Let’s analyze Chuck Grassley’s tweet as the masterpiece of experimental poetry that it is. https://twitter.com/chuckgrassley/status/1307421592411156482

“If u lost ur pet pidgin/it’s dead” alludes to so many classical pet elegies from Catullus’ “My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead” to Thomas Gray’s “Ode to ... Favorite Cat...” to e.e. cummings’ “(me up at does),” but Grassley’s work cleverly twists poetic expectations and conventions.

Unlike the dove—emblem of peace, the soul, the Holy Spirit—its cousin the pigeon is a common urban nuisance. Here, though, divorced from its urban setting—relocated to “my Iowa farm”—the pigeon becomes domesticated, elevated to a “pet.”

But the pigeon is both beloved pet and also reduced to a string of numbers. How do we identify each other? How do we truly know if this is my pigeon or yours?, the poem asks.

The numbers, too, 2020/3089/2020 hold such significance. On Twitter, the poet’s preferred place to publish—all talk is of 2020. The year cannot be escaped, the poem implies. We may hope for a future (3089) but are pulled back to this horrid moment.

The pigeon, then, may be an overdetermined symbol of what is lost and dead, especially in the context of the front “lawn” of middle America—the very death of the American Dream.

The poet is playful in tone and form—note common tweet and text abbreviations (“if u lost ur”) alongside strings of numbers and occasional capitalization—to make the elegiac thrust of the subject more common, more colloquial.

This is stressed most beautifully in the first line, “If u lost ur pet pidgin,” in which the common bird is replaced by a “pidgin.” The pun here is exquisite.

A pidgin is “a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common.”

What the poem asks: Is how do we communicate? How can we express loss and grief? Does the lofty and archaic elegy fail? Will a simpler shared “pidgin” suffice to express shared sadness?

Note too the occasional insertion of the poetic narrator—“my Iowa farm JUST DISCOVERED.” The emphasis is first, on land ownership and property. “Ur (your) pigeon” vs. “my Iowa farm.”

Secondly, this is a poem celebrating discovery as power. The capitalization of “JUST DISCOVERED” again creates a binary between the poem’s recipient who has lost a pet pigeon and the poem’s narrator who has discovered the bird.

I would be remiss to ignore the experimental form of the poem, but the opening line again beautifully illustrates how the verse soars “If u lost ur pet pidgin” (the plosive consonance is but a pellet gun shooting down this pet) and then plummets at the line break: “it’s dead.”

The poem, too, cleverly ends with a banality: “Sorry for bad news.” Moving from pathos to bathos and back again, playing with the elegiac mode, and ending with such a flattening litotes, the poem is a brilliant and compact study of love and loss.