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Zoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species’ poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the material makings of poetry. Moreover, as many species are makers, zoopoetics expands the poetic tradition to include nonhuman poiesis.

All the known forms are present (plant, flower, tree, insect, critter, animal, fire, water, air, earth) but in surprises hitherto unknown ... in relations not yet perceived . . . not yet divined in full so rich is this new thing. o And what internal energy combusts and churns and implodes and explodes within the gulf of a maker? I daresay that it's why Whitman's \"A Noiseless Patient Spider\" reigns quintessential in understanding poetic being. All that energy, all the sounds and silences, all those spinning electrons whirling and combining within the soul/ abdomen of the poet/spider, waiting to be unleashed as an ever-driving pursuit and expression of being. o Ed Folsom discusses the physicality of Whitman's making his books, highlighting how the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass \"was self-published.\" Each night before bed, I slathered my hand in sports cream and covered it with a sock, like an aging baseball player.5 Crawford-like Whitman-necessarily slowed down in his reading and response to Song of Myself unlocking a kind of deep-reading that's inspiring not only for its excellence, but also for the sheer physicality of the demand. o SLOWDOWN!!- YOU CANNOT SPEED-READ THIS!- YOU ARE NOT AFTER INFORMATION!- YOU ARE STRIVING to find a way-of-being in relationship to words . . . to images . . . that takes time to unfold!- At least, this is one way to introduce Whitman Illuminated to students. The tortuous path of some spreads requires one to turn the book, round and round, even upside down, in order to read it.

\"Letters,\" for him, are \"in no way iconic.\" [...]they have \"no relation to that of the body,\" and even the sounds we speak-the \"minimal hearable fragments\"-are \"absent any trace of the sense-making apparatus of the body producing them. [...]Kennedy opens space to shift the focus from animal rheto- rics to animal poetics, for he hesitates in his argument at a crucial point. Because the line pulses with a dactylic beat (IT launched forth FILament, FILament, FILament, OUT of itSELF) -we expect the two soft beats following SELF. [...]this poem transcends the alphabetic system it begins in and becomes an ideogrammatic, material architecture where, to use Abram's titular phrase, the spell of the sensuous readily surfaces.

A fragmented reflection on the engagement with and teaching of Allen Crawford’s Whitman Illuminated. Necessarily so. As Whitman stated, \"There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth.\" If I were to set forth a reflection upon the Earth, it would involve a series of fragmented glimpses from the atom (and smaller) all the way up. That is, I’d attend to several parts pointing toward their relationship to the whole. The challenge, of course, is that every part is its own universe unto itself; one could spend a lifetime and never move from the atom to the molecule. A reflection on Allen Crawford's Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is an equally daunting task. Every detail of every illumination is its own part. Often, these parts correspond to phrases from Whitman’s poem in surprising ways. And as each phrase, word, and sound from Whitman is its own universe, the complexity of relationships compound with a vertiginous velocity. And so, with every figure and passage I include in this reflection, I provide discussion, but the discussion is woefully incomplete. I have spent over an hour with students discussing just one or two of the illuminations with their corresponding text, not unlike a cellular biologist who spends just as much time exploring the mitochondria with students. Here, I deemed it best to include multiple illuminations to better give a sense of the whole. Concerning wholes, the parts of this reflection cohere toward what Whitman may have meant by \"original energy,\" toward Eros, and toward the poiesis of the ever reaching tirelessly spinning words and images launched forth by Whitman and Crawford.

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.

In THE early months of 2011, I discovered the phrase “Kafka’s vast zoopoetics” from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, and I staggered (6 ). The multifaceted theories surrounding “ ecopoetics” had already impacted studies of poetry, opening up new ways of seeing what it means to dwell in language and on the earth. Derrida, though, does not define nor delve into the potential for zoopoetics to open up new ways of engaging poetry. To define the term, I draw on its etymology: animals (zoion) and the making of poetry (poiesis). Zoopoetics is the “process of discovering innovative