Poetry and Animals

186OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

And still I thought a piece of cloth

had flown outside my window, or human hands

had freed a wing, or churning gods revealed

themselves, or, great news, a northern owl,

a snowy owl, descended.

The poem suggests that the animal, the hope for and the idea of it, are
all linked, a longed-for meaning that can only occur in the poem itself.
For other poets, human-animal hybridity as a signifier of multiplicity
and unknowability becomes something absurd. Animals matter, and
the problem of the boundary between human and animal is funda-
mental but also something we cannot get past. What poetry does allow,
however, is play and exploration. In the poetry of Charles Simic, for
instance, we are far from allegory and much closer to surrealism’s idea
that in playful association truth might make an appearance. Hybridity
here is gestural and funny. His poem “Animal Acts” comically lists, in a
series of sentence fragments, animals who appear to be in a freak show
or circus, doing miraculously human feats. The poem’s examples of
animal acts move swiftly from the faintly plausible and amusing—“A
bear who eats with a silver spoon. / Two apes adept at grave-digging”—
to the absurd: “Rats who do calculus. / A police dog who copulates with a
woman... // A bedbug who suffers, who has doubts / About his exis-
tence.”^43 These “animal acts” are entertaining, presumably, because
of the contradictions revealed by animals doing what only humans do.
These “acts” require training and are illusions of the kind that Frans De
Waal argues entertain “because our culture and dominant religion have
tied human dignity and self-worth to our separation from nature and
distinctness from other animals. Since we are the only ones who eat with
cutlery—a sure sign of civilization—we are amused to see apes trying
to do the same.”^44
But Simic’s examples reveal the absurdity of this distinction and how
uneasy our laughter at such acts should be, since they show that the
veneer of civilization is thin. “Grave-digging” reminds us that humans,