Sam Sax, _Pig_

SAX"S NEW COLLECTION does sometimes talk about actual pigs, but it talks rather more about the pig as a cultural presence, its representations, mythology, figurations. 

I  had not thought of it before, but there may not be another domesticated animal with a worse cultural profile than the pig. One would not like being called a dog, a sheep, a cow, or a chicken--one would certainly not like being called an ass--but being called a pig, a hog, a swine, or a sow evokes a different and harsher level of abuse. Some peoples--including, Sax emphasizes, his own people, the Jews--regard the pig as unfit for consumption. There is nothing fair in this particular cultural construction, but even so, dismantling it would require sustained and mindful effort.

The speakers in Sax's poems often seem to inhabit a comparable state of abjection, and their embrace of the Pig-Idea may be a step in that dismantling: an owning, a willingness to don the mask, to accept the name, and reconfigure the Pig-Idea from inside. Can the other's hatred be transmuted into a blessing by this owning, the other's venom turn into chrism?

In this respect, Pig ups the ante of Bury It.

Pig also testifies to the range of the pig's presence in our culture, which turns out to be wider and more various than I would have guessed before reading the book. We  have the Three Little Pigs in the book's  three section titles, "Straw," "Sticks," and "Bricks." We have the shepherd-pig of the film Babe. We have the Gadarene swine, swine flu, Pooh's Piglet, and--paid resplendent tribute in the poem that bears her name--Miss Piggy. The book's final page signs off as Porky Pig alway did in Warner Brothers cartoons: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" 

The poem titled "Three Stories" gives three examples of pig-as-cultural-locus, and perhaps flips the script, arguing for the centrality of that which has been exiled to the periphery. Here is the poem in its entirety:

in the end, the children come to learn, the beast lives in  them.

in the end, it is the animal's proximity to language that saves him.

in the end, despite their best intentions, the animals become men.

My fourth or fifth time through this, I discerned Lord of the Flies and its human sacrifice, Piggy; Wilbur of Charlotte's Web, saved by Charlotte's ability to write words in her web; and Animal Farm, with its Bolshevik pigs who undermine their own revolution. Hardly a person makes it through the U. S. educational experience without reading at least one of those--all three, in my own case. The three stories, slightly rotated by Sax to reflect a different light, revise the Pig-Idea, if we will let them; they re-negotiate the boundaries between species.