156OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDhybrid creatures. Grendel and Chauntecleer, whom I examined in
chapter 1, are both hybrids, imagined as simultaneously human and
beast, for tragic and comedic effect, respectively. This explicit mixing, as
I argue there, troubles simple allegorical readings: the animal does not
merely stand in for the human but is a part of the human, and vice versa.
An interest in representing hybridity brings with it an awareness of
challenges to form and orthodoxy. Hybridity is not just about beings
or identities that are in some way mixed; it is also about the struggle to
imagine and represent them, how to bring them forth. Thus the study
of hybridity in literary and cultural studies often has to do with the col-
onized or subaltern subject speaking through the language and cul-
tural forms of her colonizing culture; a hybrid production is successful
to the degree that an original subject retains something of her distinct
individuality, while at the same time borrowing from and altering the
language and form she has inherited. Within the realm of American
poetics, hybridity often refers only to matters of form, stemming from
the reductive idea that modern and contemporary poetry have long
been divided into camps (narrative versus lyric, Language versus official,
immanent versus transcendent, and avant-garde versus traditional),
though there are those who try to hybridize these oppositions and see
something exciting in attempting to do this. As Mark Wallace writes,
“In literature, the hybrid distorts the normal unifying marks of many
literary concepts. Genre, technique, tradition, or the identifying marks
of a movement or school: in the hybrid, all these things are subject to
mismatching and deforming.”^6 Poetry about human and animal mix-
ing presents similar challenges and rewards, though here it is never the
lion who speaks but always the human speaking for the animal. I hope to
show that in spite of the fact that in representations of animals the
human always does the speaking, it is still possible to reveal something
of the reality of the animals and the animal in the human, and that
embracing hybridity can be an effective way of doing this.
Marianne Moore is the great modern poet of hybridity, both in the
sense of exploring and creating human-animal chimeras and in repre-
senting hybridity through her experiments in form. In her introductory
note to her own quixotic endnotes in the Complete Poems, she refers to