Zoopoetics: Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, Brenda Hillman--& Other Animal Makers

Aaron M. Moe

Zoopoetics is the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness towards another species' bodily poiesis. The range of the dissertation, from Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass to Hillman's 2009 Practical Water, demonstrates that zoopoetics is not a minor event in the American tradition of poetry. Nor is zoopoetics limited to humans; other animal makers (elephants, beluga whales, and more) discover innovative breakthroughs in the forms of their makings through an attentiveness to, at times, humans. Throughout the argument, ANIMAL/HUMAN spheres merge through a shared practice of poiesis. In order to give zoopoetics an architecture, I draw on ethology, animal rhetoric, animal studies, ecocriticism and other literary theory, as well as the poetic tradition. The interdisciplinary argument of zoopoetics contributes to what Cary Wolfe calls the "radical revaluation of the animal" within culture and society (Zoontologies xi). I do so, though, by focusing on the poetic body and on the micro-universe of poetry. Gestures are paramount to this project: the gestures of animals; the gestures of humans; and the gestures of poetic form in all of its materiality on the printed page. Through material gestures, the sphere of the printed page merges with the sphere of the animal. Just as Whitman is one of the headwaters for modern American poetry, he is one of the headwaters for zoopoetics. His "original energy" of the body is not limited to humans, but rather includes the poiesis of many species. Cummings, in a radical way, further explores the "original energy" of animal gestures and the material gestures of his makings. Exploring the zoopoetic dynamic through Cummings' oeuvre demonstrates the pervasiveness of his attentiveness towards animals, and how such attentiveness led to some of the most innovative poetic forms of the 20th century. Merwin's and Hillman's poetic forms exhibit zoopoetics, but they write with an acute awareness of mass extinction. Zoopoetics undergoes a needed iteration. Merwin attentively engages the presence, and absence, of animals amidst mass extinction, and Hillman invents forms (the post-pastoral lyric) to explore the animals--and endangered animals--who are already in the civic space of the polis.

Zoopoetics: Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, Brenda Hillman--& Other Animal Makers

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