Lori reflects on “Doggerel in the Stacks,” a recent Brooklyn Public Library event with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Dwayne Betts and dog cognition expert Alexandra Horowitz. In the blog, Lori explores the surprising links between prisons, poetry, and life with dogs — and what they can teach us about how we see the world.
I will never forget my first walk into the classroom at Cheshire Correctional Institute, a maximum-security men’s prison in CT. To get to the classroom, I had to walk through long, dark corridors. That first walk was over 15 years ago, and since then, I’ve done the same to teach philosophy courses to multiple cohorts of incarcerated students.
On that first day, I was accompanied by my student teaching assistant and one of the student founders of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. As we moved through the halls, we passed guards holding barking dogs on metal leashes with choke collars. I remember feeling visceral distress as we passed those captive canids. I was so grateful to feel my student companions lean into me, one on each side. They knew how much I cared about dogs and suspected this would be hard for me. Their unspoken, embodied support stayed with me. The dogs haven’t been in those halls for years, but their fear and anger stays with me too.
In the classrooms where I teach at York Correctional Institute, a women’s prison, dogs regularly attend class. These dogs are not fearful or angry at all. They are being trained by the women there. While the pups can be unruly, I delight in their presence and always smile when they greet me by smelling my own dogs’ scents on me.
When Dwayne first brought home their family dog, Taylor, I often spoke with him while walking our dogs. Sometimes he would be walking with Taylor, while I walked with Taz, Zinnie, and E-Z. It was his first time walking with his own dog companion. I had been doing it for decades. And yet, listening to his reflections reinvigorated my own perception of what it means to walk with dogs. Through them, we can change how we see the world.
Some of the ways being with, thinking with, and walking with dogs changes our perspective was the subject of a terrific event at the Brooklyn Public Library on December 9th. Dwayne read dog-centered poems from his joyous book Doggerel and Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition and author of Inside of a Dog, reflected on what those poems revealed about how dogs experience the world, and how we might learn to attend differently through them.
The conversation explored the ways that a dog’s “smell-scape” can open new worlds for us, when we attend to what they might be sensing. They talked about how a dog’s desire to interact with another dog or another human can shift our perspectives of that dog and human. Both Dwayne and Alexandra reminisced about misperceptions and how, too often, we fail to see the world, both physically and socially, as fully as dogs can. And they reflected on grief, and how the loss of the dogs in our lives touches a poignant vulnerability that is all too familiar to those who have done time in prison or who have loved ones in prison.
The audience was engaged and curious, asking thoughtful questions about dogs, about writing, and about Freedom Reads. They appreciated the ways that poetry and science can teach us to pay attention — to what we've overlooked, to what we've taken for granted, to what might set us free.