In graduate school, I took a seminar on the pastoral that went from the Greeks to the eighteenth century. Going into it, I was indifferent toward the genre but by the end, I had come to appreciate how seemingly simple poems about shepherds often gave form to questions about political economy, nature, love, and the self. I remain convinced that pastoral is just as relevant as ever and provides a rich dialogic vehicle for thinking through a broad array of contemporary issues.

One of the curious relics of the pastoral tradition was the idea of Virgil’s wheel, which suggested that the proper path of a poet was to imitate Virgil’s three-part career. This consisted of first writing simple poems about shepherds, known as bucolics, before moving onto somewhat more sophisticated georgics, which frequently discuss agriculture and other modes of production, and finally the epic or philosophical poem. By following this trajectory, the poet was to progress from simple to complex themes, but also to recapitulate the more general social movement from shepherds to farmers to commerce and empire (often with ambivalence about this trajectory).

Around 2019, I came across Reginald Shepherd’s collection of essays Orpheus in the Bronx. The combination of Shepherd’s discussion of “urban pastoral,” along with what I had learned in my graduate school seminar, made me interested in trying my hand at some poems that explored pastoral themes. I started writing the poems in this collection at the same time that I was working on Disambiguation. But as the computer poems started to wind down, I found more and more of interest in pastoral themes.

I wrote a decent amount of these poems riding the 7 bus on Rainier Avenue, looking out the window. “Shepherd Elegy” frames the unhoused persons pushing shopping carts under the I-90 or in the International District as nomadic shepherds in a manner that I hope comes across as neither sentimental nor callous. “Toward a Pastoral of Devices” considers the traditional idleness of the shepherd in relation to how we relate to our electronic devices.

Other poems in this collection are even more tangentially related to pastoral and many of them are completely unrelated. In relation to The Moon’s Quatrain and Circumlocution, these poems are relatively coherent and focused. Nevertheless, they remain somewhat cryptic and I can only guess what readers will make of a poem like “Your Nickel Sings of Cats.” I still tend to write “bottom-up,” starting with the stream-of-consciousness and letting the process of revision take me wherever it wants to go. Sometimes I stop revising before the poem is done because the next poem wants my attention.