Poetry and Animals

176OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry,

by which I lived?

The human has been made bear by eating its shit and blood, taking the
excremental animal into himself, even as he has also gone inside the
animal. The poem works to obscure and invert boundaries—of human
and animal, inside and outside, sustenance and excrement, and tran-
scendence and abjection. The animal may be hunted because he is not
human, but this hunt comes at extraordinary cost to both. Interestingly,
the poem dramatizes a crucial aspect of actual Inuit belief—that in eat-
ing other animals, one also ingests their souls. This belief, especially as
dramatized in the poem, contrasts sharply with the common American
understanding of hunting and eating animals, in which the animal is
simply meat, with life, soul, consciousness, and shit left out.^31 Poetry
here is the process of articulating this profound link to the animal, cre-
ating a clearly human voice that might yet speak for the abject condi-
tion of the animal as food.^32
Human-animal hybridity in the examples I have surveyed thus far
has been about representing the animal as human and the human as ani-
mal. Imagining hybridity allows writers to look into the evolutionary
and cultural histories of our relationships with animals. It is also a way of
acknowledging that the problems of addressing and representing the ani-
mal are so intractable that solutions cannot be sincere or unmediated,
because the animal as animal will always be outside the realm of human
representation. However, animals, and the idea of the animal, are so
central to our existence that they need representing and exploring.
Thus the idea of human-animal hybridity and representations of hybrid-
ity have also become a means of thinking about problems of form, espe-
cially the relationship between language, originality, intentionality,
and identity. There are many poems in which human-animal hybridity
is a means of exploring the very function and purpose of poetry and
the boundaries and problems of language. This flips the problem of
representing the animal in poetry on its head: instead of using poetry to
investigate the animal, poets use the animal (and hybrid versions of it)
to investigate the meaning and power of poetry. Such poetry recognizes