Two Poems and A Discussion on the Nature of Animal Poetry by C S Hughes

 

How To Be A Cockatoo (After Judith Beveridge)

 

Raise your ire,

in an opera house coif.

 

Hang by one knee,

arms hooked and flailing,

from the clothesline’s lank trapezium.

 

Tear at the gazebo’s unkempt lace,

with an iron eye,

and a delinquent glee.

 

Warn the world you are all here,

in scraped blackboard oratorios.

 

Stretch and soar the way of clouds,

on scattered ice-cream days.

 

Bow like sunset divas,

in Tropicana curtain calls

 

 

Yowl

 

when I am a boy

I will stalk the tops of narrow fences

in night and death’s

musk camouflage

 

when I am a boy

with moon-slivered hooks

I will make rapier leaps

 

when I am a boy

I will arch like palisades

 

when I am a boy

I will catch

moonshadow from cold stars

 

when I am a boy

my mouth’s red cage

will slake silence sly as fire

 

when i am a boy

feathers will fly amok

 

when I am a boy

I will defecate under too bright stars

in the neighbour’s begonias

and smile knowingly

 

when I am a boy

I will disdain

gravity and all lesser laws

when I am a boy

you will know the song

of my fast-spun lives

 

when I am a boy

this yowl will glow

from my red coal mouth

 

when I am a boy

I will howl the abandon

of closed-fast doors

 

when I am a boy

I will sleep

curled with the weight of six thousand years

against your knees and chest

 

when I am a boy

I will watch bright motes

listening for the sun’s soft golden name

shouldered warm as laurels

 

when I am a boy

I will stretch

like the languor of summer’s final sundown

 

when i am a boy

I will slink

beneath a hawk-steep moon

counting the pincushion heartbeats

of swift, tremulous lives

 

when I am a boy

I will scratch delinquent cuneiform

in the wall’s blank slate

 

when I am a boy

in flailing oscillation

I will tear the nightshadow’s

fast fleeing flanks

 

when I am a boy

I will eat your breath

 

when I am a boy

I will be

the ink that spills across your dream

 

when I am a boy

I will arch and bristle

in your unkempt sleep

 

when I am a boy

I will bring you ragged remains

proud as Caesar

 

when I am a boy I will

with one eye slit open

curl at your feet

 

when I am a boy

I will love you with

eyes as big as worlds

 

when I am a boy

I will love you with

the moon’s cold proud disdain

 

when I am a boy

I will love you

with slow-churning pinwheel eyes

 

when I am a boy

I will gleam

still as porcelain

 

when I am a boy

against the too-bright glow

I will sleekly yowl

the way a poem is a cage

hungering for a bird

 

 

On The Impossibility Of A De-Anthropocentric Distance In Poetry

The freedom (despite the many constraints of any particular instance) that defines poetry, is, as poet and scholar David McCooey says, “one of the melancholy privileges of cultural marginality” (2012). Or to put it in the words of another poet, “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” (Kristoffersen 1970). Freedom entails a certain ambivalence, a surrender, an equivocation; a tension between seemingly opposing considerations. To grasp freedom, in life and poetry, we must forego everything, become unencumbered, embrace a more essential, a more authentic, a more animalistic nature. These are, of course, romantic and neo-romantic conceptions, I hear the critics say. What of it? Poetry is not a documentary; it is a romantic gesture, in the old sense of romance as a story - irregardless of how quotidian, how reseserved, how distanced, poetry narrativises both the poet and their life.

Attempting to reconcile similar dichotomies, Onno Oerlemans considers how, by rejecting the anthropocentric, the anthropomorphic and similar encumbrances, “something of the actual creaturely reality of the sentient beings that inhabit the planet might be found in or rescued from these cultural constructions” (2018: 13)

As exemplar, Oerlemans goes on to discuss J M Coetzee’s discussion of the jaguar in Ted Hughes’s eponymous poem in which he observes and imagines the beast pacing in its captivity. Somehow in the wild recesses of its instinct, it sees only and achieves the freedom of the savannah;

 

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.

(2018: 15)

Oerlemans (through Coetzee) finds the poem “presents an encounter with an actual animal rather than something obviously symbolic, conceptual, or otherwise artificial” (2018: 17). While far from the simple allegorical use both decry, the fact that a jaguar is a creature of jungle, forest, wetlands and scrub, rather than the rolling horizons suggested by the poem, the fact that we, audience, observers, readers, are brought into the desire of the animal;

 

As a child at a dream,

a dream so powerful that;                                    

 

                                               at a jaguar hurrying enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

 

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—

The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

By the bang of blood in the brain deaf to the ear—

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

(2018: 15)

indicates we are in discourse which while attempting to embody the animal in itself, nevertheless invokes an array of symbols that we cannot help but see as emblematic ofhuman concerns. Visionary, horizons, prison, rage, fuse, boredom, blind in fire, blood -terms almost mythopoeic in their resonance, are projections in which the dialogicalrelationship between author, poem, subject and reader is mediated by the figure of the animal.

If texts are, as Mikhail Bakhtin asserts, informed by a heteroglossia, a stratified and interconnected complex of meanings that evinces the “primacy of context overtext” (1981: 428), as we hunt meaning and sublime feeling through the poem we inevitably engage in both anthropocentric and de-anthropocentric discourse; in intertwined rhythms, meanings, symbols, semblances and observations some will bring us face to face with the creature’s “fearful symmetry” (Blake: n.d.), others inevitably with our own.

In the poem Yowl, preceding familiar and defamiliarising images of catness, their dual nature, emblematic of our dual nature - the sate, domestic, indulgent/the untrammelled, hungering, uncanny - is the anthropomorphic refrain, when I am a boy.

Rather than being concerned with loss and the past, the haunted return we hear in the elegiac, it speaks in a future conditional imperative tense, one of transformation and becoming; it is not only celebratory of catness, it posits the reader to become, to participate, to be. Rather than the repetition of lament, a chorus, a cantata, a paean, a serenade and salutation.

This repetition throws us forward, in repeated imprecation works like a spell, a mesmerisation, an autohypnotic trance. As Freud said, when “what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (1919: 4), merge and return, the wild with the tame, the familiar with the unfamiliar, we experience the uncanny, and, as Rosemary Jackson suggests (after Lacan), our subjectivity, “through violent reversal or rejection of the process of [its] formation” (1981: 53) dis-integrates.

While she argues that the mergings of “the fantastic [are] not metaphorical [they do] not create images which are ‘poetic’’” (1981: 47), the obverse, that the poetic cannot be fantastical, as evinced by examples from Poe’s The Raven, to Tennyson’s The Eagle, (and innumerable others, both classic and modern) is not true. In suggestion, in our heightened state, we become (perhaps), at least in reverie, in the imaginary topia of the poem, a night creature, no longer completely, fixedly human.

Similarly in the poem How To Be A Cockatoo (After Judith Beveridge) through a series of multivalent images we are enjoined in a process of zoomorphism to emulate the cockatoo (as in Beveridge’s poem we are enjoined to emulate the bat), and thereby deepen our sense of a creature that is often pilloried as a destroyer of crops and backyard furnishings. The words may seem anthropocentric, and yet as Birpai Elder and Knowledge Keeper, Aunty Rhonda Radley suggests, through emulation in dance, in song, and in the everyday encounters where a cockatoo flight presages rain, or an individual bird’s noisy presence marks the totem of a newborn child, “we're not separate from the birds, we're not separate from any creature” (Radley: 2023).

Through mimetic and metaphoric representations, Cockatoo, wryly invoking icons of the broader Australian culture, can perhaps build a more empathetic connection. Given the interconnected ways we construct meaning, attempts to divide nature/culture, animal/human to achieve a more authentic representation seem futile. The inverse of anthropomorphism is not zoomorphism, but dehumanisation - dehumanisation in the worst sense; one that others animals while claiming to privilege them, establishing binaries between a debased Anthropocene and an idealised Nature.

Binaries that, despite protestations, inevitably render nature under human dominion, and while, as W H Auden said, “poetry changes nothing” (1991), we should perhaps qualify that with the implications bound up in the elegy to Yeats that is the quote’s source; poetry changes nothing except the poet. Poetry is, of course, as suggested by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and others, the only literature where the reader, transported into a concomitant reverie, enters, if not a shared consciousness, at least, a parallel one.

Thus, even when that dominion is as marginal as the words of a poem, when we accept our un-rational, our transformative, our mythopoeic, our animal, our hungering nature, when we are all poets, that changes everything.

References

Auden W H (1991) ‘In memory of W B Yeats’, Collected poems, Vintage, New York.

Bakhtin M (1981) The dialogic imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, University Of Texas Press, Austin.

Blake W (no date) ‘The tyger’, Poetry Foundation, Accessed 21 September 2023, https://

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger

Freud S (1919) The Uncanny, trans. Alix Strachey, accessed 21 September 2023, https://

web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf

Jackson R (1981) Fantasy: the literature of subversion. Methuen, New York.

Kristofferson K (1970) ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ [song], Kristofferson, BMI.

McCooey D (2012) ‘Fear of music: sounded poetry and the poetry soundtrack’, Axon (2.1).

Accessed 15 September 2023, https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issues/2-1/fear-music-

sounded-poetry-and-poetry-soundtrack

Oerlemanns O (2018) Poetry and animals: blurring the boundaries with the human, Columbia

University Press, New York.

Radley R R (2023) ‘First Nations storytelling: birds of Australia storybox’, Australian Museum.

Accessed 21 September 2023, https://australian.museum/publications/birds-storybox/first-

nations-storytelling/

 

 

C S Hughes grew up by the bellow and stink of cattle yards, and the hollow and roar of dunes. He says he was a hobo in his youth, and later worked as a spice seller, a book dealer, a clock fixer, and a trader in junk and assorted detritus.

More recently he has dabbled around the edges of literature, editing From The Ashes - Poetry In Support Of Bushfire Relief, The Poetry Of John Ashdown-Hill and Somnia Blue, amongst others.

He has been published online and in print in Blue Pepper, Five 2 One, Weird Tales, Sampietrino, The Blue Nib and various others. He has published several collections of his own work, including, The Little Book Of Funerals, The Book Of Whimsies, Sound Never Dies & Other Poems, the short story collection The Book Of Fables, and the novella in verse, COVID-22.

He currently lives in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria with a cat and an historian, where he (still) studies and dabbles in story writing, but claims, with a nearly straight face, to still mostly being a hobo.