1.
“In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems” takes up one page of what some readers argue consists of zero lines, lines nothing like the poem that James Wright wanted to show someone, anyone, before it disappeared into my foregut, where it was broken down (in other words, analyzed) before moving to the hindgut, before—well, I don’t need to tell you how most poems end up. About that poem there isn’t much worth noting, but about this poem, mistakenly seen as a blank page or a bad joke or both, there remains much to be said. Since the news just reached me that Wright has died, I thought it best to memorialize him by offering my own thoughts on his poem that came from a poem of his that I ate.
Poems are neither set-ups for punchlines, nor are they riddles. Wright knew this well before he showed up at the farm and came begging me for training. He was in search of the assurance of poetry as a possibility, and I was kind enough to appease him. I taught him to see the pasture in all of its possibility, the variety and depth of which would allow him to then shape his experiences into better poems. It was this possibility and the difference between punchlines, riddles, and poems that Wright tried to get at when, introducing this poem of his in memory of me, he announced to a crowd of dolts on February 21, 1973, “This looked as if it were a joke in my book, but it’s not a joke to me.” I wasn’t there, obviously, but in the recording shared with me, I hear impatience in his voice that he even has to offer this prelude to the poem. “I wanted to tell you about David….I loved that horse, and—” he stutters, as he always did when he was drunk, which was most of the time, on “and” a few times—“I think he loved me, too.” He goes on to provide context for the poem’s creation: I, the horse David, “belonged” to the poet Robert Bly and his wife Carol, whose western Minnesota farm Wright was visiting when he wrote a poem that he wanted to show them. He walked from the chicken house, where, presumably, he’d written the thing, to the farmhouse in search of his hosts, and then, still looking for anybody home, went around the back of the house, and, according to him in the recording, “of course David was wandering around. Wonderful old David. He ate the poem.” There’s a smile in Wright’s voice as he says this last sentence. It pricks up my ears. I love the joy present in how he speaks that sentence—“He ate the poem”—rounding the vowels so softly in “poem,” and the smile that’s affecting his pronunciation of the word is not a cue for the crowd to giggle but a smile from understanding the wisdom—but perhaps wisdom is too heavy a word—that this fleeting moment in his life was trying to extend to him. Nonetheless, the audience mistakes his smile as the visual marker for a punchline. Laughter bounces around the crowd in what they call the Modern Languages Auditorium at the University of Arizona, whatever that combination of words is supposed to signal. “I know it sounds as if it were a joke,” his voice rises above the guffaws, “but it’s not a joke. No, no.” As the giggles deflate, he reads the title, “In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems,” he says, “and here it is.” But before the poem gets into the room, the audience is already laughing at what they perceive to be a joke about a paper-craving horse, a lackadaisical poet on a farm, and nothing more. Wright is silent under the laughter, the poem ends just as it gets started, and you do not hear him laughing because it is not a joke, as he has already reminded the crowd twice before they uncan their laughter anyway.
Since the poem isn’t clear in the recording, I’ll include it here in full before I go any further:
2.
One of the many ironies present in this memorial of Wright is that my setting the record straight in these pages will inevitably have the undesired effect of writing over and on top of Wright’s poem in memory of me. But that is the problem of the poet’s, not mine, since I have no lofty goals in the business of putting words on paper for posterity. Back to the poem’s context:
I am a swayback palomino who arrived at the Bly farm over twenty years ago, in August of 1959, then four years old and battered from my previous owners in what you call South Dakota and I call the pasture of bruises. That Wright (and Bly, for that matter) saw me as already “old” should raise questions not only about their adeptness as horsemen, but indeed their status as poets of so-called nature. My appearing advanced in age on the occasion that led to this poem is in keeping with what you might expect from a horse with this name, and works to elevate this poem to a sort of myth, because a horse with a name like that, a horse named David, of all names, is born to eat the work out of a poet’s hand, you are likely to think. I remember Wright, baffled as he was by the name when we first met, telling me that David is a name that suggests wisdom, conviction, strength, a name that suggests the being it’s attached to has a fondness for poems. That is why Wright fell so head over—no, I won’t say “hooves”—heels at the prospect of what he could get out of me, not because I was a steady ambling companion with a keen sense of how to sniff out the sweetest clover in a field, yet generous in sharing my finds, but because I was given a name that has absolutely nothing to do with who I, “the horse David,” was, let alone any connection to my kind, a name he thought meant something special. If you need further proof that Bly (and, by extension, Wright) were not the sharpest thorns in the field, I’m not sure you’ll gain much by reading on. It was clear to me that I, David, as Wright saw me, though he wouldn’t admit this to anyone, was what you would call his muse, even though he never credited me, his source for the best of his poems and ideas, in his acclaim.
3.
We may not be lumped into what you call ruminants, but that holds little meaning when it comes to how we process the world. Your distinctions—monogastric or ruminant, poem or forage, for starters—appear to serve no purpose other than to perpetuate the bewilderment you have created in hopes that you will feel less lost in it. I’m sure you’ve heard that stupid questions lead to stupid answers. I mean, how else is a horse supposed to partake in poetry if not by eating it? (Even more, what does our preferred method of receiving the written word say about the futility of the lowly and passive method preferred by you, that which you call, with arrogant certitude, reading?) Chewing is how we process the world. Our eyes are reserved for maintaining our safety at all times.
What I am trying to get at is that even though the poem’s title incorrectly identifies me as dead, which I am certainly not, a horse named David surely seems clever enough to know that he has no business consuming poems, which should make you wonder, precisely because of his wits, why a horse named David would choose to eat the poem instead of the grass sprung up around the barn where a horse is more likely to roam. (I didn’t mind the aftertaste of the dog Simon’s piss in the weeds and tufts, but after making the mistake of browsing there one evening after Wright and Bly had been drinking hard all day long, I vowed never to eat around the perimeter of the barn again, whether or not a wet streak was visible on the boards or a sour stench lingered over the sprouts.) The simplest way I can put it for you is that the smart animal chooses whatever provides the greatest value with the least amount of labor involved. You might assume that Wright reached out his hand without thinking, with the poem in it, toward me as a greeting, so it’s no wonder, what I, a relatively affable horse in my youth, took the poem for. The problem with this assumption is that, since I was the one who ate the poem in question, I can assure you that it was terrible and offered very little, if any, nutrients. But that poem is not the subject of my rumination.
I met Wright when I first arrived, as noted above, at the farm he had made the three-hour trip from Minneapolis to return to, having already visited on numerous occasions to talk classical Chinese poems, translate Georg Trakl, and bicker over the future of American poetry with Bly. Wright had first arrived at this farm that would become his refuge for many years to come a year before me, in August of 1958. Like me, this man was also sunken low, but he was swayed from drinking his marriage and family life, as well as his job prospects in the icy academia of Minnesota, to the dregs, not swaybacked from congenital disease doubled-down with an early life of ill-fitting saddles and riders. After the publication and general success of his first collection, The Green Wall (1957), and already well into the final revisions, when I met him, for what would become his second, Saint Judas (1959), the poet felt he had said everything he was able to say from within the formal constraints of those poems. Since he didn’t come to the farm seeking help with the poems that filled out those books, I can only speak to the selections from them that he shared with me during our training sessions. I remember a few disparaging comments he made about the two collections. He felt so far removed from them, he said during one of our training sessions, that he characterized the former as having been “written by a dead man,” whereas the latter, he said under a drunken slur on the day it had finally gone to the printer, “seemed to leave out so much of life.” Before he came stumbling to the farm, he had been searching for a conspirator in his conviction that “all poetry is formal” (my observation to Bly, which he then branded as his own, naturally, and which he passed on to Wright, who, as appears to be a pattern with all of you, had a faint notion this was the case but, without having words for it until mine came along, threw my phrase around in conversation as his own idea) and that there exists no “opposition between traditional iambic verse and free verse.” Tradition wasn’t the problem. His expertise in the gimmicks of rhyme, meter, and anachronistic speech had lead him to a dead-end where his written work left him cold, yet he confessed to me, as he already had to Bly, that he didn’t know how—or perhaps he simply didn’t have the confidence required—to write beyond the constraints of what he’d mastered in his first two collections.
During this creative crisis and on the very day when the poet was writing what he deemed his last poem before giving up on poetry for good, a poem he titled—what else?—“Farewell to Poetry” (which would not be his final poem, and would instead be revised and published, in the landmark collection The Branch Will Not Break as “Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium,” a poem, like the others in the book, with my training all over it), a copy of a literary magazine called The Fifties appeared in his campus mailbox at the University of Minnesota. He knew nothing of the magazine or its editors, one of whom, Bly himself, had the printer set in bold on the inside cover, “Most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned.” In the foreword to this first issue of the magazine, Bly bemoans American poetry’s slip back into the “old tradition” of iambic verse, which forsook, in his eyes, the hard-won gains of the Modernists of the prior decades, particularly in the elevation of everyday American speech as the language of literature. He notes that beyond the wooden American verse of the moment, contemporary models in Europe and South America writing revealed the “magnificence of suggestion and association” possible in poetry. (He had droned on and on about all of this in the barn with me, brushing my mane and cleaning out my hooves, and I finally made it clear to him, with a kick that barely missed his right knee, that I was sick of hearing it and that he should find another outlet for these ideas he got mostly from me and the others on the farm, anyway—and thus, the foreword for his new magazine.) This all seems lightning-strikingly epiphanic, of course, and Wright himself was left “wondering at the weirdness of it all,” as he wrote in a rangy, arguably deranged letter to Bly that amounted to sixteen single-spaced pages detailing his sense of failure, his bewilderment about how to leave the the cul-de-sac of his quaint academic poems, and his praise for what the new magazine was already doing for American poetry and for him, especially. Bly, exasperated by the letter, left it under the box elder trees where he’d been reading it, and I tucked away a few pages before he came back out and got onto me. Exasperating indeed, also languished, so depressing in tone that even the writing on the page suffered an awful slouch that was bitter to the taste and hard to digest. Bly responded to the heap, Wright told me later, with a one-sentence letter in reply: “Come on out to the farm.”
By 1971, when Wright’s poem in memory of me first appeared with the publication of his Collected Poems, there had been quite a history between not only the two poets, but also between the poet and me, although no one appears to have mentioned how, precisely, the incident between the horse and his poem occurred, when Wright set the poem commemorating this incident onto paper in the form of “In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems,” and when I, the horse David, allegedly passed away. No surprises there, since the focus tends mostly toward Wright’s poems before this one came along (and most of those poems, with a few exceptions, such as this one, are stilted and trite attempts at poetry, if I’m honest, but that’s the view of the overlooked, albeit better informed, consumer of his poems). Since Wright returned to the farm as his retreat countless times between 1958 and well into the mid-sixties (Wright claimed to others, I seem to recall hearing, that he would show up at the farm “every Friday,” but that seems excessive, considering the trip involved, even for a drunk of a poet prone to exorbitance), no one bothered with the facts surrounding the occasion of the poem, so I thought it was time for me to set the record straight.
In Memory of James Wright, Whose Poem I Ate is available now from Long Day Press. You can order a copy here.
Tyler Cain Lacy is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Reus (Press Board Press, 2014). His prose and poetry have appeared in Juked, alice blue, Bombay Gin, Columbia Poetry Review, Pinwheel, and Salt Hill, among others. He lives in the Bay Area.
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