A report from Washington: Trump, president of the United States, who refers to climate change as a hoax, a scam, has announced that “endangerment finding,” scientific proof issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2009, is finally being erased by him. This finding shows beyond doubt that greenhouse gases and climate change threaten our health and environment, not to mention the negative impact on other animals (of which we are one of the 8.7 million species on the planet, give or take), animals whose migration patterns, access to food sources, and habitat loss can lead to species extinction. We are living in a futuristic dystopian present.
If you’ve ever attended a Lit Balm poetry reading, a virtual reading series that was co-founded in 2020—an auspicious consequence of COVID: visceral proof of how connected we all are—by the poet, translator, and publisher of MadHat Press (which has published my work), Marc Vincenz, you would have heard his bio, recited by poet and scholar Cassandra Atherton’s (who writes an insightful introduction to No More Animal Poems) lilting, r-less Australian accent, in which a string of odd species of animals are detailed, hallowed neighbors of Vincenz who “lives on a farm in rural Western Massachusetts overlooking Herman Melville’s Mount Greylock (Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick), where there are still more eastern blood-sucking conenoses (kissing bugs), two-lined spittlebugs, and dragon hunters than ten-toed bi-pedal earthlings.”
Indeed, Vincenz’s newest poetry collection, No More Animal Poems, is written by one whose intimacy with the animal kingdom has compelled him to advocate on their behalf. The collection closes with a twenty-plus page memorial to the animals who have been declared extinct. Included are their extinction dates and the primary circumstances that have driven them to annihilation. Factors include loss of habitat, overhunting, war, the introduction of predatory animals, the introduction of invasive plant species, pesticides, and numerous other bipedal malignancies born from our greed, anger, and ignorance or our compulsion to be top dog.
That’s right, again, we’re animals, too, a classification we are unable to recall as we live our daily lives, wearing leather shoes and silk chemise, sipping rhino horn tea to rejuvenate our sex lives, and dining on (from No More Animal Poems) “thin-fingered walrus with walnuts, grilled jellied jellyfish and thyme,” which is on the dégustation “menu,” of this poetry collection that’s a paean to animals and a microscope on our belief in our inalienable right to manage other fellow animal species in any way that suits our momentary fancy. Within this faux French menu that works as the book’s structuring system and section titles is a dégustation selection or a tasting menu, though how can that word not bring to mind “disgust,” as we choose to taste diminutive bites of animals that are molded into appealing dishes to enhance the appearance of our social status and to disguise their animal carcass.
Furthermore, the word “menu” itself comes from the Latin “minutus” meaning small. Its root word is “minus” or to diminish, to take away. And we are taking away animal species—as the book’s final litany supports—when we assign animals roles to play in our lives. The first course on our book’s menu, as an hor d’oeuvre, is “false tree snail on the half shell.” False tree snail or achatinella apexfulva’s natural habitat is in Oahu, Hawaii, but due to the introduction of the rosy wolfsnail, the false tree snail has been declared extinct. And on that note, No More Animal Poems begins. No wait! Even before the extinct hor d’oeuvre, there’s the dedication—“for Ham, the first great ape in space.”
An adorable photo of Ham the Astrochimp, formerly known as number 65—strapped into his space capsule that looks like a baby stroller, wearing his sweet NASA helmet and a white knitted onesie—appears on the dedication page. Ham is an acronym for the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, his training location (what a way to be named though better than a number!). Although the space mission was “a success” and he survived high g-forces and weightlessness, and we learned what we needed from him to conduct manned space missions, after shooting him into space, we sent him to live the rest of his days in zoos, alone, an unnatural unsocial environment for social chimpanzees.
The first poem in the collection, we are told in Vincenz’s useful notes at the end of the book, was written for Ham, as well as the three monkeys who hear, see, or speak no evil and is titled “Planet of the Apes.” Who can forget the first time they viewed the last shot of that movie, awed to learn our propensity to go ape caused us to destroy Earth? Like the three monkeys, Ham could not convey his experience to us, which the poem does from his perspective:
[He] looked down upon the world
From a window in his capsule, where,
Despite the jungle spinning in his head,
He remembered to pull lever #45.
Down his craft tumbled.
Through the noisy stars,
Down through the even noisier clouds.
Though the acid rainstorm, into a quiet,
Quiet, forbidding landscape….
The “forbidding landscape” reminds us of that last scene in the movie but through Ham’s eyes. Animals, such as Ham, who have already lost their natural habitat are already living in that alternative movie universe and, furthermore, Ham is destined to be caged alone in a zoo, another forbidding habitat.
The environmental impact of space launches is significant, and we might recall the mention of acid rain in “Planet of the Apes”—a byproduct of burning fossil fuel that occurs when blasting off rockets—as we read the fable prose poem (of which there are many in the collection) “Acid Rain.” Here numerous animals congregate around Honey Lake to fulfill their various agendas. The lake water, itself, is beguilingly described with the type of details (bubbled and fizzed…strange shimmering colors) that can only be caused by severe pollution:
The lake water bubbled and fizzed and swirled. Microns of unnatural elements whipped through her confluences, strange shimmering colors, some never seen before. (Fragments of a life once led, on another continent in another constellation). And along the edges, a damselfly skimmed the surface searching for life, but found no one.
On the shore, the frogs were delighted as the worms rose dutifully to be devoured.
Like the frogs of the poem, we are captivated; for us, it is the alluring alliteration and consonance of sounds, while for frogs, it’s the surfacing of succulent worms. Frogs are highly sensitive to acid rain because of their permeable skin, which absorbs water easily, and, therefore, also pollutants. Eating toxic worms is responsible for the decline of the frog population. Thus, frogs are considered bioindicators of ecosystems.
Perhaps my favorite poem in the collection is “Biomimicry,” a list poem in two columns in which a product that humans designed is paired with the animals we have studied and emulated to engineer the product. For instance, “electric battery: electric eel, electric fish”; “LED lightbulbs: fireflies”; “saltwater desalinization: camel noses, beetles”; “Velcro: plant burrs & dog hair”; “suction cups: octopus & squid tentacles”; and “light-capturing satellites: moth eyes”. The evident entanglement between the innate intelligence of animals and our constructions to enhance our lives display our entanglement, in which we interact as linked entities.
“Quantum Entanglement: A Cosmic Rift” is another fable poem and the final poem in the collection that addresses our interdependence. Here is a symposium of a diverse selection of symbolic and some mythic lifeforms. The lifeforms are in conversation about absolutism—time, space, and individual identity. There’s the cosmic turtle who carries the world on his back, who has popped up in creation stories across cultures, and there’s the crow, another symbolic and mythological character that’s cross-cultural. Crow glides through the permeable veil in the cosmos, between life and death; and as the poem is investigating quantum entanglement, we can imagine the crow, the messenger, must easily pass through quantum multiverses. The fundamental philosophical questions that these entities—turtle, crow, snail, eel, and sunflower—are absorbed in is whether “the space between you and them doesn’t exist.” It is the electric eel who asks, “Isn’t the universe just atoms and particles?” And it is the crow who adds, “Deep inside matter, we’re all fuzzy and undefined.”
No More Animal Poems concludes by raising this crucial absolute perspective: we are entangled on a cellular level and by abusing any life force, we are abusing ourselves. We are asked to consider non-duality—that there’s no self and other but only oneness, a oneness with our environment, with all living matter. If this is probable, and in quantum physics it is, No More Animal Poems asks that we treat ourselves and those who abide on Earth with respect and humility. No small task for the human animal, especially considering our present political forbidding landscape. No more animals includes us.
***
No More Animal Poems
by Marc Vincenz
White Pine; 160 p.