12INTRODUCTIONanimals would be unencumbered by any stylistic mediation at all,
eliminating the need to ‘psych out’ and come to terms with the lan-
guage, the imagery, the voice.” A work of literary criticism that depicts
the act of reading and interpretation as a “psych out” cannot take us
far.^25
Much more interesting is the kind of animal-oriented criticism exem-
plified by Dan Wylie. In his essay on southern African elephant poems,
he remains deeply attentive to matters of poetic form, giving precise
readings of how these poems question “the conventional linguistic
boundaries of division... [while] at the same time, such poems do not
deny human culture.”^26 He argues that the power of this poetry lies in
its ambiguity and openness, rather than in the impossible ideal of
mimetic clarity, in taking “full advantage of the possibilities of language
to bridge and embody both anthropocentric and biocentric meanings.”^27
He forcefully notes that while it is obviously impossible for any kind of
writing to escape the bounds of human perception and culture, it is still
possible for poetry to “negotiate the borderlands between interspecies
subjectivity and exteriorized observation.”^28
The broadest way of stating the work that poetry can do is sug-
gested by the philosopher Dale Jamieson, who has written extensively on
our ability to understand and represent animal cognition. Knowing,
encountering, and assessing all modes of mental being, Jamieson argues,
including those of nonhuman animals, other people, and even our own
consciousness, is always a matter of interpretation, of making sense of
multiple sources of information, gaps, and ambiguities. Because the
process of understanding the mental life of other creatures is broadly
similar, there can be a “deep connection between what an organism
thinks and what thoughts an interpreter would attribute to the organ-
ism.”^29 The case I am making abstractly here, and through the poems I
examine throughout the book, is that poetry explicitly and forcefully
allows us to engage in this kind of interpretation about animals. Espe-
cially since the romantic period, one of the functions of poetry has
been to engage in precisely this kind of interpretation—formulating the
meaning of one’s own experience, and understanding that of others,