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Animals are a recurring poetic topos; they are anatomized, studied, personified, worshipped, reviled, mystified and addressed by poetry. Because language is one of the many abysses that exist between humans and other animals, they can provoke a crisis of communication, a realization of language’s helplessness to communicate across such an abyss. While humans tend to blame and denigrate other animals for failing to speak to us, Michel de Montaigne remarks in his ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ on the arrogance of blaming all other animals for this language gap, which is equally a human failing; we can no more discern the speech of nonhuman animal than we can control the effects of language (which is a nonhuman agency, after all, that speaks us as we speak it). Communication gaps, furthermore, exist between other animal species—even within this species— and Jacques Derrida emphasizes in L’Animal que donc je suis that the world is rife with such abysses. Rather than dismissing nonhuman others as inferior based on their perceived lack, why cannot we, clever and inventive animals that we are, be more open to the way other animals call us to adapt language? Cannot poets find a way to innovate with language, to change it in such a way that it can begin to offer a space to nonhuman animals, leading to a more hospitable way of understanding them? Any such innovation can only be an essai, doing the work of poesis, and so it is no coincidence that essays and poems, two forms of writing quite accustomed to innovation, seem particularly well-suited to adaptations that can record at least a trace of nonhuman agencies. In this time of environmental crisis, the humanities need to adapt, drawing on strengths in linguistic innovation, while abandoning thoughtless anthropocentrism, in order to begin to fathom what it is we lose when we lose species diversity.

Animots and the Alphabête in the Poetry of Francis Ponge