Doggerel
By Reginald Dwayne Betts
WW. Norton
When Reginald Dwayne Betts walks his dog at dawn, he knows that she’s “doing the guiding,” even though he’s the one holding the leash.
Some believe that humans are “masters” of their animals, he writes, “But I know I barely control/My wonder these days.”
That confession appears in one of my favorite poems, “What We Know,” from Betts’ new collection Doggerel, a book full of wonder that’s hard to resist. Published by W.W. Norton, Doggerel is Betts’ fifth published poetry collection. Like many of his other works, the book reflects in part on the eight years in prison he served from the age of 16 on a carjacking conviction. Norton is releasing the collection Tuesday on the 20th anniversary of Betts’ release from prison.
In Doggerel, Betts focuses on the work he’s undertaken in those two decades since of remembering, revisiting, and rebuilding.
Betts now resides in Hamden with his family. He has become a leading voice in the country calling for a criminal justice system reshaped around the humanity of incarcerated people. He’s the founder of the prison library organization Freedom Reads, which he stated on Instagram will receive 54 cents for every copy of Doggerel purchased. Betts is also a former MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, a Yale Law grad (he’s now a student again, pursuing a PhD), a former President Barack Obama-appointed Juvenile Justice council member, and a widely published and award-winning poet.
Doggerel is far from the comically bad verse implied by its title. The collection is reverent and forgiving, full of awe at the human and animal relationships at its core. Many poems evoke Mary Oliver’s insistence on an inter-species “family of things” and Natasha Trethewey’s imaginative investigation of memory lapses and archival gaps.
Betts listens for languages that often go unnoticed and can’t quite be transcribed: animal language and body language, off-key songs and silence, howls and barks and sighs. He makes the case that the dogs at the heart of Doggerel are making far more sense than the humans who claim them.
He writes in “What We Know” that dogs “hear others call us & our/Jangle of inconsistencies, owners”— a word he rejects as not only self-serving but inaccurate.
That word “owner” is the subject of an even more pointed interrogation when Betts resurrects the history of the corner of Ashmun and York streets in New Haven — a corner marked in an 1806 map of the city by Thomas Kensett as having belonged to Jethro Luke.
Luke lived much of his life enslaved by the powerful Pierpont family in the early-to-mid eighteenth century, according to historian David Blight. He eventually secured his freedom, worked with his son to help construct some of Yale’s most storied buildings, and became one of the city’s earliest known Black property owners. “Jethro’s Corner,” the title of Betts’ poem about Luke, was once the colloquial name for Luke’s land at intersection of Ashmun and York.
In this poem, Betts turns words into prisms, filtering two competing rays of Luke’s “owning” and being “owned.” He writes: “To plot freedom is to leave the words that matter/Written across everything you own that matters.” The words — “plot,” “own,” and later “property” — take on different meanings depending on whether he’s talking about the white map-maker or the Black landowner.
Over the course of the poem, Betts plays with that word own and its near-echo, owe.
“Jethro owed his name. Left/This world owed his name,” he writes. “Jethro was owed,/Left owning little.”
Betts makes the case that there’s a kind of debt inscribed in the word own, which is maybe only a fiction, or at least a “jangle of inconsistencies.”
He finds refractions of the American sin of owning and owing Black people, whether as slaves or as prisoners, in many of the ordinary human and animal relationships depicted in his poems.
In “Roadkill,” he encounters a “dead black thing in the street” that he presumes to be an animal’s dead body. The line is evocative of too many public murders of Black men. But soon, Betts realizes the “black thing” is just a plastic bag.
“We’ve all been mistaken/For something less alive in this life I know,” he writes. So poem by poem, Betts pays attention to all that’s living.
That’s one lesson, among many, that the dogs in Doggerel already know.
