OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID157the collage technique of sprinkling her poems with quotations from
eclectic texts as her “hybrid method of composition.” And alluding to
the centrality of the animal in her poetry, she describes annotating her
sources as possibly turning “one’s work into the donkey that finally
found itself being carried by its masters.”^7 In chapter 3 I examined some
of Moore’s poems as exemplifying ideas of species identity, since in
many of her poems this is the category through which she apprehends
and represents animals. This tendency to think in categories also lets her
explore the mixing of types. As I noted in my earlier discussion of her
poems, Moore’s knowledge of animals, examples, and sources are them-
selves other cultural media (books, museums, movies, magazines, etc.),
so she is aware that the animals she is viewing and representing are
cultural products, several steps removed from the animals she is circling
and moving toward in her poems. Her animals are thus often hybrids
from the beginning—not actual animals, but human visions of them,
the multiplicity or pliability of which allows her to experiment with
notions of what animals are, why they seize our imagination and recre-
ate themselves, mutate, or morph. There is no clear boundary in her
work between poems that are about species and about hybrids, since
her poems are, in her own wonderful phrase, “imaginary gardens with
real toads.” However, we can see that some of her animal poems reveal
the “real toads” while others are more concerned with the “imaginary
gardens” they inhabit. These latter poems are more clearly hybrid in that
they foreground the fabulous creatures that real animals can become in
our cultural imaginations.
My first hybrid specimen is “The Plumet Basilisk.” This long poem
begins and ends with descriptive accounts of a lizard found in South
and Central America, but the poem is in many ways about multiplicity
rather than distinctiveness. While the poem attempts to describe this
creature, its meandering account reveals something hybrid. That is, the
animal is both a real creature and the creation of some preexisting
human cultural need for fabulous reptiles. The word basilisk refers to a
creature of medieval myth, a deadly and venomous serpent that could
itself be a cross between bird, reptile, and man. The plumet basilisk was
discovered much later in the New World and given the name “basilisk”