She Had Some Horses

I picked up a copy of Herbert Kohl's book A Grain of Poetry: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them a Part of Your Life the other day. Obviously, I'm not the target audience for this book, but I was interested in it because a)I read another book of Kohl's recently (on pedagogy in American public schools) and quite liked most of it and b)I'm interested to see how contemporary poetry gets portrayed and treated in this sort of introductory book.

One of the very nice--and necessary--features of this book is that Kohl quotes not just excerpts of a poem, but quite frequently the whole thing. One of them that I don't think I'd encountered before was Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses", which I found beautiful and powerful. I always have been a sucker for anaphora.

Here's AUDIO of me reading Harjo's poem.