- OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID213
which means “black earth,” the first name Moore gave to the poem. “Melanchthon”
was the name she gave to a carved elephant she possessed, perhaps because the word
sounds like a combination of “melancholy” and “mastodon.” The poem’s title sug-
gests “tendrils” of connection between human, animal, earth, and language. See
Bethany Hickok, Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s Col-
lege, 1905–1955 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 53.
- Whitman’s poem is also a hybrid, of course, with a lyric portion in which the poet
remembers his encounter with a single bird, and a speaking animal portion, itali-
cized, which the poem presents as the youthful poet’s interpretation of this animal’s
calls. The entire poem is made strange by this combination of voices, although the
poem makes it fairly easy to see the bird’s “speech” as the youthful poet’s own long-
ing projected onto the bird.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 81. Cf. Helen Lam-
bert, who argues that for Murray, “regarding nature as a foreign ‘language’ allows his
poetry to become other than itself.” Lambert, “The Australian Language Forest: Les
Murray’s Translations from the Natural World,” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique 19
(2010): 44.
- Les Murray, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 355. See also Mur-
ray’s introduction to the poem on the Poetry Archive website, where there is also a
wonderful recording of Murray reading the poem: http: //www .poetryarchive .org /.
- Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974):
435–50.
- Lambert, “The Australian Language Forest,” 51.
- Murray, New Collected Poems, 358.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 376.
- See Bernd Heinrich, Mind of the Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 191–203,
on raven vocalizations and their meanings.
- Jane Springer’s three “Dear Blackbird” poems, from Dear Blackbird (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2007), reverse the situation of Murray’s raven. Her poems
are in the form of letters from a scarecrow to a blackbird and are also, in part, an
attempt to imagine an artificial form and space in which language might cross from
human to animal.
- Murray, New Collected Poems, 366, 367–68. These poems are reminiscent of Philip
Levine’s “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” which presents the thoughts of a
proudly resistant pig as it is led to market and imagines its own slaughter. From
Not This Pig (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 79.
- A. R. Ammons, Collected Poems, 1951–71 (New York: Norton, 1972), 11–12.
- Pattiann Rogers, Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001
(Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2001), 344–45.
- James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 248–49.
