"Cute, naive, with your foolish nests / on the ground", is how the poet Silke Scheuermann describes the flightless bird Dodo, which with only one egg per year and too many predators was not destined to live long.
He died out on the Mauritius around 1690 and fell into oblivion until contemporary poetry rediscovered him as a symbol of rampant species extinction in the Anthropocene era.
The poet Mikael Vogel has also approached him in his volume “Dodos on the Run.
Requiem for a Lost Bestiary.
Poetry and Essays” (Verlagshaus Berlin, 2018) and also a memorial to ninety other animals that have disappeared from the map.
Angela Gencarelli discusses the poetic means Vogel found for dealing with the loss of biodiversity in a special issue of the French magazine "Germanica" on the subject of literature and the environment ("Elegiac history of species extinction - On Mikael Vogel's culture-critical 'bestiary' Dodos on the run “, Volume 69/2021 / OpenEdition Journals).
At the University of Graz, the literary scholar, who did her doctorate in Bonn with a thesis on particle physics and poetics under Irmtraud Morgner, is preparing a habilitation thesis on “Bestiaries of Modernity.
Literary renegotiations of a medieval text genre”.
Where did the passenger pigeon go?
According to Gencarelli, Vogel's theme in his volume of poetry is "the inseparable interweaving of the disappearance of animal species with the expansive advance of humans", although the miniatures are not "anti-compensatory mourning poems".
When the poet laments the disappearance of woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons and the like with an elegiac gesture, he is not aiming for a banal gift of consolation through the lyrical refinement of those former inhabitants of the earth.
Rather, in programmatic explanations of his writing, he opposes any "garnishment" of poetry with animal beings, which ultimately only served a decorative purpose.
He strives to renew the animal poem genre by ascribing a personality to his protagonists.
On the basis of encyclopedic research, the poet vividly emphasizes their charismatic qualities, reminiscent of the "bright green [n] cascades" of the Carolina parakeet or the gigantic heart of Steller's manatee.
After such exotic species have first been portrayed in the poems, there is usually a turning point with the mention of human settlement or the conquest of the once wild area, including the displacement of the corresponding species.
Hard cuts are mostly used in these prototypical compositions.
Words are thus split across the line boundary (“off / sawing off”, “quill / stub”), which is intended to convey the violence of the invasion.
It is immediately obvious that these poems are inspired by modern animal ethics and cultural human animal studies, as they propagate an appreciation of animal life in the shadow of morally questionable factory farming and an unleashed hunting practice.
But Vogel's approach goes even further for Gencarelli.
For example, he repeatedly combines the subjugation of various animal species with that of indigenous peoples.
According to the statement behind it, power imbalances that are noticeable between the species also run between ethnic groups and are therefore based on the same colonial thought patterns.
On the one hand, Vogel works in a cultural-historical chronology - from the expeditions in the fifteenth century to today's "chainsaw massacre" in the rainforests - the "universal scenario of decline", starting from the "expanding 'Homo destructivus' that almost completely occupies the planet", on the other hand points he gave poetry the task of an archive.
And in several respects: it preserves the expression and grace of vanished animals for future generations and at the same time transmits the knowledge of foreign, endangered population groups.
So today we would have more detailed knowledge about the Central Australian rabbit-kangaroo, mainly thanks to the "Tales of the Aborigines".
The same applies to the New Zealand bird of prey, the Haast eagle, described in the “Legends of the Maori”.
In small, precise steps, Gencarelli approaches the specific nature writing of Mikael Vogel in her essay, whereby she clarifies the fundamental potential of poetry in dealing with the global climate and environmental crisis more en passant than explicitly.
Lyrical poetry is able to give a face and thus an emotional quality to anonymous numbers such as the 27,000 animal and plant species that become extinct every year.
The admonishing appeal is just as much at her disposal as the commemoration.
Held in the bound language with its images and rhythms, what has been lost finds its place – in a bestiary of only imaginable beauty, in which, after nature, in the end only man appears as the monster.