Hoofprints
Horse Poems
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Introduction
Ride Back with Me
How the World Makes Horses
The Grandmother
I Just Wonder
Evolution
It’s Alimentary: PowerPoint Presentation by Miohippus, late Oligocene Epoch
Global Warming: What Survives Is Also Beautiful
Przewalski’s Horse
Endless Grasses
Two Legs
The Great Hunt
Rope Halter
The Colonists
First Rider
She Said
Moss
New Words
Loose
Information Superhighway
Song to My Horse
Bone Story
The Horse Camps Glitter
Who Wears the Pants?
The Bow-legged Girl
Forever
Revolution
Horse and Ox
Eagle Speaks
The Hoofprint of Pegasus
(No) Contest
Messenger
Hittite Chariot Horse
Proof
The Race before Troy
The Knife Cuts Both Ways
Hakma, Stigrup
Afraid of His Shadow: King Philip First Sees Alexander’s Greatness
Winged Team
A Legend of the Great Wall
Pack Ponies
Roman Riders
Earnhardt, Adorandus
Ways of Mounting
Horse, Soldier, Arrow
Is That So?
Blessings
Solomon’s Horses in Mohammed’s Army
North Sea Farmers
The Fearful Knight
Muzzled
Riding with the Horde
Out of the East
A Claim Not Made by UPS or FedEx
During the Delhi Sultanate
A Lady Laments the Changing Times
The Black Mare’s Milk
Something to Remember When Aliens Land
Jingle Bells in Tenochtitlan
Bright with Bones
Treasure
The Spanish Armada Retreats
On the Death of Major General Humphrey Atherton of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Author’s First White American Ancestor
Flare-up
Gladdening
Painted Horses
Unnatural
One Master
The Gun
To Water
The Groom
1848
Foxhunt
Road Apples
M.A.D.D. (Modernity Against Drunk Driving)
Clever Hans
Foolish Creatures
Abandoned, 1919
Hands
Big Top
The Dutch Horse
Triumph
Company for Breakfast
Means of Transport
Epona Considers Her Current Position
Advice to a Young Woman
Horse Whisperer
He Races
He Organizes His Herd of Three
This Rider
West Palm
Therapeutic
Mangalarga Marchador
Innocent Engines of War
Behind the Supermarket
Efficient
Peasant Eyes
Down the Side Street
Dappled Things
Race Riders
Buzkazhi
If Required
The Mid-Air Moment
The Color of Heaven
Afterword
Glossary
Bibliography
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
A WHINNYING HORSE HEAD, BONE FIGURE FROM EARLY MIDDLE STONE AGE
Inspiration for the poem “Rope Halter”
History
Horse story
My story
Your story
Introduction
I love reading about alternative medicine, for horses as well as for people, and in Healing Your Horse I learned something fascinating about acupuncture.
Chi, the essential force acupuncturists work with, runs through the body in pathways called meridians, which are similar in all mammals. But an acupuncturist working on horses can’t use meridians below the knee and hock. Sixty million years ago the horse had toes. Now it has a single hoof. The toes remain, tiny irrelevant bones concealed in the long slim column of the leg. The meridians have been concealed as well, squeezed and distorted. Close to the ground, the acupuncture points on a modern horse seem random.
Like those toes, like chi itself, hidden truths underlie the horse stories I grew up on—the ones that were supposed to be true.
One of my favorite books is Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind, in which the Godolphin Arabian, a foundation sire of the Thoroughbred, is rescued from pulling a cart through Paris streets.
The horse existed. He did, as in Marguerite Henry’s book, come to England, via France, from an Islamic royal court in the 1720s. He did father outstanding speed in the Thoroughbred, his descendants are winners to this day, and he did love a cat named Grimalkin.
But he was not an Arabian. He was from a special strain of Turkish horse bred as expensive, prestigious gifts for foreign dignitaries. Calling him an Arabian enabled his English owner to charge a larger stud fee.
As a diplomatic gift horse, the Godolphin Arabian was acquired by a French duke and sold for a high price to a rich English breeder. He was five years old then and had always been highly valued.
He never did pull that cart.
But if you love that story, here’s a true version. In 1965 Louise Firouz, an American woman searching for ponies for her riding school, discovered three tiny, beautiful horses pulling carts through the streets of Amol, an Iranian city on the Caspian Sea. Slender, well-proportioned, and averaging about forty inches at the shoulder—just a little taller than a yardstick—they resembled horses depicted on the seal of Persian king Darius around 500 B.C. The king and the lion he hunts both tower over the chariot horses; before Firouz’s discovery this was assumed to be artistic license, or artistic symbolism. Now it seems that the picture may be quite literal.
The horse Louise Firouz rediscovered, the Caspian, has been rescued from near extinction, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war, and now wins friends around the world for its speed, gentleness, and talent as a driving horse.
Knowing this, I don’t miss the Godolphin Arabian pulling that cart in Paris. King of the Wind