Janine Certo on “How to Haunt Humans”

I’ve always loved poems about animals, but that piqued in 2003 after I read what remains my favorite poetry collection to this day. Robert Wrigley’s Lives of the Animals. The speaker’s inquiry into the animal world is marked by a respect and a nuanced observation where in many of the poems, the tables are turned. Animal now regards human.

I wrote “How to Haunt Humans” in the summer of 2019. I’d just finished Matthieu Ricard’s well-researched book, A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion. The text rails against the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition and argues what I’ve known since childhood. If one lacks compassion toward animals, one lacks compassion toward human beings as well. At the same time, like many SRR readers, I was digesting the myriad articles about how our planet is losing new species daily. I wanted to join the chorus of writers who have written about how we have harmed-exploited-neglected-underestimated animals, and what the implications might be.

As I wrote, I quickly realized the poem worked better as a hybrid piece. It was liberating to imagine some hyper-intelligent animal narrating a reference guide for other animals. As one might imagine, earlier drafts were lengthier with guide entries from A-Z. I’m sure readers will be able to think of their own entries.

Of course, “How to Haunt Humans” was written before COVID-19. Before this collective crisis we are all experiencing. A wise friend recently emailed me: “The Yunnan Box Turtle reference in the poem is specifically haunting right now as we humans experience the animal virus and see Spring and her indifferent animal life taking its same pleasures now during our isolation.”