K: Martin Kratz

All The Dogs Are Here

Here’s another friend of mine. I’ve known Martin for about 15 years – we met on the poetry MA at Manchester Met, where we found lots of common ground in both our reading tastes and our ideas about writing poetry. He used to live round the corner from me in South Manchester and I live fairly close to him again after my move. Martin now works at the Manchester Poetry Library and he’s done a great deal to promote and showcase new poetry, especially poetry in translation. It’s almost as though the idea of a poetry library in the North isn’t totally unprecedented, isn’t it? It’s almost as though we already have poetry libraries in the UK that have been well-respected and well-attended for years without attention-seeking fanfare that quietly do excellent work out of love of the medium and a sense of civic responsibility, and that don’t feel like the swaggering vanity project of a man desperate for legacy. Huh.

This is going to be a slightly strange one to analyse – Martin and I often send each other first drafts of our work for feedback, and I remember us discussing this one when it was in its early stages. Hopefully I can give some insights without straying too far into how the sausages are made.

Martin’s pamphlet, A Skeleton’s Progress, was published by Poetry Salzburg: Martin Kratz: A Skeleton's Progress but the poem today can be found at Interpreters’ House, which has consistently been a top poetry magazine for longer than I’ve been writing and reading poetry. You can read the whole thing here: Kratz 79 — The Interpreter's House

All The Dogs Are Here

All the dogs are here.
Here’s Laika the Space Dog.
Here are the loyal Dogs of Pompeii.

A fun title. A dog poem! One thing I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of in poetry is wryness. I mentioned enjoying it in Bishop and I think it was possibly there in the Jennings poem too. And yes, I like something here in the repetition of the word ‘dog’ which appears in the title and all six first lines. And I like the title, which gives us a piece of odd information that needs explanation – all the dogs are where? And why? And why all of them? In answer, the title is then repeated again, almost tauntingly, in the opening line.

What have we got here, and why, then? We are invited to imagine a ‘here’ but then immediately let that go and trust that the details of the ‘here’ will be fleshed out later, perhaps. But it feels like the dogs have been summoned ‘here’ or have congregate ‘here’, which means we’re already in a place outside of the real or the normal.

And is it funny to say ‘all’ the dogs are here and then tautologically mention two types of dogs specifically within that ‘all’? I would argue that yes, it is. There’s something of that deadpan, slightly pedantic Stewart Lee thing. Laika the Space Dog is a character that recurs in several of Martin’s poems, but I think we’re supposed to take both of these examples as a model of doghood that presents them as loyal to humanity but ultimately betrayed by us. Laika was the dog the Russians sent into space, and if you like dogs and want your heart broken, Google the details yourself. I had to look up the Dogs of Pompeii – it’s a reference to the strange fact that the ruins of Pompeii have become, for years, a congregating ground for stray dogs, because it provides places for them to shelter, and the regular tourist traffic provides them with a regular source of food and treats. So the ‘loyal’ modifier there is poignant too, just as with Laika. In both cases, dogs are innocents who love us but are not always treated well by us.

And there are the dog owners,
saying ‘shutupyoustupiddog’.
Even though the dog makes a good point!

I like that the dog owners take second billing to the dogs, and we only realise they’re here too in line four, almost as an afterthought. And again, humans don’t come out well. The humans are not only mean to their dogs, but their language is borderline incoherent, and crucially, wrong. The speaker is very much on the side of the dogs here.

That exclamation mark is funny. It just throws the reader, a tiny bit, I think, and makes the tone fall slightly off. It reminds me of Selima Hill, who often presents absurd statements with a straight face as though they are facts. Do the dogs make a good point? Again, we’re not being told what point the dogs are making, and I don’t feel that trying to work out what that point is would be useful. The point they make is embodied in what they are, perhaps - so it’s more about creating that dynamic in the poem that slightly undermines the seriousness of whatever the humans and dogs are doing there.

Here’s the broken road.
Here the tarmac’s cracked to reveal
old cobblestones beneath.

the future’s a dead end
time rushes back on itself
with nowhere else to go

I like this swerve. The whimsy of the dog meeting gives way to something that feels more serious, perhaps dystopian. The road is broken and straight afterwards, the poem kind of cracks and breaks too. I know I’ve mentioned Frank O’Hara before in this series, because he was a direct influence on Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem, but I think we’ve moved from Selima Hill tones to O’Hara ones, with the big statements about past and future delivered kind of breathlessly and without punctuation.

Every stone reads:
Wenn du das hier liest,
dann weine. Or:

When the swallows stop 
these stones start
flying.

Migrating through
your fucking windows.

This is my favourite part of the poem. We’ve had the congregation of the dogs and their owners in this dystopian landscape, and now we have an indicator of what all this might mean. The German here is a reference to Hunger Stones, which are common in Central Europe – they are engraved stones placed on riverbanks and in riverbeds in the Medieval period to indicate times of drought. When the river is running freely, the stones cannot be seen, but when it dries up, messages are revealed. This German translates to a phrase commonly used on them: “When you see me, cry”.

What I *love* about this poem is that it contains the German phrase and then provides a translation that is totally misleading. I love the bravery of that in the way it treats the reader – it’s a playful act of mock-contempt, maybe, or a compliment inviting people into the joke, but only if they look up the phrase for themselves. Besides, the fake translation is not *unrelated* to the message on the stone, it’s just that it radicalises the message. “When you see me, cry” is a bleak message of powerlessness, but “When the swallows stop/these stones start flying” is a threat, a warning and a call to radical action. We realise in this deliberate mistranslation that it’s a poem about climate change – perhaps this is why there’s the mild contempt for humanity at the beginning.

“Migrating through/your fucking windows” is again funny, perhaps unexpectedly aggressive, especially from a poem that had appeared to be slightly whimsical or playful. The verb migrating is great there, turning the process of radical action into something natural, instinctive, cyclical.

Who is the ‘you’ of ‘your windows’? The reader? Is this about our complicity in the causes of climate change?

We give you our word,
say the Presidents of Extinction.
As if they have a word to give.

Even in their wildest fantasies,
they act too late.

I also like that the poem doesn’t just end on the smashed window and the direct accusation. It finds a better culprit. Again, the “Presidents of Extinction”, like Laika, do recur in Martin’s poetry, but I think they can stand alone here as a damning and comic indictment of our political classes across the world. Every President is now a President of Extinction, in a sense, and not just the fascist ones. In fact, this poem is great because I see it as a specific indictment *not* of the fascist ones, but of the centrists who pay lip service to what people want and run on promises only of being not quite as bad. I love that the poem targets this kind of politician at the end, and is so dismissive of them.

Political poetry these days is difficult. Perhaps political poetry all days is difficult. But this poem provides a pretty compelling model – I think it walks the tightrope between delivering the clear and uncompromising political message while also not compromising on artistic vision or creation of voice either.

Here’s the poem again, and I would definitely recommend spending some time on the Interpreters House site after you’ve read this one. You’ll even find a couple of mine, too, in this same issue, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after… Kratz 79 — The Interpreter's House

In the comments: Who is your least favourite President of Extinction?