JP Grasser

[Wilderness]

[Wilderness] first germinated two years ago. At the time, it was the mere seed of an idea about the human ego and its role in Global Warming. I spent my free time hiking the California hills, and as I did I thought a lot about webs and hierarchies, anthropocentricism and species identity. I worried about the unforeseen effects of social media and technology on the ego. For a while, I carried around a scrap of paper on which I’d scrawled a phrase from Claude Lèvi-Strauss, “Animals are to good to think with.” I worried about all the animals we poets have used as vehicles and mere vessels of thought. I buried the scrap of paper in my garden.

The ground was drought-fissured and the grasses were waiting tinder. A few nights, earthquakes rattled me awake. I loved the smallness they shook into me. I began to conceive of something I called the Wilderness Lyric. I wanted a poetics of loneliness, of kenosis, of evacuated subjectivity—something that might help to recalibrate humanity’s relationship with the environment. Something to get our egos in check. On Oct. 9, 2017, I came face-to-face with the Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County. In hindsight, I should’ve been terrified, but the ruling emotion was instead repulsion: the highway was gridlocked with awestruck motorists, phones in hand, snapping pictures.

I wanted a poetics that renounced both the Wonder of Nature Poetry and the didacticism of Ecopoetry. Can there be Wonder, in an age of mass extinction? I didn’t want to read more poems marveling at pyrophytic trees and their genius, fire-loving pinecones. Both Wonder and moralism felt like offshoots of the root problem—the promotion of humanity within our collective imagination and the ensuing demotion of other species, a reinforcement of hierarchy. As for moral instruction, the deciduous question was: Who am I to argue for the ethics of environmentalism, for any ethics, when the human ego got us here to begin with? Let the rabbits solve it, I thought. Someone give the gavel to the octopodes. Why can’t the chickadees be in charge?

Which is to say, I wanted to stop being human. But I wanted keep on being, too. Something of a dilemma. Was the Wilderness Lyric different from the Pastoral? Yes, absolutely, I knew it was. Could I explain how and why? Not exactly. I knew that the husbandry and stewardship of the (Neo-)Pastoral didn’t matter here. In fact, it seemed like the Wilderness Lyric would actively distance itself from the cultivation of plants and animals, along with the pretense that human intervention and manipulation is, or even can be, benevolent. Was this tantamount to burying one’s head in the sand? Maybe. Was it akin to the Necropastoral? Sort of. It was atavistic, in flux, and more concerned with process—the movement of the mind, a methodology to lose the self—than product. And, like the Necropastoral, it wanted to retreat (quite impossibly) from constructed, anthropogenic systems like Identity, History, Politics, and Time. Past those boundaries, though, I hadn’t the slightest clue.

So, I asked poets to send me poems on the topic of “Wilderness,” with no further definition or instruction, which I’ve collected in this folio. The greatest commonalities I see in them are that the poems embrace confusion and that the poems are deeply human, that inescapable condition. Wilderness-the-body, Wilderness-the-mind. The wilderness of trading innocence for experience. The wilderness of pain, pleasure. Collective loss, memory, extinction. And, too, a willingness to embrace human subjectivity as part of a manifold system, rather than to renounce it wholesale. I hope you will read and think, and that you will feel both small and significant, at once, impossibly.

—JPG