26INTRODUCTIONencounter and perhaps understand another nonhuman being—so pow-
erful? Part of my argument is that the self-conscious creation of the lyric
moment allows poets to invent forms of contact that can shape and feed
our sympathy.
Chapter 5 is on hybridity, on poems about mixing animal kinds,
imagining human-animal crossings, and mixing forms. While the other
types of poems I examine imply an idealization of the very idea of type—
of an essence of animal, human, species, or even individual—poems on
hybridity complicate and undermine these other categories. I discuss the
idea of hybridity, its biological roots, its appeal to poets, and the various
kinds of work that recognizing and imagining hybridity can do. On the
one hand, I see these poems as a substantial and important body of
work, a consistent way of thinking about the meaning of animals. After
all, animals reproduce, mutate, and cross both naturally and as a result of
human control and experimentation. On the other hand, these poems
are by definition resistant to classification and abstraction and thus call
into question taxonomies of all kinds, including the one I am suggesting
for this book. I think of this chapter as my own explicit acknowledgment
of the limitations of categorization, of the remainders left out by the tax-
onomy of animal poetry I build toward in the other chapters. It helps to
prove the case, I hope, that there is an inevitable tension between ideas
of category and their tendency to dissolve, the many and the one.