THE BEAST
Don’t say that you love me!
Just tell me that you want me!
Tusk! Tusk! Tusk! Tusk!
—Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk”
THE ANIMAL
This lecture⋆ is called “The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human,” but it used to be called simply “The Animal.”
When I called it “The Animal,” I was using the word animal l for a few reasons. The first is because for a long time I have been interested in the idea of the Wild in poetry, and the idea that poetry is an animal somehow through its wild use of language. I’ve been invested in the notion of a poem being feral (as Lucie Brock-Broido described this term to her students) and how this ferality could make a being partly not part of itself and partly wholly of the self
The wild in poetry is what I’ve always felt poets carry to the making of new language. I probably formed this idea way back in graduate school, when I studied with the poet James Tate. In his workshops, he didn’t always talk that much, but at least once per poem, he’d say something. Sometimes he’d say, this poem is wild or this word or image is wild, and that was the greatest compliment of all. I’d be sitting there waiting and hoping each week he’d say that about something I had done, and sometimes he would. Wildness in poetry, I guess you could say, became then a quality of the ideal.
All poets harness a wildness in the I of our poems. An I in a poem contains so much ego—is so puffed up with its brute strength—that it is willing to shred itself in the space of the poem. Or, that is to say, it feels so strong and confident to be itself that it feels completely free not to be anything at all.
An I in a poem is free because it really can be anything, despite the fact that some of us try to make the I the poet ourselves. I guess I mean to say when I know something is wild, I want it to be everything. A poem is wild when it is not predetermined. It can be anything it wants to be, and it does, and it does not give itself away at any point. Like a thing that can breed endlessly, it expands without asking. Like when they sing that song “Wild Thing,” do they mean you? They do.
Emily Dickinson talks about the wild:
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
This poem at its face seems to be all about love. After all, what is wild love on a wild night? So many songs have been sung about it, and we have loved these songs. I have loved them, at least. Haven’t you? But I am not sure that I have ever felt it: this wild love in a wild night, with a wild heart.
Well, certainly I’ve felt that: a wild heart. I know that I have felt wild sexual passion at least for a moment or two in this lifetime. I know that I have felt wild emotional obsession that I let overtake me, for example, to let me fly across the country for the sake of even just a whiff of it. Sometimes not even for that. Just more for the idea of two people running toward each other in the rain. Like that ever happens. (Will it?)
But I am not sure I have ever known what it is to be in the moon of a
