Hello, my very marvelous versifiers! It is time once again for a new Word List! This time, I have liberated She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo from its 40-year snooze on a shelf of the bookcase where I like to keep all of my poetry books.
The blurb on the back reads as follows: This is not a book. It is an opening onto woman light, into hatching, into awakening. The ruined & dismembered, imprisoned, dispossessed, ride out on a bright thundering of horses in a light of illumination & love. Who touches this book touches a woman. If you want to remember what you never listened to & what you didn't know you knew, or wanted to know, open this sound & forget to fear. A woman is appearing in the horizon light. --Meridel Le Sueur.
Well all righty then. A tad overwritten & overblown & it has the weird "&'s" instead of "ands" but hey. The book itself does none of that, and yet, I have owned my copy since the 80's and have never read it through because it just does not grab me. It isn't bad, I just don't think it is all that and a strawberry milkshake. Honestly, it stopped one step short of sending me off to sleep. She somehow writes of difficult, worthy subjects without making me feel. However, I did like the ending of the title poem:
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Joy Harjo is a Poet Laureate of the United States of America. (So is Billy Collins, but while he's cute and readable, I don't find him to be earth-shattering either.) But what do I know? Harjo is famous, celebrated, and enjoyed by many. To paraphrase the B52's, before I talk, I should read her book! (But I know, after compiling this week's List, that I never will. Little lending library, here we come.) Pay no attention to me, this long-haired, overfed, leaping gnome and her crackpot opinions!
My views aside, Harjo's book was just fine for compiling a word list! What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then spout rot about the famous poet of your choice!
And now, your List:
alive
animals
belly
bones
corn
crow
hawk
heart
horses
jail
magic
nerve
never
railroad
rained
shell
shy
silver
sweetheart
yellow