Thursday Poetry Post: What Carries Us

And first, there was the horse.

From my horse shelf

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Arlo texted me to ask if I could write “a bad poem about a horse” for a project they were working on. Well, actually, they asked if I had written a bad poem about a horse, and then added the extremely generous caveat “I know you don’t write bad poems.”

I do write bad poems, but up until this, I had only written one poem about a horse¹, and it was really good! So I set out to write a Bad Horse Poem. Or, a Bad Poem For a Good Horse. Several of our most treasured poets are Horse Girls or have written about horses – current Poet Laureate Ada Limon, former Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, and Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose poem is the focus of my newsletter today.