INTRODUCTION19Yet taxonomists have long recognized the arbitrariness of the pat-
terns they have identified and the names they have given. Darwin’s Ori-
gin of Species was an attack on the idea of the fixity of the category of
species, since he showed that they are in a constant state of flux, created
by shifting populations of generations of individual organisms. Donna
Haraway argues that in this tension between the one and the many, the
individual and the species, the only reality is one of indeterminacy and
change, what she calls “webbed existences.”^38 The one doesn’t exist,
because the individual is always a community of cells and microorgan-
isms making and taking part in the body on the one hand, and in larger
systems and communities on which they depend for sustenance on the
other. Though this is true, it is also the case that criticism of any kind
must engage in the abstraction of categorization, and this is especially
true if we are trying to survey and make sense of a broad collection of
individual entities, as I am doing here with a kind of poetry—namely,
animal poetry. Haraway herself is fond of the category of dog breeds, a
particularly problematic convolution of artifice and nature, human and
nonhuman. My topic is poetry about animals, itself a subset of poetry
defined by subject rather than by form. Poetry is of course itself a cate-
gory, one we find easy to identify but nearly impossible to define.
Animals present the problem of categorization in an especially com-
pelling way, in part because animal types, like the category of the ani-
mal itself, seem natural, of the physical world rather than our own
constructions of it. As children, our ability to distinguish humans from
other animals is presumably one of our first acts of knowledge, though so
too is the ability to recognize individual parents from among the gaggle
of humans who present themselves. The ability to recognize categories of
species (such as dog, cat, pig, and horse), the very idea of species, is among
the first skills we acquire, or as Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues, one of the
first kinds of hardwired knowledge we express. Yet regarding any crea-
ture purely or simply as a representative of type creates ethical prob-
lems. We demean the individual in understanding a single person or
creature primarily as an example of an abstraction. As many animal
studies theoreticians have noticed, our schooling about animal types
informs and provides language for unethical behavior toward humans.