90POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEWriting poems about species thus helps to mark several
communities— that of the perceived and described species, and that of
the group of readers and writers who feel some strange attraction to the
species by having come to know it to some degree. And it is necessarily a
matter of degree. For instance, bird-watchers who have encountered and
identified pileated woodpeckers (a strange but not rare North American
bird, easy to hear but somewhat challenging to see) know both what is
definitive and striking about the species and that its “spectacular” iden-
tity, as Roger Tory Peterson puts it in his ubiquitous field guide, is nearly
impossible to communicate to nonbirders or even other birders who
have not yet learned to recognize this species.^12 Encounters, and moments
of identification, create the feeling of special insight, experience that is
in one sense the product of another creature but also marks the distinc-
tion and power of the individual observer. Field-guide paintings of spe-
cies aim for utter transparency, to be pragmatic and definitive, which is
why it makes sense to speak of the audience for these artworks as “users,”
a description that is generally anathema to readers of poetry. Lyric poems
about species express allegiance, attraction, and puzzlement and retain
the possibility of keeping readers on the outside of the experience of
identification, a distinction overlooked by Dana Phillips in his account
of the practical value of the field guide.^13 Such poems are in part dis-
plays of encounter, registering a kind of knowledge gained by observing
animals, without necessarily providing full access to that knowledge.
This strange duality of the species poem helps to explain why the
number of animal poems in general, and species poems in particular,
burgeons in the romantic period, as David Perkins has shown.^14 These
poems reveal a deepening connection with the natural and animal
world, even as they mark what Tiffany calls the infidel nature of the poet
and poetry—as abject, outsider, and threat.^15 Writing poems about ani-
mals signals an expansion of the boundaries of concern and community
and marks the writer both as an outsider from the human community
because of his or her radical interests and as a careful observer of the
natural world. Animal poems in the romantic period are evidence of
shifting allegiances and community boundaries, of the place of the poet
and the role of poetry.