levelheaded: You need do not need to fear the heat

If two-hundred years of Romanticism have conditioned us to periodically walk out of our million monochrome apartment complexes, hop into our Priuses (Prii?, Priora?), drive an hour and a half to a national park, and write poems extolling the unwavering beauty and benignity of Mother Nature, Rick Kempa seems to think we are missing the point. Yes, his speaker declares “willows arching overhead / will lend their shade” and that “[y]our old brown friend / the river is by your side[,]” but these are brief, early moments of hope for a speaker reluctant to admit the fearsomeness of the natural world.

The poem’s first half is a series of assurances. We have no reason to “fear the heat.” Our slice of nature is shaded and well-watered. We have brought a tent and a satchel of trail mix. But these assurances (and reassurances)—even before we’re explicitly asked, “Why then this vague dread?”—are undercut by our need for comfort at all. The speaker only tells us we “do not need to fear the heat” because we are afraid of the heat. He reassures us that the river is our “old brown friend” because we are afraid of dying of thirst. We have “the nut, the dried fruit, / the seed,” but how long can we reasonably expect these to last?

Or on the other side of the same coin, why have we come to a wilderness in the first place? Rick Kempa’s poem conflates a Romantic view of nature (in which nature is all purity) with a pre-Romantic notion that the natural world is chock full of lions and tigers and bears (all of whom have a taste for human (and livestock) blood). The second half of the poem—after Kempa’s extraordinarily outright volta—directly approaches the “fear” and “dread” we can experience when faced with open, unoccupied space. The poem becomes a reminder of the sublime, of the smallness of humanity in the midst of Everything. It also becomes a reminder of the smallness of humanity in the midst of language. The speaker becomes as trapped in language as the “air trapped in a box canyon.” There is the subtle recognition in the writer’s use of simile that language can only approximate this feeling of entrapment. When the speaker tells us “[y]ou wish you were in need / of something you could move / toward[,]” he writes us into a riddle. Our only escape is the poem’s final, frustrated plea for survival—a barbaric yawp if we’ve ever heard one.

-The Editors