Being Eaten and Eating: Red Meets Her Wolf

• In Event: What Is a Poem Good For? The Possibilities of Poetic Inquiry Within Educational Research

Abstract

The performance of my poems based on the fairy tale Red Riding Hood will elucidate both my content and methods. My research is based on evolutionary ideas about human relationships with animals. Our species emerged in consort with animals, watching them, “participating in their world by eating and being eaten by them, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, making tools of their bones and antlers, and communicating their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them” (Shepard, 1996, 11)

Poets use language and performance to evoke emotionally and imaginatively resonant images, by which listeners and readers can not only hear and read, but also feel and imagine the poems. This too is supported by evolutionary ideas that highlight the importance of emotions throughout human history. Contemporary emphasis on cognition and rational thought has a relatively recent history, compared to the much older, primitive parts of the instinctual, emotional brain. Today, the traces of our earliest species experiences of being hunted are in our nervous systems (29). But we have gone beyond recognizing and naming our once-valid fears; we have aligned predatory animals with evil. The highly intelligent wolf, for example, has been reviled and destroyed so vehemently that they are extinct in parts of the world. While humans can continue to enjoy the fantasy of the chase, we need to rethink our destructive relationships with the other creatures with whom we share this planet.

My poetic research of the fairy tale considers wolves as others in a world where otherness is in danger. Through the character of Red the work cautions that people must better understand their encounters with animals because human assimilation of the world often results in the elimination of animal habitats and thus of the creatures themselves (Hoogland, 2011). Ultimately, our supposedly enhanced life styles may amount to very little without animals.

My mode of inquiry is a slight alteration of the overarching panel question, to “How does a poem mean?” as John Ciardi once asked. Ted Hughes (1977) answered in animal terms: “The special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it. The unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness, all that is too familiar to mistake. This is hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.”

The following aspects of my study are derived from Hughes’ quotation: 1) the sensory reading of the encounter (Red meets the wolf in the woods), 2) who is the wolf (multiple identities), and 3) what the wolf contributes to Red’s life (and to ours).

The study’s significance in literary, poetic, Canadian and global terms, is, in part, to “improve education and serve the public good.”

Author

• Cornelia Hoogland, University of Western Ontario