INTRODUCTIONKumin, Sarah Lindsay, Don McKay, Pattiann Rogers, Charles Simic,
and Robert Wrigley.
The absence of sustained critical attention on poetry about animals is
worth pondering. One of the contributions of animal studies generally
has been to reveal how human culture has imagined and constructed
boundaries between the human and the animal, even as we have shared
the planet with animals and built industries, nations, and empires by
defining, killing, and exploiting them. As Cary Wolfe has shown, rede-
fining these boundaries has played a significant role in enabling various
kinds of racism and imperialism.^12 In other words, a conception of the
human as opposed to the nonhuman, and thus the very definition of
the animal, is at or near the center of conceptions of power. As Nicole
Shukin argues: “Discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the
species divide. That is, they hinge on the zoo-ontological production
of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute
line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and rein-
scribe borders between humans and animals.”^13 In the modes of repre-
sentation she examines (advertisements, images, and movies) we see
animals as victims of the human will to power. Both Wolfe and Shukin
note how frequently animals are represented and that this represen-
tation is largely a way of rendering animals as consumable or otherwise
marginal. Because nonhuman animals are virtually without power
within human culture, they are destroyed in such vast numbers, and
their future is so grim, it stands to reason that culture represents them
as objects and as radically other. Cause and effect are ineluctable here.
The literary critic Marian Scholtmeijer made a similar point in the early
1990s, noting that in modern fiction animals are consistently repre-
sented as victims, as essentially lacking any power of their own: “Almost
nothing remains to animals that has not been constrained, pruned,
injured, or eradicated by humankind.”^14
In this broad cultural context, poetry barely registers and has thus
been largely ignored within animal studies. As W. H. Auden wrote, over-
stating the case somewhat, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”^15 Though
it is absurd to say so, poetry appears to make even less happen today.