11 - Poetry

Summary

Introduction

The bodies of critical work in both ecocriticism and animal studies offer productive approaches to poetry that alert us to how the artform’s figurative and musical dimensions allow it to engage with nonhuman nature in ways that transcend mere depiction and powerfully convey our utter embeddedness in what we inadequately dub “the environment.” Such engagements thereby serve to undermine the anthropocentric discourses that authorize our continued exploitation and destruction of the other-than-human world. If a vegan approach to poetry is to distinguish itself from these critical ancestors, then, it must both draw upon the anti-anthropocentrism and empathetic attention to the nonhuman other that, at their best, they so successfully cultivate while also going beyond those considerable virtues to somehow embody, in its critical practice, the refusal at the root of veganism – namely, the radical abstinence from consuming or using the products of animal exploitation and execution. While recognizing this fundamental difficulty in staking out a specifically vegan reading practice, this chapter confronts that difficulty as a productive challenge, attempting to provisionally delineate a vegan mode of reading poetry in the teeth of the apparent discreteness of the realms of criticism and consumer choice. In the first section, I turn to one of the touchstone works of literary animal studies, J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), drawing from that text’s engagement with animal poems four potential parameters for the vegan critic of poetry. In the second section, I undertake an experiment within those parameters, taking as a test object D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Fish” – a text that, I argue, evokes meat-eating as a means of gesturing ethically beyond it, to a world in which the human consumption of animal flesh is seen as a paltry squandering of our relational potential vis-à-vis the nonhuman other, a world in which veganism’s sliver of utopian promise has blossomed into fulfillment.

Towards a Vegan Approach to Poetry: Elizabeth Costello’s Poetics of Corporeality

The second of The Lives of Animals’ two sections, entitled “The Poets and the Animals,” offers a rare instance of poetry being approached in illuminating ways from what might be construed as a vegan perspective, as the fictional novelist-critic Elizabeth Costello compares the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke to that of Ted Hughes in terms of their portrayals of nonhuman animals, specifically big cats.