10INTRODUCTIONreproduction will take place.” The urge to know the world, to know the
other through our senses, and to leave a record of it (to reproduce) is
central to our animal being. Producing poems is an expression of this
reproductive desire, much as song is for many birds. It is anthropomor-
phic in that it is necessarily bound by our human senses and language
and the desire and experience of the individual poet. It is always per-
sonal, of the poet. Yet Stewart sees that poems are also a record of a
desire to reach beyond self: “The semantic dimension of poetry is an
open unfolding one, stemming from both composition and reception. No
poetic utterance is absorbed by its context or completed in its use....
The poet speaks to another in such a way as to make the communication
intelligible to more than one person. The communication is not simply
intimate: it is constitutive of the social, mutual, intersubjective ground
of intimacy itself. It is the kind of thing one knows that others say when
they are face-to-face.” Stewart’s account of the full meaning of a poem
includes the community of readers, of which nonhuman animals can
never be a part. But animals can be included in the community that
poets themselves recognize and help to forge. Stewart notes that poems
have mimicked animal calls and so become signs of the desires for
spontaneity, authenticity, and beauty that animals often embody for us.
Animal play and animal faces (often reproduced in the form of masks)
have suggested modes for poetry, ways of becoming other and connect-
ing to the world.^22
Although Stewart points to an inherently anthropomorphic quality
of poetry (and language), poetry as a whole produces no particular ide-
ology or approach to animals. In the helpful terms suggested by Mat-
thew Calarco in representing and understanding animals, poets may be
focused on identity, difference, or indistinction. That is, they may high-
light ways in which we are like animals, and they like us; they may fore-
ground and celebrate animal (and species) difference; and they may
dwell on “a space in which supposedly insuperable distinctions between
human beings and animals fall into a radical indistinction and where
the human-animal distinction (in both its classical and more compli-
cated deconstructive form) no longer serves as a guardrail for thought
and practice.”^23 Poetry in general can do all these things; individual