For decades, The Forest Service had a program of trying to put out every fire immediately, which was a disastrous error. This is because fires are natural, and they keep highly flammable undergrowth from becoming overgrown. Of course, during this time we also logged all the larger trees, the ones more resistant to fire. These two factors led to the humongous, unstoppable wildfires we have today, because all the trees that could slow them have been cut down, and all the brush that they feed off was allowed to grow.
I love how everything in the world is a metaphor. Surrealists, if taken literally, are going crazy on this: the hamburger is the eagle, the heart is the sidewalk, the piano is our mortality. I wonder what sort of complex allegory we could craft to make the situation of wildfires applicable to poetry.
Have we cut down the larger poets, and allowed the smaller ones to grow by not extinguishing what would have put them out? Or, is this a situation in which we want the wildfire, and we have allowed the poets of history to grow too strong in our minds, that the agony of their influence on us is that they are blocking us from the sunlight?
To keep on the trees theme, Easter Island is a fantastic example of grotesque deforestation in an area that was once lush with forest, and also with both land and sea birds, only to become completely bereft of all of these things. The island's inhabitants just chopped down all the trees until there were none left, using trees for firewood, to build canoes, and to help them put up their silly statues, which are likely the only reason any of us know what Easter Island is.
In this metaphor, I wonder whether the trees that have all been cut were tradition, or meter. Nah…those are too easy. Instead let’s say it’s the idea that a poem is where you go for spiritual knowledge, for the truth. As soon as poets ceded this territory to prose, the marginalization had begun.
And now, through the eyes of the more debbie-downer among us, many of our grand statues have been tipped over, the populace has resorted to cannibalism, and no one comes to visit except tourists.
Cannibalism is common in the annals of human history. The Anasazi, who thrived in the Four Corners region of Southwest America, definitely had cases of it, even though their complex of irrigation and architecture was some of the most impressive in the pre-Columbian New World. Europeans ate each other in West Greenland, while poets of all sorts have been eating each other for centuries.
And Europeans, this time in Australia, were so short-sighted that they imported for hunting purposes non-native rabbits and foxes to the island, to such degree that they’ve spent the last hundred years trying to get rid of them by introducing diseases and blowing them up with dynamite. Very poetic!