OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID179“mindless dance” that includes “joy,” a far different state from the one
the speaker begins the poem in. This is a bare hybridity,^34 a desire for
an animal voice that poetry cannot actually have but can figure and
approach.^35
James Wright moved from poems like those of Wallace Stevens in
their complexity and formality to free-verse poems of disorienting sim-
plicity, which invoke and then reject or disrupt patterns of form, narra-
tive, and naturalism. This change occurs in his third book of poems, The
Branch Will Not Break. Many of the poems in this book also figure ani-
mals, often as suddenly intruding on and altering consciousness. These
poems suggest hybridity in that their speakers see animals as full of
some crucial meaning inaccessible to language and thus the poet, but
also as plain evidence of the kind of obscure meaning that poetry longs
for. These poems also signal Wright’s (and modern poetry’s) ambiva-
lence toward tradition and poetic form. He is suspicious of poetry’s
claim to be a special language with some ability to access and reveal
truthful experience. This suspicion focuses on the idea of the lyrical
voice, which implies a speaking subject with an awareness of the world
and an ability to deploy language to investigate and make sense of it.
The ideal lyric speaker is in a sense supremely human, a creature con-
trolling and controlled by language and thus reflective of how we have
defined ourselves to be different from animals. This self is disconnected
from the body and is a master of the universe of language. Wright’s pas-
toral surrealism disrupts this idea of the lyrical subject without actually
getting rid of it, implying that the meaning of poetry comes not from
some all-powerful human self but from something stranger—the inter-
relation of language and the world.
Here, for instance, is probably the most famous poem of Branch, “Lying
in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”:
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,