Charles Olson's parenthetical admonition in his "Human Universe" seems—as if he wanted to avoid the charge laid against, I think, Camus, that he was a "human racist"—at least self-directed: "It behooves man now not to separate himself too jauntily from any of nature's creatures."

Michael McClure has taken Olson's parenthesis to heart. He wrote an essay once about Gerard de Nerval's "The Black Spot," and praised Nerval for "showing us our kinship with all creatures." He made this poem a rallying cry for a new consciousness: "LET US THROW OUT THE WORD MAN! Such poems as this translation of Nerval remind me that I am MAMMAL!… The poem makes me see the surge of life…. We become Mammals as we were once Men." Others of McClure's Meat Science Essays develop this mammalism (which can slide, in that famous treatise on Jayne Mansfield, into mammaryism). As Mammals...