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

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