5

OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

T

he structure of this book reflects my commitment to the idea

that there is a strong correlation between how we categorize

animals and how we write poetry about them. However, I have

also argued all along that part of the power of poetry is its ability to resist

preexisting structures of thought—to investigate, disintegrate, and

refashion them. One of the tendencies of poetry, part of its DNA, is to

copy and mutate, to build on convention and to be original by breaking

from convention. Not surprisingly, then, there are many poems that do

not fit my scheme, that foreground a mixing of categories rather than

any single category. I am going to refer to these poems as hybrid, both

because and in spite of the fact that in literary criticism this has become

an overloaded term referring almost entirely to notions of cultural

mixing.^1 For Mikhail Bakhtin, hybridity undermines the monological

within a particular social arena. For Homi K. Bhabha, hybridity is a

salubrious part of the postcolonial landscape and involves the ulti-

mately beneficial mixing of identities, discourses, and cultures.^2 What

often appears forgotten in the critical discourse of the hybrid, however,

is that its origin is biological, referring to the crossbreeding of species.^3

This origin reveals the wonderful ambiguity of the term, which I

would like to recuperate for this chapter: that hybridity involves the