'The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner' Reviewed by Colin Lee Marshall
SJ Fowler’s most recent book of poetry, The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner,
is permeated with error at almost every stratum of its composition. A keen eye
will pick up (before the book has even properly begun) that such erroneousness
is not only premeditated, but also intransigent. As we are informed on the
copyright page: ALL ERRATA IS INTENTIONAL, AND THIS WORK HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY
PROOFED. Lapsed agreement between verb and noun occurs in at least three other
places throughout the collection: “the past are taking over” (‘Atacama’);
“otherwise it’s just noises” (‘Wortwedding’); “I see a tower with a clock &
remembers” (the first ‘Epithalamia’ sequence). But these examples barely hint
at the extent to which error – to use that term as a broad catch-all for a
panoply of different schemes and tropes – infects the grammar, lexis, and even
the sequencing of the poems.
It isn’t feasible to enumerate even half of
the errors of the text within the space of this review; nonetheless, one might
tease out a few of their constellations in an attempt to get something of a
handle of the book. While
initially it might be tempting to read constructions such as “I’m a emotional epic” or “a herd of
buffalo’s trying to fly is AIDS apparent heir” as mere stylistic filigree –
discrete ludic bursts that don’t transcend their local effects – a close
reading will
cause such errors to accrete into various densities of
suggestion (if not blatant argument) that seem essential to the philosophical
thrust of the book.
Perhaps unsurprisingly – given the apparent extent of Fowler’s travelling
(both domestically and abroad) as part of his various poetic and curatorial
commitments – The Rottweiler’s Guide is studded with geographic and topographic references (Granada, lublin [sic], Hackney Town Hall, etc.). However, Fowler also moves
beyond planet Earth, plundering liberally from a number
of well-known pop-cultural heterocosms (those of the Star Wars, Pokemon, and Game of Thrones franchises salient
amongst them). These alternate terrestrial moorings and defections throw up
interesting questions about Fowler’s engagement with the so-called ‘real world’. And yet,
the distinction between worlds is often misleading; for even when the poetry is
ostensibly rooted in a recognizable historical event or situation, things are
seldom straightforward.
The loaded title of the book’s best poem, ‘Wolves
in Chernobyl’, adumbrates a landscape and fosters certain
expectations even before we have begun to read the main body of the text. But as it
turns out, the titular wolves don’t make a single
appearance, and amongst the poem’s nine sections perhaps fewer than half of the
lines evoke the Chernobyl disaster—and then only tangentially, and always as
necessarily buttressed by knowledge of the title. Instead, amidst the usual
peppering of errors (“couples sunbath around the cooling ponds”; “do not eat green vegetables / or
milk”; “a parents plot of land”) the poem unfolds
largely as a series of gentle philosophical ruminations on “wood” (perhaps an indirect reference to
The Red Forest) and “the thing”, lacerated only
occasionally by unambiguous moments of toxicity or levity. By invoking
disaster thus, only to then sidestep a direct reckoning with it, Fowler perhaps risks inviting the charge of
flippancy. But not only are the occasional lacerations of ‘Wolves
in Chernobyl’ far more effective than any overwrought sentimentality could be, they also
force us to confront the politics of our personal reactions to uncomfortable
material. Consider the following excerpt from the same poem:
a foal had been
born with eight legs
piglets without
eyes
calves without
heads or ribs.
deformities due to inbreeding
The easy thing would be to dismiss this as mere levity, to decry the poet’s
insensitivity to the very disaster that he is only too happy to invoke. But from a different point of view, it
might be seen as a tactic by which to draw attention to
the complicity involved in reading a poem about Chernobyl. Here, the error becomes our own. We have
likely been reading about the radioactive fauna of a restricted region, only
then to be hit with a paraprosdokian – “deformities due to inbreeding” – that denies us our moment of cathartic confirmation,
and simultaneously skewers the presumptuousness of our attempt
to subsume the actual disaster into our understanding of it.
But it is more typically through
modifications to language itself that Fowler unsettles the act of easy assumption. At the end of the poem ‘Scent’ (via the rendering of a hairdresser’s
comment, only partially overheard) the modifications are orthographical:
[…] “…exicans
have been decapitating
peeple for
thousands of years
it doesn’t mean
there,
what it means
here.”
The
aphaeresis of “…exicans” is a sly lexical analogue to the decapitations to
which the text refers—assuming, of course, that we take “…exicans” to be an
aphaeretic rendering of “Mexicans”. Irrespective of whether we make this
readerly decision, and supply the missing ‘M’, the sense of violence, of
complicity in what things “mean”, and of ultimate detachment from what they are is insurmountable. This is further
reinforced by the fact that “peeple" are being decapitated, and not
‘people’. ‘Peeple’ and ‘people’ are homophones (what looks like it should be a
diphthong in the standard spelling isn’t) and as such, whoever overheard the
hairdresser’s words would not have been able to infer any orthographical
difference by sound alone. Contextually, the subtle de-anthropomorphic tweak makes
perfect sense, given the implication that the value of human life is lower in
the culture in question than it is in the “here” of the utterance; but the
homophony preserves the problem of whether we are to read this as satire, or as
a straight-faced semantic downgrade—a problem compounded by the ambiguity as to
whether these are words cognized as heard, words cognized as (vicariously)
spoken, or words that have been tinkered with at the extradiegetic level.
Regardless, the text aims deliberately to upset the facile imputation of the
spoken words—and perhaps, by extension, any facile imputations that we might be
tempted to make upon reading it.
At around
the halfway point of the collection, the pages of the book turn grey, so as
clearly to demarcate the ‘Wortwedding’ sequence of prose poems (originally
written as part of a collaboration with the artist Alessandra Eramo.) This
stark demarcation is entirely appropriate, given that – in the context of the The Rottweiler’s Guide as a whole –
‘Wortwedding’ seems utterly like a foreign body, an interpolated text. In this
section of the book, Fowler unleashes a logorrheic, largely unpunctuated
sequence of eight different “lessons”, at times making metapoetic references to
what he perceives as the work’s infelicities or longeurs. It might seem a brave
decision for Fowler to have included this particularly challenging and
protruberant sequence in the collection; but not only does ‘Wortwedding’ add a
further dimension to the prevailing tenor of error, it contains some of the
book’s most interesting material:
be varied in your words […] otherwise it’s just
noises
(but that isn’t interesting asks the one in the
front row who will learn)
like choke choke choked laugh laugh chalk chalk
chalked
the mind is not a violin to be tuned […]
Here, rote
pedagogy and earnest learning are contrasted with the idea of liberated
disobedience. The erroneous doublings of what we recognize as the present tense
(and, in the case of the word “laugh”, the apparent absence of any but the present tense) are
simultaneously a rebuke to the rigidities of standard verbal conjugation, and
an instantiation of the very “noises” that their supposed variation aims to
sidestep. In one way or another, the yoke of language remains, yet through
poetic play one might open up interstices through which meaning can elude the pedagogical
fescue.
Such
creative rebuttals to prescriptive grammar allow Fowler to write things like
“and in so did” (‘Atacama’) instead of ‘and in so doing’. But perhaps eschewing
authority in this way isn’t an empty means of dissent as much as it is a
legitimate groping for new semantic possibilities. Any unquestioning trust in
existing grammatical structures has to presume that these structures will admit
of no error, and one of Fowler’s preferred ways of exposing the precariousness
of such trust is by robbing declarative statements of their conviction. If we
look once again at the above excerpt from ‘Wortwedding’, we can see that what
appeared to be a statement (at least according to one possible parsing of its
polysemic syntax) has been branded a question: “but that isn’t interesting asks
the one in the front row who will learn”. Such confidence, which belies the
uncertainty of the one “who will learn”, occurs in similar fashion earlier in
the book: “and have you I’ve / noticed the disproportionate amount / of
enormous men who are the police?” (‘calling the doctor makes me feel better’).
Revealed here through punctuation (rather than through exposition, as in
‘Wortwedding’) the question forces a jarring shift of cadence. Re-routed in the
midst of its utterance, the sentence flits uneasily back and forth between the
poles of authority and deferral, forcing, if not readerly choice itself, then at least a reflection on
the ethics of such choice.
It would be
remiss not to acknowledge the obvious fact that error in The Rottweiler’s Guide serves to disrupt the trajectories of some
of the book’s more traditional themes (love, death, marriage etc.); but so too
would it be remiss to limit error solely (or even primarily)
to this function. Fowler’s
main achievement (or so it seems to me)
consists in intensifying a certain kind of cognitive dissonance—a dissonance that emanates from the hinterland of creative agency between
text and reader. We read constructions such as “just fourteen years of visit”
(‘that god blesses them fuck drogue’) or “in every / slice of year round”
(‘calling the doctor’), and can’t help but feel their irregularity, however
much we may wish to defer to the new temporal conditions that they appear to
conjure. Even when presented with constructions that are couched as
imperatives, meaning is typically compromised through solecism (“wish me not to
make me glow, but diminish my desire”—‘Wolves in Chernobyl’) so that there is a
constant tension between the urge to extract a clear command from the rubble,
and the urge to allow the errors to short-circuit any imperative force. How we
read these error-strewn poems is governed by shifting degrees of resolution and
abeyance, and by a constant reappraisal of which of these two states is the
more appropriate.
