Poetry and Animals

POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE117

Ammons, Margaret Atwood, John Kinsella, Don Mckay, W. S. Merwin,
Mary Oliver, Pattianne Rogers, Kay Ryan, James Wright, and James
Wrigley. Two dramatic motivations of the contemporary poet for poems
on species are the increasing pressure human civilization is putting on
other animals and the growing number of species we have made endan-
gered or extinct. These existential threats to animals are almost always
measured at the species level (and with some large animals, in terms of
populations within species), and poets have worked to draw attention
to threats to species we may not have heard of—such as Rogers’s “Justi-
fication of the Horned Lizard.” Don McKay’s poem “Identification” is
an ode to the peregrine falcon, “o dangerous / endangered species,” and
connects the difficulty of actually seeing and identifying the bird with
the species’ own tenuous grasp on existence.^57 Writing down the expe-
rience of fleeting observation is a desperate gesture at making perma-
nent what is ephemeral and a feeble protest at the natural and unnatural
world’s mutability. Only in poetry could we have James Dickey’s imag-
ined “last wolverine,” which enacts vengeance for the demise of its spe-
cies by eating the heart of an elk, mating with “the New World’s last
eagle,” and producing an apocalyptic offspring that will

rise beyond reason over hills

Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,

That it has come back, this time

On wings, and will spare no earthly thing.

This fantasy wolverine superhero enacts its vengeance by attacking
men building roads, railroad crews, and traplines, even as the actual last
wolverine—“small, filthy, unwinged”—leaves the world uttering only
“Lord, let me die but not die / Out.”^58 This poem recognizes poetry’s and
the individual animal’s ephemerality, their relative meaninglessness in
the face of much larger forces, but it serves at least as a rebellious elegy.
The act of representing species seems to call forth the concision and
implicit incompleteness of poetry, as well as its pressured language.
Identifying a species through poetry is a way of coming to know some-
thing about the animal, of reaching across divides to meet some version