| Summary: |
Through analogical association and differentiation, the practice of the human-nonhuman animal correlative in poetry can shed light on the relationship between the physical environment and figurative language. Can the animal in poetry take the mediating role of weaving the human into nature, or does it remind us that humans are “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003) and forever set apart from nonhuman animals? This essay explores a number of contemporary Chinese poems’ engagement with nonhuman animals to better understand how figurative thinking links the sentient to the sensible, even when it points to an epistemological gap between human and nonhuman animals. Recuperating the Chinese contemporary debate around the slogan “poetry puts body into words”诗言体(Yu 2001), my principal aim is to explore the intersectional space between the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘knowledge,’ answering the questions: What is knowable? How does the body know? How does poetry know?
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