Meghan O'Rourke, "Inventing a Horse": Imagination and Creativity Re-Examined

 Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

                                                     From the first line to the last of “Inventing a Horse,” Meghan O’Rourke is hinting at something larger than mammalian horses. She offers no rationale for inventing a horse; the act arrives out of the blue, suddenly and mysteriously. We could pass it off as a child’s fantasy—“Buy me a pony, Daddy”—but it’s also in the first line, from the get-go, that we we’re talking about pretending in larger terms. We’re not buying a pony, but inventing a horse, and that “is not easy.”

Immediately, the inventor (the dreamer? the creator?) finds that there would be many additional duties, all of which imply something much more adult and weighty than a child’s desire to ride. We could pass it all off as the parent reminding the child that caring for an animal takes time and effort. But in that case, would he make ominous statements such as ”live with humans like you?”  Or “accustom him to the harness?” And would even the most formal, distant father speak these lines to a daughter about the horse she desires? 

            and not to grow thin in the city,

   where at some point you will have to live;

and one must imagine the absence of money.

Most of all though: the living weight,

the sound of his feet on the needles,

and, since he is heavy, and real . . .

No, I think Meghan O’Rourke is very skillfully playing a rhetorical game. She gives us a whiff of the specifics that might concern a father, but from the first line, the poet has loaded the situation with overtones that are dark, difficult, pragmatic, economic, philosophical, psychoanalytic.

O’Rourke is having her cake and eating it too, playing at a childhood situation while driving at something adult and complex. So, by the time we get to the more obviously daunting questions, we’ve been prepared for them:

and, since he is heavy, and real,

. . .  one must imagine love

in the mind that does not know love,

an animal mind, a love that does not depend

on your image of it,

your understanding of it;

    I find those lines chilling, haunting, almost Gothic, the creation of a Frankenstein—or is it Hannibal Lector whose mind "does not know love?" 


    So what is this scary metaphor for or symbol of a horse? I suspect it’s poetry—or art in general.  Once “invented,” art, like a half-pretend, half-material horse, is full of considerations that are, if I may quote myself, dark, difficult, pragmatic, economic, philosophical, psychoanalytic. 

Like O’Rourke’s symbolic horse, a poem or painting is indifferent to the nutrients for a literal horse, because the work of art is an invention, not a palpable, hungry, breathing, and above all, not a loving presence. So it is:

indifferent to all that it lacks:

a muzzle and two black eyes

looking the day away, a field empty

of everything but witch grass, fluent trees,

and some piles of hay.

 
Like the Mona Lisa of the 1950s song, this invented horse is just a cold and lonely, lovely piece of art. Yet I do not mean to diminish the scope or sophistication of the poem by comparing it to something in pop culture as well as a child's imagining.  By offering this notion of a poem, Meghan O'Rourke is able to conjure all the romance, gallantry, nobility, and simply all the pleasure of a horse. In a modern culture where horses are not a primary or practical means of transportation or labor, all those characteristics amount to a child's enjoyment of riding; it’s a fanciful, pretend world. So O’Rourke tries to give us the weightier aspects of invention as well.

s  She has taken an enormous chance here—the chance of sounding foolish. A poem as a child’s horse might even seem to degrade, or at least challenge, every traditional, loftier notion we have about the nature of artistic creation. But Meghan O’Rourke sees that the experience of writing is all that—a child’s infatuation, a romantic gambol, but also a gallop into awareness of darker matters.  She makes every piece of the puzzle fit, and gives us a fresh consideration of creativity. It's an intriguing, provocative ride. 

Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

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"Lastness" by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

Lastness by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

“If you can’t catch the bird flying at you, don’t bother getting him at all.”  I’m sure there’s a purist photographer out there somewhere who would say that, but I’ve decided I’m lucky to have caught these Canada Geese in any fashion.  I’m even telling myself that there’s something interesting in the attitude of the flying pair contrasted to their floating cousin. Neither group is interested in me; it’s all about my appreciation of them, heedless birds in a green world.

As for poems, I was looking for something about a mockingbird to connect to yesterday’s little frolic. What I came across instead is my first experience with Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Lastness.”  It’s an unlikely comparison of a bear and a newborn son, both negotiating the world in which they find themselves, both with their black, glistening mammalian hair—and all that compared, in turn,  to the grasslands and ferns of a newborn planet. It feels a little like my appreciation of the geese—unlikely, beyond logic, and stunning for the human observer.  

I’m sure one could argue that Kinnell’s conceit is too much, a bridge too far in stretching figurative language and in thinking about the likenesses among dissimilar entities.  For now, however, I’m good with it, happy to be shocked again by what the human mind is able and lucky enough to stumble onto, perceive, and guess about. If validity is a question, it seems a job for some ill-tempered cousin from the wrong side of the tracks.

I’m interested too in the way Kinnell’s animal steps out of himself in the first stanza. About both bear and human speaker, we can ask who is seeing what, and how, and on whose terms? By what unconscious way of perceiving?  Is it trickery? Magic? Mysticism?

Thanks again to The Poetry Foundation for discovering these poems before I did and offering them to us all. In case I don’t get to it soon, another poem somewhat along these lines is Meghan O’Rourke’s “Inventing a Horse.” The voice and language are nothing like Kinnell’s, but both poems intrigue me as they find themselves wondering about the mind of an animal, much in the vein of the movie Buck, which was discussed here on July 16.

 

Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

Lastness by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

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