INTRODUCTIONof all kinds of life other than human are becoming extinct (between one
thousand and twenty thousand times the rate of “natural” extinctions).
The biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that half of the animal species cur-
rently in existence will be extinct by 2100, and predictions for ocean life
are even more dire.^3 About sixty billion land animals are killed every
year for food, in addition to equally vast numbers of marine animals
(most of which are merely “bycatch”). Multiple studies have documented
the collapse of fish stocks the world over.^4 In virtually all respects, then,
the lives of animals on the planet are getting worse. Pets are the only
animal category that continues to expand (in every sense), though as
John Berger noted in his famous essay “Why Look at Animals,” this is
hardly reassuring.^5 It is a n open quest ion whet her keepi ng pet s ex pa nd s ,
contracts, or does nothing to our collective concern for the larger animal
world.
The growing awareness of these crises is no doubt spurring the devel-
opment of a truly engaged discipline of animal studies, which will make
this, as ethologist Marc Bekoff has argued, the “century of the animal,”
or at least the century of nostalgia for the animal.^6 Scholars are now
exploring the animal and actual animals in nature and culture, history,
philosophy, art, and literature. Yet poetry about animals has received
scant attention, both since Atkins identified the burgeoning field and
since the rise of animal studies. For instance, at the 2009 International
Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society: Mind-
ing Animals, in Newcastle, Australia, only one session out of about a
hundred was on poetry, whereas there were at least a dozen sessions
on the representation of animals in novels and film. Equally telling, an
essay by Teresa Mangum surveying “animal genres in literature and the
arts” argues that the representation of animals in literature “cannot
escape the binary opposition that separates humans from non-human
animals” because writers and animals are “penned in by the conven-
tions of character and plot that organize genres,” as though all literary
genres are reducible to, or entirely structured by, narrative and the cre-
ation of characters.^7 The excellent book Creaturely Poetics, by Anat Pick,
briefly refers to a single poem, its real focus being film and prose.^8 A May
2009 special PMLA issue on animal studies included only one article on