Which Chimps Eat Which Ants? (Found Poem: Nishida & Hiraiwa, 1982)

The chimpanzees of Mahale
prey upon Camponotus
and Crematogaster ants,
but reject Dorylus ants,
while those of Gombe
prey upon Dorylus,
but reject Camponotus
and Crematogaster.
Since the two habitats
seem very similar ecologically,
the difference in entomophagy
might be due
to traditional drift.

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Comments

Kailashana

16 years 3 months ago

Everything is poetry, eh?

Everything is poetry, eh? Once we decide we're poets. ;-) Love. ~A "What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal." Albert Pine

Rob Graber

16 years 3 months ago

I Don't Know

This "found poem" business is one I enjoy; but I admit I am not entirely comfortable using the word "poem" this way. While I definitely do not think that everything is poetry, saying what is and what isn't is, uh, problematic... Thanks for commenting!

Skumpfsklub

16 years 3 months ago

Yeah, Rob, that's what happens.

I'm finding such things in "Ontological relativity," as well. Sometimes also in "Uncle Scrooge Comics." I haven't entered logics not Aristotelian into my blog post, and I have resisted the impulse to draw parallels between poetry and scientific endeavor. But I will dare it here, should it become useful, if you don't mind the location. You didn't write a poem, but you did find the poem that the poet missed, or did not care to mark apart as a deliberate poem. Is it fair to say that? I think so, and I judged the piece derived 'good.' Acknowledging my recognition of a poet's eye, perhaps, along with your poetic judgment of where the line breaks belong. But the piece defies crisp distinctions, as between 'prose' and 'poetry'---and some have already hinted that abandoning the distinction wouldn't upset them. What might be the replacement---since, as we have 'poem' and 'essay' and 'shopping list' and all the other terms (now increasingly in dispute), the temptation will be to retain the terms and hammer out some kind of conventions of language to utilize them, will it not? (By the way, I was delighted just then to use 'utilize' more or less properly in a sentence. I have so few opportunities to do so.) I am so tempted, though I would prefer to make the terms attributes. I.e., to speak of 'poetic thngs' rather than of 'poems' and to smuggle in some ideas from fuzzy logic. Should 'playful,' 'sneaky,' and 'strategic' be counted among the more important 'poetic attributes?' I think so, but I don't think the popular mood is yet right for general acceptance of that idea. Perry

Rob Graber

16 years 3 months ago

Playing with Form

Calling something a "found poem" raises the demarcation problem directly indeed, doesn't it? As prose, the passage is due entirely to Toshisada Nishida and Mariko Hiraiwa. But then (1) my thinking of it as poem-like; (2) my removing it from their context; (3) my breaking the lines; (4) my giving it a title; and (5) my posting it on a poetry website: These activities strike me as of an artistic nature, since they are playing with form. But do they suffice to make "Which Chimpanzees..." a poem? A poem by me? Oh, I don't know. It would seem odd to say that Nishida and Hiraiwa overlooked a poem; it is more as if their prose only now has become poem-like in the recognition and packaging--and now, our discussing!--of it as such. It seems, as you nicely suggest, if not a poem, at least a "poetic thing." The look, the sound, and the meaning of the passage caught my attention; I wanted to separate it out, shape it a bit, and present it free-standing to the world. Thanks!

weirdelf

16 years 3 months ago

What I want to know

is if the Mahale chimps disdain the Gombe chimps for their taste, or viceversa, or accept cultural differences. I saw a great series of poems written by homeless people, all based on some lines from a computing textbook. "Some codes can form cycles, this is interesting" Cheers, Jess, reprehensibly irrepressible

Rob Graber

16 years 3 months ago

Disdain?

Great question! I'll have to check the geography, but I believe they live too far apart to know or care about these cultural differences. However, by no means would I assume that an emotion as complex as "disdain" is beyond them. When selecting fruit from a given tree, some chimps are "choosier" than others; it is easy to imagine the attitudes that might form both within and between groups, given the apparent existence of snobs and slobs among them as among us. Thanks indeed!

kaligantsaros

16 years 3 months ago

Who said chimps dont make great poetry..

Fun stuff eh! , inadvertent poetry . Good stuff.

Rob Graber

16 years 3 months ago

What caught me first was the

What caught me first was the perfect complementarity of this "entomophagous" distribution; then, the word "entomophagy" itself; then there are the perfectly parallel constructions in the syntax (compare lines 2-4 with 6-8); and finally the high-flown conclusion with its reference to the pattern as possibly "due to traditional drift," which basically treats calling something an accident as if it were a satisfactory scientific explanation. (I see sort of an anthropologists' joke here--hope it makes sense). Thanks!

Skumpfsklub

16 years 3 months ago

this comment bears fruit, Rob

On reading it, I thought: "Why was I not caught by that?" And the explanation was easy: I made the assumption that 'traditional drift' was in-house shorthand for a tacit theory (perhaps: a monkey sees, a monkey does---and habituates to a particular 'tradition' by virtue of accident of birth circumstance, which will be conditioned by the incidence of 'competing traditions' locally). That led to further (rather vague) considerations of theoretics---and an epiphany! The conservative mind allows only the 'dominant theory' to inform observations. The liberal mind however, allows a single 'observation event' to do multiple service: it informs the 'single' event of observation in several ways, so multiplying the value of a walk in the park by just so many theories as are currently entertained. As a dabbler with a mind so open as to be called by some 'empty,' this is a very important epiphany to me. Thanks, buddy. Perry