Friday, 13 of December of 2024

Midnight Musings by Dennis Fritzinger

When reading at the Rendezvous I always considered my audience. Who is the audience for “Bearshit on the Trail“? One always hopes a book will get a lot of new readers, but yeah, it’s Earth First!ers. And since Earth First!ers are getting older and dying, our pool of readers and prospective readers is shrinking.

The book is drawn mainly from the Armed With Visions page in the Earth First! Journal, with some of the poems obviously inspired by Earth First! campaigns going on at the time. These poems definitely have an Earth First! flavor to them. Other poems with an Earth First! flavor talk about monkeywrenching, usually humorously. Cutting fence, spiking trees, burning ‘dozers, each become topics at one point or another a poem hangs its story on.

Another thread that wanders through the narrative is respect for large, wild animals. Like bears, mostly, but also wolves, and especially Coyote, who shows up with his own Trickster narrative in hand.


There is an undercurrent of outrage driving many of these poems, usually below the surface but occasionally it comes up for air and we see it in full view. This is perhaps to be expected, since outrage is a typical driver of an Earth First! campaign.

A lot of things are exciting in the beginning and get less exciting over time, and editing poems for the Journal is no exception.

I took over during a time of upheaval when the entire Journal staff had quit and the new staff coming on was making up its mind what sort of magazine they wanted to publish. One of the changes they made was to drop the poetry page. Art  Goodtimes, the original editor, got a pink slip, and for an issue or two there was no Armed With Visions page, though poems were still sneaking in here and there.

I began to agitate for the return of the Armed With Visions page by writing an angry letter and sending it in, and to my surprise, it got published. I then decided to continue my campaign at the Summer Rendezvous coming up, and that’s how and where the Warrior Poets Society was born.

I knew that changes in the Journal would be discussed and argued over at the Rendezvous, and knew my proposal would have more weight with the backing of other poets, many of whom had considerable clout.

In short, my idea paid off and we got Armed With Visions back in the Journal. The downside, from my perspective, was no one else wanted to be editor, so I ended up accepting the job.

This was a heavy responsibility since I had no experience beyond a single issue working on a college magazine. Still, what could I do? Dive in and try my best.

I did have the example of Art Goodtimes to go by, and that was a plus. Ten years of excellent poetry chosen, arranged and illustrated with indigenous graphics. Ten years of poetry that was part of the ferment of the first ten years of Earth First!

That was the example I had at my fingertips (since I had back copies of nearly every Journal to refer to), to emulate, be inspired by, and perhaps surpass.

As submissions started pouring in it became clear that interest in Earth First! had not subsided one whit. Poems equal to, or exceeding, poems from the first ten years showed up in my mailbox regularly. I laid out the pages using supplies from a local art house and mailed them in. And Armed With Visions once more was off and running.

The fortunes of the poetry page and the fortunes of Earth First! were hand in glove. The more active Earth First! was, the more poems came in. I also noticed how stories in the Journal seemed to inspire topics in the poems submitted. ELF stories inspired ELF poems, which I rejected. More prisoner articles inspired more submissions from prisoners, which I appreciated, as well as poems about, well, being in prison, most of which I didn’t use.

And over time, things changed. After the Save the Redwoods campaign trickled to an end, there were fewer and fewer campaigns of any size, and the number of poetry submissions likewise dropped off.

There were still Earth First! poems coming in, just not as many. I had to raid my pile of rejects just to keep the page full at times. I could see interest had dropped off, and I sensed the reason was things going on in Earth First! I had no control over. A good campaign creates energy, and energy is an important ingredient in Earth First! poetry.

Where we are now and go from here is anybody’s guess. Earth First! poetry is intimately tied up with Earth First!–mainly campaigns, but also biocentrism and, if only in legend, monkeywrenching.