An Interview with the Dogfather

Poet and Painter Joe Rosenblatt (aka “The Dogfather”) was born in Toronto in 1933. Over the years, Rosenblatt has written more than 20 books of poetry, several autobiographical works and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry over his forty-year career as a poet. His poetry books have received major awards, such as the Governor General's award for poetry in 1976 and the BC Book Prize in 1986. His art works are represented by the Qualicum Frameworks Gallery in Qualicum Beach, Artfitterz Frame shop and gallery in Nanaimo and the Rouge Gallery in Saskatoon. His drawings and paintings are in numerous private and public collections in Canada.

"Happy Colours" 2008
Joe Rosenblatt

In 2000, I photographed every dog I saw for a week roaming the streets of Havana. This was the origin of my emotional, spiritual and aesthetic relationship with dogs that has since resulted in my Fine Art Dog Portrait business.


In 2002, my “Perros: Dogs of Havana” photographs were exhibited at the Havana Gallery on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. When Joe saw the photographs he was inspired to write sonnets about them. Soon after, poet Catherine Owen joined Joe in his sonneteering and, in 2008, the book of photographs and sonnets simpley entitled “DOG” was published by Mansfield Press in Toronto. It was during this collaboration, that the Dogfather was born. And Catherine and I soon became his Dogdaughters, she “Angelina” and myself “Francine.”

Cover "Dog" Joe Rosenblatt, Catherine Owen, Karen Moe

Mansfield Press, 2008

I realized the other day that I must interview the Dogfather for my Dog Blog and retrieve some of our experiences during our collaboration on DOG and also ask him to throw us a few bones on his life and philosophy as the Dogfather.

This interview between Karen Moe (me) and Joe Rosenblatt (the Dogfather) was conducted over e-mail between April 5 and April 15, 2012.

KM: Why are you the Dogfather?

JR: I am the Dogfather because of our collaboration, myself as dog sonneteer, you as dog photographer, and Catherine Owen, dog sonnateer on the Dog book, a Mansfield Press title (Toronto).

Catherine and I were inspired by your Havana photographs of dogs in inner city Havana. It spirited us to write sonnets to your canine images. Now as I was the oldest bard I thought it fitting to call myself the Dogfather which is a take on the Godfather in that fabulous movie.

KM: You wrote sonnets about my Dogs of Havana in our book DOG. What was it about these photographs that inspired you?

JR: What inspired me about the Havana dogs was they were survivors and they were proud survivors. They had a thing called nobility and it showed in the photographs. They were worthy of being written about in sonnet form.

"Carne" Dogs of Havana (2002) 

Karen Moe

"Pounce" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe

KM: Is there anything about the sonnet form that befits survival and nobility?

JR: I like the sonnet form because it is a closed form, no straying away with those concluding lines of the sonnet answering a big Mutt like myself's dilemma. 

KM: Yes, the sextet (the last stanza) is a response to the octet (the first stanza). There is the comfort of an answer to an existential dilemma.

"Happy Perro" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe

KM: What is the connection between the Godfather and the Dogfather?

JR: The Dogfather, me, Mutt is a patriarchal figure like Brando playing the Godfather. Ya see, Mutt being the transformative patriarchal mutt to his Dogdaughters is a Godfather of sort but unlike Brando he doesn't have cotton batten in his mouth to play the godfather.

KM: Like Brando, you are 'playing' the patriarch. Are you a tongue in cheek (or cotton batten in cheek) patriarch?

JR: Partially eaten Montreal smoked sandwich stuck in my cheek patriarchal transformative dogfather. It muffles my bark, but I like it that way!

KM: What do you mean by ‘transformative’. Is it an ironic characteristic of your Dogfather with a ‘muffled bark’? And is there anything mafioso about yourself as the Dogfather in connection to the film?

JR: I am being transformed into sagacious old godfather mutt with no criminal intent or record. I say humans developed from Border collies not apes that Darwin would have us think and you can quote me on that, Border collies are smart herding dogs. 

The transformative is the dog spirit morphing me into a human dog, muffled bark, yeah, that’s me. I say move over Marlon Brando, here comes the Dogfather!

KM: You often feature cats in your paintings. Have you ever featured a Dog? If not, why? What is the difference between dogs and cats, to you?

JR: No, I haven't featured dogs in my visual art because there are at least 400 types of breeds in the dog world and it just happens that cats have crept into my life for decades, are featured in my drawings and paintings and in my poems. No offence, dogs, and I adore them, don't make the fit in my psyche.

"Hip Cats" (2008)
Joe Rosenblatt

"Hip Cats 5" (2008)
Joe Rosenblatt

KM: What do dogs symbolize to you?

JR: Dogs symbolize loyalty and have more enobled features than humanity. They serve people, protect people and keep people company, whereas cats tend to rely less on people except for feeding time and seem more aloof than dogs and certainly more mysterious. Cats bring home rodents as gifts to their owners while dogs wait for gifts from their owners.

KM: You have 3 orange cat friends. If you had a dog what kind would you have?

JR: If I had a dog I would have a Border Collie, a smart dog because I love the herding instinct and love a pushy dog who would make a big hit pushing party goers around as they drink my high octane martinis!

Transformatively speaking I would make a wonderful Border Collie. 

KM: You have talked about being photographed as a dog. How do you envision that photograph? Would it be a kind of 'self' portrait? An alter-ego?

JR: I want to be photographed as noble mutt. It would have to do with my ego. Maybe I could get into a huge St. Bernard dog costume with a little brandy barrel chained to my neck?

KM: What do you think about dogs in leather jackets? What do you think about dogs in pink, frilly dresses?

JR: I loathe the idea of animals dressed in leather jackets or wearing dresses. Why hide the beauty of the dog in such frivolous ways? Isn't their fur coat natural clothes? The Creator didn't intend for dogs to go around wearing clothes. This is an abomination as far as I am concerned.        

KM: I agree … but not as severely. If a client wants me to photograph their dog in doggy clothing, of course I will. But I always tell them that I like to represent the dog as dog as best I can.

In my Dog Art Photography, I focus as much as possible on the Beauty and nobility of the Dog as a Dog and as an individual creature outside of the human. This style and approach to Dog Photography developed through the genesis of my Dog Photography being in Cuba where dogs are detached from humans and are, in a sense, 'pure' dogs. 

"Flop" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe

I like to reveal and document something about the essence of Dog and the essential beauty and personality of an individual Dog.  But, if a client’s dog as dog has become a pink tutu wearing Maltese, is that what the relationship between dog and human has produced in a particular cultural context? From centuries of inter-action between dog and human? Can it be seen as an evolution or transformation of dog as dog? What do you think, dear reader? 

Joe, is the essence of Dog that emanates from my Dogs of Havana photographs what inspired you to write a book of Sonnets based on them?

JR: Why did I identify with those wandering street dogs in inner Havana?  I admire their survival skills, enduring hunger and just trying to retain their canine nobility while tourists snap their cameras at them without offering them some food. You at least had the sensitivity to offer them a partly eaten sandwich. I identify with the underdog, if you will pun, and always have. One of your dog pictures, a black and white dog, ferocious looking … why, I wouldn't walk up an ally with him following a scent trail of a belt of weiners. Just kidding here!

"Beso" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe 

KM: Through the photographing of every dog I saw for a week in Central Havana, the dogs became ‘my spirit guides’. I was having a difficult time down there, confused and alone in a very different Cuba than I imagined in my idealistic, socialist soul. Also, as is typical of First World tourists, a broken-heart added to my isolation and I wondered why I was even there. The Dogs became my guides and my ‘reason’.

"Scrappy" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe 

In ‘Drifting’ (which is your first poem in DOG), you call to your faithful animal companion, Rex, ‘to perform a creative ablution.’ (See the end of this Dog Blog entry for the poem). Were dogs simultaneously your inspiration and your guides through this particular poetic journey?

JR: Well, Karen, dogdaughter and dogateer, that poem isn't too flattering. I called upon the spirit dog Rex to pee on my mother's grave, my reason as I may have mentioned it: she got her revenge on me from beyond the grave and left me out her will, so I called upon my alter ego Rex to wash her grave in sacred urine. Need I go on?

Regarding your Cuban canine, did they find a kindred spirit in you as well as you in them? In Third World countries dogs are a luxury; poor folk have to feed their family before they feed a street dog in inner Havana, if you get my drift?

KM: Yes, I can empathize with the fact that a difficult relationship with your mother and an extreme insult through her death is certainly an extistential struggle. And, you may be right in that the Havana dogs found some sort of kindred spirit in me; I certainly found them as my kindred spirits. My relationship with the dogs of Central Havana can be seen as another instance of how dogs and humans have helped each other in various ways (including psychologically and helping to heal the soul) for over 10,000 years.

Be they detached from the human and pared down to an essence or maintained and clipped into an ideal of a perfected breed, dogs are inevitably connected to the human, and we to them. Indeed, as French Feminist philosopher Helene Cixous outs it: “We are never so human as when we are dog.” 

JR: Here is an old mutt. Haven't you noticed the tin can tied to my tail, the sad gray eyes, the drooling mouth, the ruined knuckles on my paw, my chipped ears from dealing with baying wolves of adversity?




Drifting


I'm drifting like a piece of debris swept up by a leaf blower
Sleep well, my fermentative rage, go and rest for an hour
and dream of a childhood's waltzing butterflies,
or perchance to follow the frothing pit bull in my soul:
Why wait? Get up, my faithful companion, Rex,
I need you to perform a creative ablution: it'll be beneficial
for us both, to lave and bless a grave via a bladder's ode
to a slippered ghost, hunched over like a dead plant.
In the citreous light I see her sporting a treacled smile
as she shuffles about some dirt floor in a worm-starred abode.
Yes, my grinning friend, you and I can co-scribe a poem,
but I am out-surged by your stream of consciousness,
You write so effortlessly and your so damn elegiac!
you didn't learn the craft in some puppy mill, did you?


Joe Rosenblatt

KM: Always a hearty WOOF to you Dogfather and thanks always for your loyal and such a noble (and lets not furget playful) collaboration of Dogs and Sonnets! 

"Chicken Bone" Dogs of Havana (2002)

Karen Moe