INTRODUCTION11poems, as I will show, may align with any of these strategies and some-
times all of them at once. My general argument is that poetry’s inherent
playfulness, its resistance to rules and codes, its openness, allows it to
break out of ideologies and categories, to be at once anthropomorphic
and antianthropocentric.
R
My ambition is to produce here a field guide of poetry about animals,
which is both an overview and a sampling, one that begins to account
for the variety of work poetry can do for and about animals and our
interests in them. The only other full-length study that attempts to do
this is Randy Malamud’s Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. Noting the
absence of serious analysis of poetry about animals, Malamud usefully
surveys the work of several well-known twentieth-century American
poets. The book is somewhat limited, however, in its scope and in its
evaluative schema. Malamud’s activist mode of criticism foregrounds
the ability of art to represent animals respectfully, allowing animals in
one way or another to be “present.” For Malamud, bad poems about ani-
mals (which he sees as legion) are actually about humans, accepting
Calarco’s claim that any degree of anthropomorphism is a kind of fail-
ure.^24 He thus dismisses all first-person lyric poems as guilty of fore-
grounding the human over the animal. Good poems are those few that
make explicit their inevitable failure to represent the animal. Moreover,
Malamud ignores matters of form. Indeed, Malamud is not really inter-
ested in poetry as a specific mode of writing, but simply as one more
mode of mimesis, as though the purpose of all art about animals should
always be to make the animal present. This is a simplistic ethics posing
as a kind of aesthetic. Thus, although he admires Marianne Moore’s
poetry because it presents “a panorama of animals and animal experi-
ence,” he also complains that her poems are “choppy and difficult; it’s not
the form I would have chosen for such outstanding poetic animals....
The important thing about style for my purposes here is that it not
overwhelm the spirit of these works.... Ideally, the imaginative texts
that springboard readers to a range of metaphorical relationships with