Friendly Reminder.

I recently went to go see the poet Ada Limon talk about about her new book, The Hurting Kind. And while there certainly were interesting bits over the course of the event worth noting — she wrote a poem for NASA that will be sent into space! She read it! — I'm still not over the interlocutor saying to Limon — and I quote — "You know, people think you're a bird poet, but I'll put it to you that you're actually a horse poet."

There is a kind of quietly alarming ‘asleep at the wheel’ quality behind such a sentence. If that wasn’t the case, however, if the idea had truly made purchase with its intended target, I wonder where the discussion would have gone.

Would we be talking about Karen Russell’s “The Barn at the End of Our Term?” Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses?” McCarthy’s Border Trilogy?

I don’t mean to write another mountain-to-molehill essay with exegetical rain crashing down on one lone umbrella of a thing. I’m not asking for every film to be a Scorsese film or every book to be Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison redux (or whatever. Choose your own. Pick your own.) I’m not writing with the intention of denying, denying, denying the fundamental premise or fundamental questions of the emergent firecracker essay at hand until the thing that remains is nothing more than a series of will-o-the-wisp fumes.

What I’m saying is that music. What I’m saying is that silence. What I’m saying is the two. And that’s it. What I’m saying is the happy buzz of coming back from the concert late at night, the hold your hand up to the light and blink when you emerge from the movie theater, and/or the late night radio croak-frogging in the night, like a creaking tied-up boat gently bumping up against the docks as the sea swirls and swirls.

So when I hear someone say to someone else that they’re a horse poet, I don’t hear function. I hear form. And I want to hear function. I don’t want to hear someone say, ‘Glorious.’ I want to hear someone say that Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.