MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Reginald Dwayne Betts has authored four collections of poetry and a memoir. He's also a lawyer and an educator. So his is a life in words, but his route to that life was a circuitous one. He spent more than eight years in prison for an armed carjacking committed when he was 16. He started writing in prison, including some of the poetry in this latest collection. It's called "Doggerel," and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Dwayne, good to talk with you again. Thanks so much for talking to us.
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS: It's my complete and absolute honor.
MARTIN: So remind us again of what the classic definition of doggerel is. And then, of course, you know I'm going to ask you - what's yours?
BETTS: Yeah, so doggerel classically just means mediocre poetry.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
BETTS: And I chose the name of "Doggerel" because doggerel isn't really just mediocre poetry. Poetry is meant to serve a purpose. And sometimes, we don't let poetry serve its purpose because we think that it has to be on some certain kind of level, and we define our audience first. I wanted to write poems that say, this is for everybody. So if you're looking for some laughter, there's something here for you. If you're looking for love, there's something here for you.
But I also wanted to cleverly sneak the word dog into the title because so many of these poems came out of my experience getting a dog during the pandemic and walking a dog and really seeing the world as a man who just, you know, had a new friend that was showing me things and revealing things to me that I just didn't pay attention to, including joy.
MARTIN: Just right up front, you say it's (reading) nah, just a Black man writing poems about his dog and all the dogs he encounters on the street and how having an extra four feet changed his world, and then he falls in love.
BETTS: Yeah, it was funny. Man, it's not even just that I have a dog now. I have a dog now, and honestly, I think about dogs, and I think about the relationship that they've allowed me to build with people. I mean, I've had the wildest things happen. I've had, like, white guys pull over on the side of the road just like, hey, I got two Jack Russell terriers. You know, I...
MARTIN: You have a Jack Russell terrier?
BETTS: Yeah.
MARTIN: That is like TV dog, you know, the dogs (laughter)...
BETTS: It literally is, and it's a dog that is obsessed with believing - truly believing - that it's smarter than you.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
BETTS: It probably is smarter than you.
MARTIN: Well, how did he come into your life?
BETTS: It was the pandemic, and we were starving for life. And the idea to get a dog came from my ex, and I think she was right. You know, we needed a animal to give us a different sense of ourselves. And it did for the four of us, and me, in particular, though. I think what it did was make me notice the relationships and interactions that I had with other people because of Taylor.
I get up, you know, early in the morning - 3, 4, 5 - and I'm taking a walk, and I'm riding my bicycle. I begin to see that this was the dog owner's hour. And the people around me - because I began to notice they're more for their dogs - they would, like, notice me. And I would read them poems - people in my community, people in my neighborhood, people in the elevator. If you had a dog, it was a invitation to have a conversation.
MARTIN: Wait a minute. You would read them poems from "Doggerel" that were about dogs...
BETTS: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Or just - or - really?
BETTS: Yeah.
MARTIN: That's kind of (laughter)...
BETTS: Let me tell you what I did to somebody. It was so aggressively rude. I had just met the person, and we did not know each other. And then they picked up the phone, and they were on the phone call. A friend of theirs dog had died. I said, oh, put me on speaker. He looked at me like, why do you think I'm going to do that? I don't even know you. I just met you, Dwayne, five minutes ago. I said, I know. Put me on speaker. Why? I'm going to read y'all a poem. What are you talking about, sir?
MARTIN: (Laughter).
BETTS: He puts me on speaker. I read him "Grief." They both gasp when I get to the end, and they're like, thank you for that. But the thing is, I would have never done that if it was two people talking about the loss of a loved one.
MARTIN: The one that you read, would you read the one - is it "Grief"?
BETTS: Yeah, that was "Grief."
(Reading) Grief - the story of Easy. A small dog, who I imagine is named after Mosley's detective, crawls into the space left by zinnia, burrowing into corners against doorframes beneath a house in search of a phantom smell - state fair, Sahara, Thumbelina, dreamland, envy, orange star, creeping zinnias that bloom until first frost. My God, the ways we grieve again and again, because the only rule of life is to forget means to abandon. When I forget to feed Tay, she never barks but waits wherever I am, as if she trusts my memory more than I do. I imagine this is grief's lesson. It is the engine of making what happened before matter. And it's true that I've only ever remembered a few joys as much as I have recounted all my reasons to grieve, but nothing grows without weeping, not even joy.
MARTIN: Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much. I got to ask you about a piece that you recently published in The New York Times, an opinion piece about having the police called on you at a bike shop that you had patronized for years. And you just talked about just the - I don't even know how to describe it - I mean, the rage, the emotion that welled up on you, and that even the police officer could see that you were getting emotional. Is that true?
BETTS: Well, my initial impulse was - I was incredulous. I could not believe that I wasn't being allowed to complete a single sentence that would have alleviated the chaos. I got a Harvard identification on me. I got a Yale identification on me, and I got a bar card on me. But I know that I could say...
MARTIN: The bar card signals that you're a member of the bar, the state bar, meaning that you are - you're a lawyer.
BETTS: Right. And I knew that none of that was going to solve the day, but I also knew that the burden was on me to prove that I deserved to be treated with some dignity.
MARTIN: What I took from the piece is that you were so deeply hurt and that you went back to the store. And just to tie a bow on it, you actually did go back and buy a bike at the store.
BETTS: Right. I felt like that's what I needed to do because I was going to suffer if I didn't. I don't know what happened to him this morning. I am not just going to assert a motivation for him because I'm so tired of people asserting motivations for me. And when I bought the bike, it was his daughter. I didn't know it was his daughter. She was the most lovely human being I had met. And he had already coded in a discount for me 'cause I told him I was going to come back.
And so I don't need to name what motivated, what happened on the day I almost got arrested. I would like to name what motivated, what happened every subsequent day after. And I like to believe one of the things that motivated his behavior was his recognition. Like, he kind of failed me as a human being. And I went back to be like, I am not going to double down on this notion that I need to treat you in a certain way because that's how you treated me.
MARTIN: That's Reginald Dwayne Betts. His latest collection of poems is called "Doggerel." Thanks so much.
BETTS: Thank you.
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