2043. POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237ff. - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970). Histories of
taxonomy show that systems of naming, though they depend on a faith in the fixity
of species, also reveal the extraordinary messiness of the project. Harriet Ritvo
argues that while the new Enlightenment taxonomic systems conferred power both
to “the human position at its head” and the individuals and cultures that undertook
the endeavor of classification, the “accumulation of theory and information was not
a hegemonic juggernaut, crushing error and dissention in its path” (Ritvo, The Platy-
pus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination [Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 15, 50). That is, the system of naming had
by its very nature to be imprecise, a matter of interpretation. See also my chapter
“Romanticism and the Metaphysics of Classification” in Onno Oerlemans, Romanti-
cism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). - See Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination Into the Signs of Life and the Life
of Signs, ed. Donald Favareau, trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau (Scran-
ton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008); and Wendy Wheeler, “Postscript on
Biosemiotics: Reading Beyond Words—and Ecocriticism,” New Formations 64
(2008): 137–54. - Our mimicking of bird and other animal calls to see if they will respond is also, I
think, an elemental response to animals—a simple and spontaneous way to make
some kind of contact with them. Who is not thrilled by the idea that you might be
able to imitate a cuckoo or chickadee or owl and have them respond? - Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fart,” accessed August 4, 2017, www .oed .com.
- Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 151. - In this context, it is worth noting that ornithologists have discovered that birds
distinguish songs not just between species but also within species. The New York
Times reported a study showing that rufous-collared sparrows in Ecuador distin-
guished between local “dialects” and that females only mated with males whose
songs reflected local variations (Sindya N. Bhanoo, “For Certain Sparrows, Love Has
a Local Sound,” New York Times, July 5, 2011). Moreover, we also know that many
animal species (e.g., penguins and seals) can distinguish the sounds made by indi-
vidual members of their group, so that parents can find their own offspring in a rook-
ery by the identity of its calls. These are clear signs that animal calls contain a quality
(a subtext?) not audible to human ears or analysis. At the same time, learning to
recognize birdsong and other animal vocalizations is one of the best ways to come
to recognize the presence of kinds of animals. - Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 150.
- Roger Tory Peterson, Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 252. - See Dana Phillips’s discussion of the contrast between literary texts and Peterson’s
Field Guide in The Truth of Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 173–83.