3

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

The Species Poem

A

mong the uncountable poems that feature animals there is an

impressively large number (hundreds that I have found)

whose more or less explicit aim is to describe and define a

particular species. As Paul Muldoon says about his poem “The Hedge-

hog,” “As I tried to discover something of what made the hedgehog

a hedgehog, I was doing something poets have always tried to do, and

always will. The poet looks at the ptarmigan, or the tortoise, as if for

the first time, and tries to convey something of its ptarmigan-ness, or

tortoise-ness.”^1 Evidence of his claim that capturing the essence of spe-

cies is something “poets have always tried to do” might be found in the

numerous anthologies of poems about animals now on the market,

nearly all of which organize the poems along notions of animal kinds.

(Interestingly, Muldoon’s own Faber Book of Beasts arranges them

alphabetically by title.) It is perhaps not surprising that poets should

approach animals through the lens of type, since taxonomy is one of the

central means by which we know animals and think about them. Ani-

mals are those creatures whom we recognize first as belonging to a kind,

and this is true experientially, culturally, and biologically. That we think

of, perceive, and represent animals through the filter of a species con-

cept is so obvious that it perhaps barely needs to be discussed. However,

it is one of the central arguments of this book that there are in fact