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Renée Nicole Macklin’s “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”
The eight movements in this piece of postmodern doggerel serve to indict the scribbling as nothing more than a postmodern workshop exercise. It remains one of the most flagrant tells that something is wrong in education culture in the USA: this poem won the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize at Old Dominion University.
Introduction and Text of “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”
This piece “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” does not merely fail on its own terms; it exemplifies a system that has mistaken posture for poetry and grievance for vision. The entire spectrum along with its habits have become unmistakable—and depressingly standardized.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy
legs of cockroaches.
i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of
zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they
burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to
anymore, maybe my gut—
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can’t believe—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my
ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
Commentary on “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”
Line breaks are not thoughts; failure to capitalize signals nothing profound. This piece strains to be original to the point of exhaustion. It sprawling placement on the page does not equate to anything Whitmanesque; its mindless juxtapositions do little more than startle and stun and then fall flat.
First Movement: Nostalgia as Substitute for Form
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
The piece opens with a whine rather than an image: “i want back my rocking chairs.” This awkwardly phrased salvo is not memory shaped by art; it is desire announced without effort. The rocking chair is a prefabricated symbol, wheeled in to signal premodern calm without earning it.
The gesture toward “tercets” and “pentameter” is particularly revealing. These features are not forms the poem employs but instead are terms it waves at the reader like credentials.: “look I know some poetry terms I learned in my creative writing class.”
Meter becomes metaphor, form becomes flavoring. As Helen Vendler insists, poetry requires a thinking ear, not a decorative vocabulary [1]. This poem treats form the way lifestyle branding treats craft: as an aesthetic aura, not a discipline.
Second Movement: Desecration as Cultural Credential
i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags… the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
Here we arrive at the first ritual sacrifice. Sacred texts are not confronted, questioned, or even read; they are disposed of theatrically. The Bible appears only as evangelical pamphlet, never as literature, theology, or intellectual inheritance.
Such effusion is not critique; it is credentialing. George Steiner warned that modern art’s fixation on desecration often signals creative exhaustion rather than courage [2]. The poem performs disbelief the way a résumé lists internships. As Harold Bloom observed, contemporary poetry often avoids agon—the struggle with strong precursors—in favor of symbolic vandalism [3]. Trash bags replace thought.
Third Movement: Science as Vocabulary Trauma
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures…
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
Science enters the poem not as inquiry but as irritation. Scientific terms are recited like curse words, their meanings irrelevant. The poem resents knowledge without attempting to understand it.
James Longenbach has noted that free verse collapses when it merely records annoyance rather than transforming it [4]. Here, scientific language is treated as an assault on sensitivity, revealing not science’s limitations but the speaker’s refusal to engage it beyond syllabic discomfort.
Fourth Movement: Specificity as Alibi
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
This line is the system’s shibboleth. The named diner is not symbol, setting, or pressure point—it is proof of authenticity. The poem assumes that coordinates equal meaning. Randall Jarrell warned that poetry which merely reports experience degenerates into prose with line breaks [5]. This IHOP does nothing but exist, which the poem treats as sufficient.
Fifth Movement: The Soul, Shrunk for Convenience
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
Here the poem congratulates itself for modesty by reducing the soul to runoff. Unlike metaphysical poetry, which used bodily imagery to heighten spiritual stakes, this poem uses anatomy to flatten them.
Christopher Ricks argued that metaphor should increase imaginative pressure [6]. This one relieves it. The soul becomes small enough not to trouble anyone—including the poet.
Sixth Movement: The Straw-Man Dialectic
this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
Faith and science are staged as cartoon antagonists: faith as comfort blanket, science as rude undergraduate. This weasel language is not dialectic; it is melodrama for the intellectually uncurious.
As T. S. Eliot warned, poetry that mistakes emotional dissatisfaction for insight substitutes complaint for thought [7]. The poem invents a conflict it cannot articulate and then sulks about it.
Seventh Movement: Wonder Infantilized
the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to…
Wonder here is not earned but remembered—and remembered only as childhood comfort. Sacred texts become maternal figures, soothing rather than demanding.
Eliot cautioned against confusing regression with depth. This passage does exactly that. The poem inadvertently admits that its concept of wonder cannot survive adulthood and then blames knowledge for the failure.
Eighth Movement: The Grand Reduction (a.k.a. The Sulk)
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
The poem concludes with the system’s obligatory finale: a reduction so crude it pretends to be brave. Life is reduced to sex and death, as though no one has ever thought this before.
No serious scientist, philosopher, or poet holds such a view, and the poem does not pretend to argue it. As Eliot observed, exhaustion presented as revelation is still exhaustion. The poem ends not with insight, but with a pout.
An Afterword: Dissatisfaction Does Not Bring Wisdom
Macklin’s “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” exemplifies the current rot that passes for poetry because it wants the authority of crisis without the labor of understanding. It rejects form while gesturing at it, dismisses belief without engaging it, and resents knowledge without learning it.
It longs for rocking chairs but refuses carpentry. What it offers instead is the familiar debris of postmodern workshop verse: fragments of feeling, gestures of rebellion, and the unexamined belief that dissatisfaction is a form of wisdom. It is not.
Readers might notice that this essay does not even begin to address the awkwardness of language use this piece, which would require another essay to fully engage the issue. Suffice it to say that said awkwardness could, in fact, result either from intent or simply lack of language acumen of the doggerelist.
Either reason aligns with postmodern thought that dismisses utility for heft and originality for quaint novelty. For the postmod mindset, Ezra Pound’s diktat “make it new” [8] has become “make it shockingly ugly.”
Sources
[1] Helen Vendler. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Harvard UP, 1997.
[2] George Steiner. Real Presences. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
[3] Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford UP, 1973.
[4] James Longenbach. The Resistance to Poetry. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
[5] Randall Jarrell. Poetry and the Age. University Press of Florida, 2001.
[6] Christopher Ricks. The Force of Poetry. Oxford UP, 1984.
[7] T. S. Eliot. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Harvard UP, 1933.
[8] Ezra Pound. Make It New: Essays. Faber and Faber. 1934.
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