Based on the wormlike chain model, a coarse-grained description of the nonlinear dynamics of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer is developed. By means of a multiple-scale perturbation analysis, a length-scale separation inherent to the weakly bending limit is exploited to reveal the deterministic nature of the spatio temporal relaxation of the backbone tension and to deduce the corresponding coarse-grained equation of motion. From this partial integro-differential equation, some detailed analytical predictions for the nonlinear response of a weakly bending polymer are derived in an accompanying paper O. Hallatschek , following paper, Phys. Rev. E 75, 031906 (2007)].