Most poems about critics speak from a podium. Dave Bonta's speaks from the floor. "I am a dog who got hold of art / and worried it" is a confession, and a joke at the speaker's own expense. The verb carries the weight. A dog "worries" a slipper or a bone by seizing it and shaking it between its teeth. But "worry" also means to fret and to pick at a problem, and criticism does both. The line break helps: "art" sits alone at the end of the first line, whole and untouched, and then "and worried it" pounces. Before the poem has made a single argument, the critic has already been shown as an animal with something in its jaws.
What comes next reads like the dog's opinions. "I dispute the value / of pieces rated as great" is the most official-sounding moment, yet it is full of small giveaways. "Rated" is the language of grades and markets, and the passive voice hides who did the rating. "Pieces" can mean artworks, but it is also what is left over once something has been worried. The next couplet, "the ridiculous design of work / in a committee," has no verb at all. It reads like a muttered complaint, perhaps recalling the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee, though the poem never says so. Judging by the phrasing, the target is art made by consensus, which ends up compromised and absurd.
The grammar then starts to come apart. The opening couplet has a confident subject and two clear verbs. By the end, whole lines are noun phrases drifting without a main clause, as if the sentences themselves were being chewed. The pronouns shift as well, from "I" to "we" to the distant third person of "a man" and "boys." The "we" in "we who now dissect bodies / and call that art" is the key turn. The complaint stops being a private grudge and becomes a charge against everyone, including the speaker. "Dissect" is a critic's word, since criticism takes things apart to see how they work, but here it is literal, with bodies on the table. The poem seems to ask whether taking something apart can ever count as making something. The word "now" adds a note of decline, as though this was not always so.
The final couplet is the strangest and the most open. "A man never yet with child" sounds like a proverb, and "never yet" gives it an old, slightly solemn ring that sets it apart from the dog's gruff voice. One reading, and it is only an inference, is that the critic is someone who has never gone through the labour of creating and is judging a process he has not known. "Boys desiring a pig" offers no explanation. It is an image of crude appetite, perhaps a childish wanting for the wrong thing. Whatever it means exactly, the poem's animals now include a dog and a pig, and the human beings around them are not doing much better.
Formally, the poem keeps almost everything bare. It is made of five couplets with no rhyme, no end punctuation, and lowercase openings after the first line. The lines are short and uneven, closer to speech or notes than to measured verse, and the white space between couplets works like the pauses in a sulky conversation. Nothing is wrapped up. Because there is no final full stop, the poem stops on "pig" rather than concluding, which suits a speaker who admits he cannot finish a judgement.
The poem is worth reading because it does what it describes. A poem that attacks overrated work, committee design, and dissection passed off as art is itself a small, rough, deliberately unfinished object, a scrap of something worried at. It also refuses to flatter its speaker. The critic who sneers at "pieces rated as great" starts by calling himself a dog, and so the poem leaves open whether its own verdicts deserve more trust than the ones it mocks. For a student, that makes it a good starting point for discussing how we judge art and who gets to do the judging.