Poetry and Animals

OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID181

presence, though paradoxically it cannot be found in the words of the
speaker himself.
The hybridity figured in Wright’s poems includes the complexity of
form, at once lyric and not lyric, poetry and not poetry. The presence of
this hybridity suggests that there is no one way to break out of the
human traps of the past into something new, but that, as Jacques Derrida
has also suggested, making sense of the animal as a sign (“that therefore
I am”) can be a newer and truer avenue open to poetry. Similarly, Cary
Wolfe has argued that for contemporary critical theory, “the power and
importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multiplicity
that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that
were proper to the subject of humanism.”^38 We can see this hybridity as
an attempt to deconstruct humanism in other contemporary American
poets as well, many influenced by Wright and other experimental poets
of the 1950s and ’60s, who see themselves resisting what Charles Bern-
stein calls “Official Verse Culture.”^39 Robert Creeley’s poem “The Ani-
mal” is paradigmatic of this hybridity, almost a manifesto for it.

Shaking the head from

side to side, arms

moving, hanging as the

sign of pride,

mouth

wide open

to eat the

red meat

in the jungle,

in the heat.

But I am

not animal,

move,

discontinuous, on