Dog Girl

Heidi Lynn Staples

An author’s statement

What I enjoy most in an artistic statement are an account of the writer’s process and descriptive comments illuminating the work. What I dislike most are divisive assertions of aesthetic allegiance and grand proclamations. I’m going to say a bit about ideas informing the poems in Dog Girl. But I’d like to begin by asserting that for me a poem is a humble art form, a lot like a hand-knit scarf. When well done, it’s simply appreciated by the recipient and keeps that somebody warm.

During the time I started writing the poems that have gone into Dog Girl, I was reading up a bit on Japanese poetry forms and began experimenting with several. This reading and writing steered me toward the aesthetic values most overtly informing the book—the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which asserts the transient, the imperfect, and the incomplete as comprising the beautiful. Applying such values to communicative acts, few of the poems are austere in the way typically associated with the Japanese tradition.

Around the same time, I got married. A correspondence arose in my mind between my own experience cherishing a dynamic relationship and the definition of beauty put forward by Japanese aesthetics. With the idea of articulating this insight, I let the subject of my romantic partnership prompt my writing. Many poems celebrated the love I’d found. Some grumbled about its commonplace disappointments. A few observed companionship’s quiet pleasures. Then, I suffered a late-term pregnancy loss and was plunged into sorrow. My marriage and my pregnancy loss both brought about in me extreme emotional states. Reporting the facts, narrating the stories, or even employing iambics could not get the joy’s nor the grief’s measure. I think it’s fair to say intensity of feeling compelled most of the innovative strategies employed.

I’m pleased with Dog Girl because the work is unassuming yet ambitious both artistically and personally. Through the repeated act of attention, the writing of the work has made me more welcoming of life’s vagaries. I hope reading the book proves similarly worthwhile.