OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID183whole poem). The poem presents both an abstraction of the animal and
a comic portrait of an individual, a human being momentarily seen as
animal, a dumb body, by “they,” human outsiders. Thus human and ani-
mal are both “discontinuous,” evolutionarily different from what has
come before, and individuals separate from the species.
The idea of hybridity in the poem is again one of simultaneously
being human and animal and of the impossibility of such a state, which
points to, without revealing, something concocted and not right about the
entire human project. Hybridity is thus necessarily abstract—a figment
of our language and imaginative abilities—even as it is something
biological, since we are also animals who have evolved in the natural
world, just like all other organisms. So too poetry is a way of represent-
ing and forgetting the self, a process of constructing the self and recog-
nizing it as other. These effects are heightened by the poem’s short
free-verse stanzas and emphatic enjambments, signaling arbitrariness,
ambiguity, and minimalism (the poem’s form echoes William Carlos
Williams and mocks him). The long thin shape of the poem is also an
abstraction of the human silhouette. The poem’s wonderful last sen-
tence describes human as animal, or animal as human, and is a question
to readers about the nature of animality. Who are we to say that the
animal cannot speak, since we cannot know? But of course we do know,
since we are speaking the poem.
Jorie Graham’s poem “History” begins in a seemingly direct encoun-
ter with animals and becomes about exploring the complexity of this
experience to such a degree that it turns inside out, reveling in the prob-
lem of understanding and representation rather than in the complexity
of the animal. The first verse paragraph of this long poem presents the
beginning of an experience marked by black storks descending out of
the sky and the interruption of some undescribed perception that pre-
ceded it.
So that I had to look up just now to see them
sinking—black storks—
sky disappearing as they ease down,
each body like a prey the wings have seized...