Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry

Abstract

In the past decade or so, a handful of studies have begun to investigate the relationship between poetry, form, and ecology or ecological conditions—from Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (U of Georgia P, 2002) to Scott Knickerbocker's more recent Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (U of Massachusetts P, 2012). Some scholars call this area of study “ecopoetics.” Aaron M. Moe's Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry marks an intervention into this emerging field. In Zoopoetics, Moe argues that poiesis and poetry are multi-species events, or “zoopoetics.” He defines zoopoetics as “the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species' bodily poiesis” (10). For Moe, animals are makers, and this fact has long shaped the making of poetry by humans. To illuminate this claim, Moe considers theories of the primacy of gestures in human language and across human–animal spheres. In presenting evidence of the gestural origin of speech, Moe is able to argue that animal gestures should also be taken seriously as having their own “rhetorical energy” (15). Moe then traces a zoopoetic lineage, reading E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman as inheritors of a Whitmanian zoopoetic tradition. He discusses everything from the way Cummings's “grasshopper poem” (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) reenacts the insect's poiesis through textual leaps and sound structures, to how in the “multi-species polis” of a Hillman poem, earthworms on the State Capitol steps “legislate” through the mere presence of their porous, toxified bodies (131). Between the book's chapters are “interludes”—explorations of research on species and interspecies communication and poiesis (e.g. vocal-range expansion in beluga whales resulting from contact with humans; cultural breakdown and retaliation in elephant populations as a consequence of habitat loss)—that are a testament to the book's serious interest in other-than-human making.