2145. OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID- Ibid., 273–75.
- Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld (London: Weiden-
feld and Nicolson, 1966), 50. - Ibid., 53.
- Levi-Strauss’s account links the wolverine and the eagle and refers to the wolverine as
“carcajous,” as Dickey does in the poem. The wolverine also figures as a creature at
once human and strangely unknowable in Barry Lopez’s great essay “Landscape and
Narrative,” in Crossing Open Ground, ed. Barry Lopez (New York: Vintage, 1989),
61–72. - Marion Hodge, “Aspects of Invention in James Dickey’s Poems,” South Carolina
Review 42, no. 1 (2009): 132–42. - Galway Kinnell, The New Selected Poems (New York: Mariner, 2001), 59–61. The
method of killing the bear the poem describes is, as John Hobbs notes, rooted in fic-
tion rather than anthropology, taken from an adventure novel by the Swiss writer
Hans Ruesch about Inuit life. Hobbs, “Galway Kinnell’s ‘The Bear’: Dream and Tech-
nique,” Modern Poetry Studies 5, no. 3 (1974): 237–50. The poem may also be read as
an allegory of the discomfort caused by the cultural appropriation of Inuit culture it
appears to enact. - The brilliant documentary film Diet of Souls by Canadian filmmaker John Hous-
ton shows interviews with Inuit elders who reveal that “the great peril of our exis-
tence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.” Dealing with this peril
is the heart of their religious practice. Living where they do, in the high arctic,
the only available food is other creatures who must be hunted. And for the Inuit
to hunt them successfully, they must observe, follow, and understand these ani-
mals to an extraordinary degree. In seeking to kill them, they come to respect
and admire them. - Kinnell’s poem “Porcupine,” also published in Body Rags, similarly moves from a
human account of the porcupine to a dream vision of being and speaking for one. - James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1990), 60–61. - By “bare hybridity” I mean a hybridity rooted in biology and physical being, as in
Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.” See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press:
1998). - Elizabeth Dodd argues that “in his most radical poems, Wright is asserting two, some-
times conflicting, powers of language: reference to the world outside the mind, and
enactment of the mind’s receptive participation in a larger than human world. From
the principle of reciprocity arises his most powerful poetic transcendence.” Dodd,
“Green Places: James Wright’s Development of a Biocentric Aesthetic,” ISLE 13, no. 2
(2006): 30. See also Andrew Elkins, The Poetry of James Wright (Birmingham: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1991), 48–50. - James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1963), 16.