“Burn it down, dog” The Poetic Theory of Fran Lock’s “Hyena! Jackal! Dog!”
Sometimes, you pick up a collection that takes you on a journey. Not a narrative journey of action or events linking from beginning to end: conflict to satisfying resolution. This is a different kind of journey, without the need for conclusions, nor defined bookends to mark the plot’s outer boundaries. This journey more resembles the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail: continuous, unfolding in cycles that refer to what happened previously while foreshadowing what is to come, offering seemingly endless discoveries and unexpected encounters.
Fran Lock’s Hyena! Jackal! Dog! is this second type of journey, except if it were to have a symbol, then it would be — I imagine — an ink-black canine, refusing to settle into a single form much like Lock’s collection refuses to settle into a single genre category. Hyena! Jackal! Dog! serves as a poetry collection but doubles as essays, personal and informally academic. It showcases a breadth of knowledge, drawn as much from cultural history and scholarly writing as it is from emotional and sensorial experiences gathered and made corporeal through words. Although Lock shares her grief with the reader, Hyena! Jackal! Dog! is not interested in handholding or sharing in the safest and most passive definition of the term. The best way to approach it is to use Lock’s comment about the messiness of language when confronted with emotions too overpowering for words as a guideline; the moment when one is engulfed by Lock’s words is also the moment when the “theory” behind them manifests from within, a part of the text rather than something applied to it.
For those wondering about the significance of the title, Lock’s introductory essay, “Hyena! and the work of queer mourning,” serves as the first clue, a bone thrown to the reader to whet their interest without giving too much away. Here, Lock makes clear that the hyena is at once a symbol, a retainer of multifaceted meaning that “shifts between categories of species and of sex,” as well as the character Hyena!, who is a similarly disruptive force working against the established hierarchies within society and even literature. There are numerous characterizations of Hyena! in the collection’s first section, dedicated to Lock’s heroine. One viciously delightful example can be found in “Hyena commitments,” which effectively connects the dots between the privileges afforded by one’s class, gender, and education and success in the literary world:
Hyena didn’t etiquette. Hyena didn’t Marxist summer school.
Hyena didn’t Poetry London. Hyena didn’t Bloodaxe. Hye-
na wasn’t sexing her pedantry for boys and boys and boys,
shining her pout like an empire apple.
The jackal and the dog, on the other hand, are more elusive. For those looking to “spoil” things by first reading the author’s thoughts before mining the text for how they were then manifested, the final “essay,” “Animal affinities,” provides some notes on these two canines and returns the collection to the theoretical groundwork of the introduction.
If section one, “Hyena!”, is an unmaking — of language but also notions of social propriety and acceptable forms of mourning — through a single figure of resistance, then section two, “Jackal!”, is the setting, the world that Hyena! is working against. Lock directly critiques London, with “On taking leave” a kind of anti-homage to the city that contains the greatest concentration of them, calling it “a shit/ kingdom of suction and plunge” that “killed all those/ who loved [it] best” but only after eating “the moon/through all her phases, down/ to a pair of slim gold croissants.” Also, in “Jackal!”, the critique of contemporary poets and poetics from Hyena! goes a step further. With a consistent playful touch, Lock unravels while beginning to brainstorm what the contemporary poetry world can be replaced with, as in “Dispatches from the Bleach Year” and “‘Doleful.’”
“Dog!” the book’s third section, is more challenging to place, yet Lock leaves ample clues for the reader to comfortably simmer without feeling lost or suddenly disconnected. The mood of “Dog!” can be summarized using lines from “Internal medicine,” as Lock’s words speak far greater volumes than mine would in this case: “let’s burn it down, dog […]/ i swear dog,/ at the mess inside of me the knives turn timid.” The “i had”s and “i was”es of this section recall the glimpses of a personal narrative that peak through Hyena! Jackal! Dog! before quickly retreating into language’s woodwork, the sense of loss palpable even if the reason for it — a partner, the contemplation of motherhood and children — is never spotlighted.
Ironically, my favourite piece in Lock’s book had nothing to do with canines. Despite this, “Poem in which i became a bear” — “no, not a stuffed bear,/ but a girl stuffed with being bear” — manifests all that Lock so carefully laid out up to that poem, the practice to accompany the theory. The poem radically shifts the axes of Hyena! Jackal! Dog! with its unexpected placement but also in how successfully it captures the sense of being out of place without making it the overt subject.
Although Hyena! Jackal! Dog! is about much more than its clear interest in the canine trilogy it is named after and the lore that surrounds them, Lock’s collection offers much to deliberate on precisely because the work’s engagement with the field of animal studies is mediated through a deeper interest in what authentic emotion, and thus the authentic self, looks like. When, in “Animal affinities,” Lock writes of the umbilical cord’s role in folklore “as an anchor for the soul” because it is believed to have “a real, material bearing on the future line of the child,” she tells the reader just a few lines later: “When I was born, my mother’s shaggy black dog ate a portion of my cord. I have belonged to the dog ever since.” This endless tension is at the heart of Hyena! Jackal! Dog!, never going away or finding any cohesive explanation or resolution. Failure to neatly conclude, Lock shows the reader, is its own language, the compulsion to cycle back and begin again a form of communication that rises to the non-verbal, affective level after language has receded into the background.
“Burn it down, dog”: The Poetic Theory of Fran Lock’s “Hyena! Jackal! Dog!” was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.