Zoopoetics

A Look at Cummings, Merwin, & the Expanding Field of Ecocriticism

Author(s)

  • Aaron M. Moe Washington State University Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10047

Abstract

The premise of zoopoetics is that nonhuman animals possess agency as they dwell imaginatively, rhetorically, and culturally on the earth. These claims are contentious, and therefore they are defined and defended through drawing on the work of rhetoricians, ethologists, poets, and theorists.  Though zoopoetics could illuminate the work of many poets, the essay focuses on the works of E. E. Cummings and W. S. Merwin, for they both have written numerous poems that not only explore the agency of nonhuman animals, but also create interspecies borderlands where the animal engages the human just as much as the human engages the animal.

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Author Biography

  • Aaron M. Moe, Washington State University

    Aaron Moe is a doctoral student at Washington State University. His research interests include the rhetorical energy of gestures (textual and bodily), poetry and poetics in the long twentieth century, and a multiculturalism that includes nonhuman animals. His work has appeared in The Journal of Ecocriticism, Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, CT Review, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

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Published

2012-02-12

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Moe, Aaron. 2012. “Zoopoetics: A Look at Cummings, Merwin, & The Expanding Field of Ecocriticism”. Humanimalia 3 (2): 28-55. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10047.