Poetry and Animals

OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID189

a parody of the human need to find meaning in the world and of poetry’s
need to define it.
My final examples of hybridity are prose poems by Russell Edson,
whose hybrid forms not coincidentally also feature a wide variety of
hybrid animals. He is most well known for developing the prose poem
itself, which he refers to as “a beautiful animal... mating a giraffe
with an elephant.” Robert Bly has said that Edson “writes the poetry a
chicken might,”^47 comically alluding to the idea that sense and non-
sense might be produced by allowing animals (monkeys or chickens) to
randomly arrange letters and words. With Edson, though, there is also
always the notion that animals might have some idea of what they are
doing. Here is Edson’s “Ape and Coffee”:

Some coffee had gotten on a man’s ape. The man said, animal

did you get on my coffee?

No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me.

You’re sure you didn’t spill on my coffee? said the man.

Do I look like a liquid? peeped the ape.

Well you sure don’t look human, said the man.

But that doesn’t make me a fluid, twittered the ape.

Well I don’t know what the hell you are, so just stop it, cried the

man.

I was just sitting here reading the newspaper when you splashed

coffee all over me, piped the ape.

I don’t care if you are a liquid, you just better stop splashing on

things, cried the man.

Do I look fluid to you? Take a good look, hooted the ape.

If you don’t stop I’ll put you in a cup, screamed the man.

I’m not a fluid, screeched the ape.

Stop it, stop it, screamed the man, you are frightening me.^48

The talking ape is already a hybrid, of course, like Kafka’s Red Peter (and
more recently, Benjamin Hale’s Bruno Littlemore and Will Self ’s Simon