RESTLESS HERD

SOME THOUGHTS ON ORDER—IN POETRY, IN LIFE

I

She had horses who danced in their

mothers’ arms.

She had horses who thought they

were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars. She had horses who waltzed nightly

on the moon.

She had horses who were much too

shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

—from “She Had Some Horses” by

Joy Harjo

WHEN I think of order, I think of horse statues. As a child in rural Michigan, I coveted them. They could sometimes be found at Goodwill, and a couple of times, on a birthday, I received a new one from a family friend. I housed my collection on a special wooden shelf my dad built before he died. It sat on the floor. Low. Kid-level. Boarded there, they were objets d’art. Taken out to play, they became real, but more-thanreal, expressions of the Platonic form of “horse.” I brought them onto my bed and bent my right knee at an angle in which I could pretend they lived in a cave, and I their lone human connection. Each horse was its own being, of course, each with its particular musculature over which light played from my bedroom window. Together, the sum of the separate entities was more than its parts. On each was tied an invisible rope that tethered them to the word horse, the idea of horse, and to

DIANE SEUSS ’s most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021).

Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

(Graywolf Press, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim fellow. She was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

horse galloping through imagination’s realm. The Fighting Stallion, the Arabian Stallion, Man o’ War, the Mustang, the Bucking Bronco, the Running Foal. (Where were the mares? I had not yet approached that question.) The horses—the statues and the herds they represented—could be ordered in a number of ways depending on my need: by color, shade, size, attitude, breed, age. Some could be paired. Others repelled one another like magnets, or as I found myself repelled by the idea of mathematical sets I was learning in school, even though I was unknowingly enacting them at home, with horses. Later, as I moved into adolescence, I would do the same thing with troll dolls, who could be grouped by color of hair, length of hair, eye color, belly button, butt crack, and degree of evil, which my imagination supplied.

Maybe there is something to kidlevel, to the way in which order and the imagination are not in binary opposition to each other but feed each other. Sugar cubes on an open hand.

II

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.

—from “Delight in Disorder” by

Robert Herrick

WHEN I think of order, I think of disorder. I began writing poems before I knew what poems were. There was no internet, no social media with its surfeit of poems to model, mock, and learn from. There were books, some of which entered my house via my mother when she went to college as an English major at age thirty-four, after my father died. She built a bricks-and-boards bookcase in the living room, low to the ground, and there, sitting on the floor, I’d touch and read the books’ spines. Chaucer. Shakespeare. The Romantic period. (I imagined kissing.) Whitman. Emerson.

Melville. Hawthorne. Conrad. Joyce. A book with a gray spine and red type: Modern Poetry. I was old enough to know I was a girl and young enough to absorb, without resistance, the fact that all of these names belonged to men. (Where were the mares? That would come later.)

My first poems sprang from the forehead of a manual typewriter in typing class, a high school requirement, as was home economics, for girls. They were single-spaced. The ink was ebony and bled with the pounding of the keys, or if the ribbon was shot, faded to dappled gray. The poems were unaware of a left margin and cascaded down the page with abandon. “Poem,” to me, meant that within the margins of the typing paper I could pretty much do anything I wanted. I think I got this notion from my primary influence, rock and roll. (I hadn’t yet noticed how seamlessly songs of anarchy could be strung together into an album.)

There was little poetry taught in my high school English classes. In middle school, what we then called junior high, one teacher forced us to memorize and recite poems selected for us. Though I pretended to hate this exercise, as the other kids said they did, I secretly loved it. Sometimes I still hear those poems in my head: Sam Walter Foss’s “There are hermit souls that live withdrawn in the place of their selfcontent; there are souls, like stars, that dwell apart, in a fellowless firmament…” I had no idea what a fellowless firmament was, but I wanted in. My favorite was Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, / on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five, / hardly a man is now alive / who remembers that famous day and year.” I could hear the hoofbeats in those cadences, which came back to me when I was trying to get to sleep at night or when I was really cooking on a poem in typing class. These poems tuned my ear to metrical patterns in everyday life. The settings on the four burners of my mom’s old stove, for

instance, read this way: off high sim (simmer) low medium-low medium high. Thanks to Longfellow, I made a song of them in my head:

off, high, sim, low, medium-low,

medium-high. medium-high, medium-low, low,

sim, high, off.

My first manuscript lived in a box. Actually, it was a cheap black briefcase. My father had used it when he attended college on the GI Bill after World War II, and now it was mine. Within its four worn corners I shoved all my treasures and necessities. Poems, spare change, tampons, matches, smokes, and a tiny pot of gooey Yardley lip gloss that gave my mouth the appearance of glass. The briefcase accompanied me to college, about sixty miles north of my hometown, where I majored in theater, and then anthropology, and finally English, before I stopped going to classes and was kicked out, but not before finishing my senior project, an eighty-poem manuscript in a black folder that I called “The Midnight Ride of Monster Woman.” (“On the 8th of April in ’77 / up she jump / into the saddle / she a tattle tale / and her skin / are green / and one if by land and two if by sea and three if by three if by three if by three…”)

The briefcase joined me, my fake snakeskin suitcase that housed my clothes, and my manual typewriter on a train to New York City, where I was traveling to become a poet. I didn’t know what it was to be a poet, but I’d absorbed the message that to become a poet one must leave the hinterland, and so I left the hinterland and proceeded to live a profoundly disorganized life. If high school was rock and roll, New York was punk, odd jobs, love, addiction, violence, and self-estrangement. In a sense it was living the poem rather than writing it. Nothing much ended up on the page in