56POEMS OF THE ANIMALdomesticate, consume, and observe. These are the kinds of animals
most commonly found in art and poems.
It is something of a paradox that we can so easily use and accept the
animal as a broad category (as in animal studies and animal rights)
given our awareness of the complexity and variety of life and that the
category fudges our own status as animals. Beyond the scientific uses of
the category, why do we need or imagine it? While Agamben and Der-
rida make the case that the category exists to separate humanity from
the natural world, this is only one reason among many. As with other
forms of discourse, poems imagine, imply, and figure the category of the
animal in many different ways, with different effects and meanings.
Writing a poem that figures the category of the animal can have the
effect of distancing humanity from the community of nonhuman ani-
mals, to see it as other and strange. Or it can identify the community as a
group deserving of attention and care. Or it can idealize or de-idealize
animals or humans. Animals as a group can be figured abstractly or
concretely, through multiple examples, or by simply speaking directly
about “the animals” (the title of several poems). It almost goes without
saying that ideas about the animal or animality are also deeply bound
up in culture and history, all the more so because this is the broadest
and vaguest category and so bound with defining humanity.^9 Inuit
culture understands the animal very differently from other cultures in
North American, for instance, and Inuit culture, like all cultures, also
changes over time. I will largely be side stepping these important con-
texts in this chapter, but it strikes me that a broad view reveals some
continuing truths—that ideas about the animal vacillate between poles
of similarity and difference, savagery (bestiality) and docility, mindless-
ness and mindfulness, and stasis and progress. Reading poems indi-
vidually allows us to see these vacillations in action.
As we saw in chapter 1, explicitly allegorical representations of ani-
mals like those of fables offer one way of figuring the animal broadly.
That is, the less a poem concerns itself with a specific actual animal, the
more it allows itself to be read as about something like animality in gen-
eral. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is clearly less interested
in a specific rooster, or chickens and foxes, than it is in a broad array of