Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Tuesday Poem: riding on Sarah's (and Jenny's) horse

a horse i met once
Okay, so that's not the title of my poem for this week. First thing this morning, I read Sarah Jane Barnett's Tuesday Poem post: 'Poem About a Horse' by Jenny Bornholdt, then I went off and tinkered with some of my poems-in-waiting intending to pop one up on my blog. But after reading 'Poem About a Horse', everything I tinkered with seemed insubstantial and overly heartfelt.

Jenny's poem is wonderfully playful and it is a long poem (Sarah loves long poems) and there is heart in there but it is knitted in with such delights as a Yak-proof house and an excessively long skirting board and the joys of global roaming. So its a fabulously light and airy inner-sprung heart, not the leaden version that lies at base of the worst kind of poetry.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the first two stanzas - and you'll need to go Sarah's blog for the rest ... it is absolutely worth it. After that please visit the Tuesday Poem hub for another playful, long poem (an extract of) with its own terrific inner-sprung heart. It's by Richard von Sturmer edited by Harvey Molloy.


Poem About a Horse by Jenny Bornholdt
This poem could be about your horse.
This horse here, or a horse
you remember, either one will be fine
and either way you will need to include
some other animal to keep the horse
company. This could be your friend’s dog—

1 comment:

maggie@at-the-bay.com said...

Hi Mary - I just listened to Harry Ricketts reviewing Jenny's latest book of poems 'The Hill of Wool' and he read aloud a lovely villanelle (don't you love the form?)... called 'Undone' which he claims is one of her finest poems and he spoke too of another villanelle called 'Memory' - the two poems he claims are Jenny 'at the top of her game'... "and these two poems at the heart of the book," he says "pull all the other poems towards them."