OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID173the original wolverine in the poem as “skunk-bear,” an animal that is
not one thing but several, its multiplicity allowing it to morph into other
forms but ironically not saving it from extinction. For Dickey, imagin-
ing the multihybrid (wolverine-elk-eagle) is liberating, a way of access-
ing and representing the more than human, and an announcement of
allegiance with wild animals, a becoming fierce.
Dickey’s poem ends by acknowledging that the last wolverine will
ultimately be “small, filthy, unwinged” and “will soon be crouching //
Alone.” The poem is also explicitly about the poet co-opting the wolver-
ine and the hybrid versions he creates: “The timid poem needs // The
mindless explosion of your rage.”^29 The idea of a wolverine fighting to
the last (an aspect of its behavior and reputation), the desire that the
poet has created out of hybrid notions of animal “to eat / The world, and
not to be driven off it,” is the need of the poet to create, to resist and
write against death. The poet and the poem are the “blind swallowing
thing” as much as the animal, and the poem forcefully represents the
idea that artistic creation is akin to the animal instinct to resist death. “I
take you as you are // and make of you what I will.” This is also explicitly
self-serving, of course, since aspects of civilization that make poetry
possible are also those that build roads, railways, and even steel traps.
This is yet another way in which the poem is hybrid, serving animal and
human, insisting contradictorily that both are primary.
Probably the best-known modern American poem that depicts a
human becoming animal is Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear.” The poem
recounts the experience of a person hunting and then seemingly becom-
ing a bear. It is told in the first person, though the identity of the speaker
remains indeterminate, in spite of the detail recounted in the story. The
setting of the story and the hunt it relates suggest that the speaker is
Inuit—he hunts a bear in the tundra over a period of many days, using
a deadly bait made from whale blubber and a wolf ’s rib made “sharp at
both ends.”^30 Yet the language of the poem is formal, grammatical, and
precise, with no obvious gesture to signal that it is in some sense a trans-
lation from Inuit culture. The initial strangeness in the mode of telling
is that its present tense suggests repeated rather than immediate action,
particularly in the first section.