puppy rolling?

 

Michael Simms: Puppy Rolling

A poet asked me to write a blurb for the back cover of his new book. I said yes and wrote a few nice things about his poems. He wrote back saying he’d tweaked my blurb and sent the new version. Man, it was nothing like what I’d written. But the thing is, it made me look really smart, like I completely understood the inner workings and meanings of his poetry, almost as if I were living in the poet’s mind when he was writing the damn things, as if I’d stayed up late with him discussing whether fresh as a daisy is, well, fresh enough for a poem, so I said yes, go ahead, use the blurb you wrote, it’s much better than mine because the way I see it, writing blurbs is kind of like puppy rolling. Say what, you say. It’s like this: When I take Josie to the dog park she likes to find a puppy, preferably a rare breed like a Shiba Inu or a New Guinea Singing Dog and roll it down the hill. It doesn’t hurt the puppies. In fact, they seem to enjoy being rolled, but sometimes the owner, usually somebody who’s never accidentally dropped a baby or stuck a baby with a safety pin or taken eyes off the kid for five seconds and had to run into traffic to save it, somebody who thinks puppies are fragile, gets upset and tells me to stop rolling her puppy which I can’t really do, my dog having a mind of her own, so we just have to leave the park. All of this explains why when the poetry critic posted a comment saying he disagreed with the blurb I didn’t actually write what could I say – it wasn’t my dog? Instead, I just said I understood his concern over the fragility of American poetry, it being a rare breed and all, and unfriended him.

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Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His collections of poetry include American Ash and Nightjar (Ragged Sky, 2020, 2021). Simms identifies as being on the autism spectrum.

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