Poetry and Animals

82POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

of course there will be no end to the animal as food source—only to the
animal as kin in the larger environmental sense that Lehmann points
to. Though there are many poems on the idea of meat (Robert Creeley
and Charles Simic have powerful poems simply titled “Meat” that
directly confront the process by which an animal is turned to edible
flesh), and on the slaughtering of individual animals, I have found very
few poems that address the fact that billions of animals are slaughtered
every year for food, most of them in inhumane conditions. (One such
poem is Les Murray’s “Cows on Killing Day,” which I examine in chap-
ter 5.) The death of an individual animal we can mourn or celebrate,
valuing the individual life or drawing some kind of ritualistic power
from the account of its death. But the stark fact that we have configured
our own oversized existence on the planet through a system that pro-
duces and destroys animals at a scale we refrain from representing con-
structs the animal not as something domesticated or companionable, as
natural and part of the world, but as something infinitely malleable,
decomposable, and unrepresentable. The factory farm animal is an
industrial product, both an abstract idea and a brutal reality that we
rarely glimpse^49 and part of a system so depersonalized that poets and
poetry recoil. While the poems I have surveyed here show the possibility
of imagining the animal as a category in several ways, each way ultimately
celebrates the animal or its uses. The absence of a poetry of the animal
as factory product is itself a telling silence—a cultural reflection of our
refusal to address this fact collectively, perhaps because, as Coetzee says
in The Lives of Animals, it bears too close a resemblance to the Holo-
caust, about which poetry also cannot speak.