Between the Sky and the Stove: John Thompson’s Animal Encounters and the Extra-Linguistic Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Thompson’s poetry engages recent concerns in the field of animal studies. This paper addresses his struggle to move beyond language and toward the animal experience. Both of his poetry collections, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets and Stilt Jack, demonstrate his movement from the domestic sphere to the wild. This change rests on the human acquisition of language, which Thompson comes to distrust. This paper argues that he then struggles to reconcile his zoopoetics, as it employs a new sense of metaphor and image, in an effort to capture what cannot be expressed of the animal’s experience in the natural world. His zoopoetics shows how the act of composition in the poem itself might be read as an animal that the poet struggles to tame. While the real animal disrupts the poems with its subversive presence in the composition, he himself is transformed by these encounters and discovers a new identity, not as intruder, but as ontological shape-shifter. Ultimately, he discovers the importance of silence as a counterforce to words, and as an intricate force in the animal’s world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".