Moe, Aaron M., Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry

Abstract

Aaron M. Moe, Zoopoetics: Animals and Making Poetry. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. x + 159 pp.The following Thoreauvian questions have been fundamental to literary ecocriticism: can humans speak for Nature? If so, who, and how? In his Zoopoetics: Animals and Making Poetry, Aaron M. Moe answers, yes, some human poets (including Walt Whitman) can, and they do-first, by paying attention to behaviors other and then by translating this alter-species semiotics into human discourse. In poetry Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman, Moe explore [s] how an to contributes to each poet's makings (22). Moe's insistence, moreover, upon an integral relationship between other-species behavior and human poetic form these poets renders his contribution to ecocriticism more ambitious than, say, M. Jimmie Killingsworth's 2004 study on Whitman's ecopoetics, Walt and Earth, which it is shown that poet's tropes often reveal vital connection with biosphere. For Moe, human poetry is not monospecies event, but multispecies one (24); and so zoopoetics as critical practice involves discovering breakthroughs [poetic] form through an to another species' (10). This is Moe's favorite sentence, since he uses some form it several times chapter describing by his four poets. This repetition becomes problematic, however, as reader eventually wonders if every poem discussed is truly some innovative breakthrough form issuing immediately from observing another animal's semiotics, if such empirical attentiveness actually is sine qua non for eco-mindful poetry, and if bodily is more than just dangerously anthropomorphic metaphor such critical context.Moe finds commonality and rhetoric material primacy gesture itself (9, 16, 12); priori to human is poiesis shared by many animals (17). This leads directly to Walt Whitman, since discussion the human body, as Moe admits, retrace [s] well-trodden steps scholarship (38). But this move also entails too broad conflation two related but separate points regarding rhetoric: 1) centrality material (human) body to human language and discourse-now critical commonplace contemporary theories poetics; and 2) importance other animals' gesturing bodies to human poetic form (Moe's zoopoetics), at least work certain attentive poets. The chapter elides two key places, as if asserting first point firmly demonstrates second, latter much tougher tenet to support.That said, Moe's turn to Kristeva's semiotique is perhaps his best, most ingenious attempt, via theory, to bridge species gap, common human/ non-human 'preverbal space' (35). In Whitman's words that print cannot touch, he pushes back to pre-linguistic energy of Kristeva's semiotic chora (40)-and (animal) body. Whitman's origin all poems thus necessarily incorporates the other species, via a deep universal poetics (37, 41), and poet's proto-Darwinian old becomes the same old law poiesis. (All italics are Moe's.) The critic's task is simply to expose places where gestures many still endure within his lines (26). Moe's main extended readings Whitman-of spider and eagle-are ambitious but problematic this regard, and demonstrate main difficulty with Moe's general argument and his specific attempt to see as proto-posthumanist who celebrated continuity between species (48, 49). Speaking an essay mine (2007), Moe writes that I also have explored Whitman's animals, but that I doubt that Whitman ever actually gets beyond his own anthropocentrism in his adoption another animal's 'barbaric yawp. …