INTRODUCTION23sense of the meaning of the species, its distinctness, beauty, and place in
the world. Such poems attempt to articulate some essence of the species
rather than relying on morphology or genealogy, as biology does. They
may involve encounters with specific representatives, but these repre-
sentatives are understood as examples of the type.
There are of course other concepts one can bring to the taxonomic
project. There are lyric poems about animals, often about single encoun-
ters with specific animals, and narrative poems, of which there are a
wide variety of kinds (making narrative perhaps less useful as a cate-
gory). Within lyric poems, there are poems that foreground their human
speakers and the effect the animal encounter has on them and those in
which the human speaker appears almost not to exist (e.g., certain poems
by Gary Snyder and Robert Creeley). There are poems that present the
encounter with the animal only in fragments of images or narrative and
poems that provide relatively full and complete contexts. There are poems
in which animals speak, or rather, in which the author attempts explic-
itly to ventriloquize or translate animal desire and intention. And there
are many poems that are hybrids of categories I have mentioned— the
platypus of animal poems—and that defy categorization, even interpre-
tation, a terrific example being James Dickey’s “Sheep Child.” I exam-
ine these poems in chapter 5.
Given that there is no obvious system for taxonomizing animal
poems, one might rightly wonder what the point of this exercise is. There
are also plenty of topical categories one could include, such as zoo
poems, hunting poems, pet poems, wild poems, and imagistic poems.
Categories proliferate. Like individual sentient animals, each poem is
unique, implying its own distinct category and so effacing category alto-
gether. The practice of poetry thrives because it creates rules and con-
ventions in order that they might be broken, and so one might argue
that a paradoxical essence of poetry is a hostility to categories. The prob-
lem of organization is central to the project of surveying poetry about
animals, and to answering the fundamental question of what good
poetry can do, and has done, for the animal and what good the animal—
and individual animals—has done for poetry. The usual solution has been
to write on poets who have written animal poems, which necessarily