Readers Up #16: The Jockey Poems
Horse racing is a sport for aesthetes. The vignettes and tableaux of a racetrack, the poses that its actors tend to fall into, the dizzying resolution of color and motion, the idiosyncratic chorus populating apron and dirt: two minutes of action crystallizes, embodies, emotes. The horse is a much-beloved figure in literature, with reams of poetry and prose dedicated to its beauty, fleetness, sauce, and spirit, while the rider in equine poetry is typically a soldier or knight, a cowboy, an adventurer; the bond between animal and human is romantic and wild, bone-deep, the stuff of Hidalgo and “Boot and Saddle” and Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. The humans devoted to poetic horses are starry-eyed girls or masculine heroes--and sometimes they are a breed apart themselves, as in Ronald Koertge’s strange 1980 collection The Jockey Poems.
Composed equally of sharp observation and wry flights of fancy, Koertge’s style is matter-of-fact, compact volleys of free verse that--like the sport itself--seem simultaneously dated and timeless. Jockeys dream of bears more than any other animal, he confides on one page, then segues into a diamond-sharp assessment of the function of silks. A certain tolerance for nonsense is necessary to racing enthusiasm, an affinity for camp, ideally a grasp of history, which Koertge sometimes elides to murky ends. How to explain a poet’s eye keen enough to name the silks’ bowtie “servile” but unwilling to place the uniform in its historical context? How to square poetry’s major function within history, that of preservation and continuation, with the dismissal of female riders as lost to the sands of time? Now who remembers any of them--only me, Ronnie, your improbable reader decades on.
The other side of the coin is a defiant Americanness, pervasive and insistent. There’s a negative capability required to compile a collection of poems about jockeys. No one on Earth cares that much, for that long, about the facet of racing a majority of its players would dispense with if given half a chance. Yet here they are, painstakingly rendered: here are Shoemaker and Pincay, Jr. and here is R. Smith, here are anonymous figures--jockeys, their own species, set alongside and against men. There is an aggressive projected sexuality of money riders who put out, veiled dick jokes, female attention making men of jockeys: a probing obsession with the physical that mirrors reality, as though Koertge is unable to select a new lens from his camera bag and has decided to train that magnified eye on the small figures aboard the horses until they burn like ants under a glass. There is an uneasy Manifest Destiny, a discomfiting tendency to box and label the horizon. There is a startling agility of language to offset the utilitarian concerns of bodies. Like pictures of shoes, they do not wear. Point blank in their sweet utility. Escutcheons on the hoof. Sycophantic neon.
Within poetry's role as purveyor of cultural memory, occasionally the writer-reader taps into the universal mind. It's at once reassuring and enervating to find your own beliefs, tendencies, and bugbears echoed from the past. Refamiliarization, an affirming of kinship, can be as incisive a tool as defamiliarization.
Koertge, 1980: The peasants distribute largesse to the passing blue bloods: pauvre oblige.
Hurlburt, 2015: You’re surrounded by wealth, you feel like it could rub off on you, you remember you’re part of the reason the rich stay rich. Going under the wire a nose or a head or a length in front, you figure you’re doing them a favor.
How did I manage that, having not dipped into Koertge until stumbling across one of his works, titled simply "A Jockey," in a collection of sports poetry? There is always something larger at work beneath artistic impulse.
So, who better than a poet to examine that impulse--to delineate the sport's relationship to poetry, and poetry's efficacy in explicating racing? Many of you know Nicolle Neulist as @rogueclown on Twitter, where they post picks, examine bloodlines, and always show up for Illinois-breds... but you might not know that they're also a poet! Check out our conversation below, and browse Nicolle's blog for some of their equine-inspired verse.
DIANA HURLBURT: Do the words "jockey" and "poem" strike you as an unusual combo?
NICOLLE NEULIST: The words "jockey" and "poem" don't strike me as an unusual combo, given that I enjoy both writing and reading poetry about horse racing...though, on the other hand, I'm acutely aware that it may seem weird that I don't find them to be an unusual combo? After all, sometimes it feels a bit difficult to find poetry about horse racing, and I always wonder what the audience is for poetry about horse racing.
DH: These are definitely thoughts I was considering as I read. Horses themselves are popular topics for poetry, but that often means cowboys or soldiers, or the beauty of the animal in isolation.
NN: Yes! And, not to take away from how beautiful horses are, as horses, or how beautiful other ways of interacting with the horse can be...it's horse racing that really made me see the beauty of horses, it's horse racing: the history, the pedigrees, the ways of interacting with the sport, that made horses speak to me more loudly than anything else. And, I've always been the kind of person who gravitated toward media I can relate to. So, though I enjoy reading poetry about a range of topics, equine and non-equine, it's special when it shines a light on horse racing, and when I'm writing poetry about horses, or horses interacting with people, it's going to relate to the racetrack.
DH: You do a lot of different types of writing about the sport--touting, race recaps, personal blogs, and of course poems. Do you find that poetry allows for examining the sport in ways that articles or even personal essays don't?
NN: Absolutely. Especially in recent years...when I sit down to write prose about horse racing, I have the urge to address a complete picture: how I think a race is going to set up, how a race happened, what a pedigree tree looks like, why a particular horse matters to a particular person. But, a lot of things bounce around my head as individual images...things for which I can't tell the full story, either because I haven't completely contextualized it yet, or maybe I've come across a horse whose full story has been lost to time, and I don't know how to get it back completely? Especially, in those cases, when I can't put together some kind of start-to-finish story, or what feels like a full explanation? Poetry makes more sense to me. Sometimes the process of writing it helps me figure out a bit more about why something is bouncing around in my head, or why something caught my attention...and always, it's nice to just start getting words down on paper about a horse or a race or an idea that sticks in my head. It gives me...permission to engage with those fragments.
DH: You could call a race itself "horse fragments." That's part of why this collection made sense to me, and why poetry and racing pair well together; the sport is made up of discrete moments that shape a larger whole, and poetry is often concerned with the immediate, a specific image, a mood.
NN: That's a great point -- something I haven't seen at quite that angle yet, despite that image making so much sense, a race as a "fragment" of a horse's life, or their career, or of the sport at large, almost in the same sense that a line or a poem is a fragment of some larger whole, a collection or a body of work or a lifetime of a writer engaging with a topic. And, there are as many ways to look at a single race as there are...horses, trainers, jockeys, owners, fans, bettors. I always like to say that horse racing is a great sport because there are at least as many stories about the race as there are horses loading into the starting gate, but it has to be many times that.
DH: A race has its translators, as great epic poems do. Emily Wilson's Odyssey is not Richard Lattimore's. My parsing of a race, the details I choose to highlight, won't be the same as yours.
NN: It varies with people...and can also vary with time, I think. How I'd parse a race the day it happened may be different than I would months or even years later, even if I had the same raw material to go from...be it memory (as imperfect as that may be!), or even a race replay to make sure that memory is ground in reality. After all...how a person engages with the sport can change over time. Memories of a track, or a horse, or the horse's connections, can change over time. Maybe you know something about the career trajectories of some of the race's players that has had an effect on you, for better or worse. Maybe it's two weeks later and the winner came back to finish last in his next race, a disappointment. Maybe it's five years later, and you know that the filly who trailed in last has gone on to produce a really nice horse or two, some kind of redemption. Different details jump out at different times, even to the same person.
DH: Have you thought about doing a poem series about the same race, or the same horse, months or years apart? A la that movie Boyhood, maybe.
NN: Not...qua that. The only project that I've really tackled about one horse is actually one I started drafting last summer, something I've gone back to since, and been progressively editing, but haven't gotten into any kind of final form to put out there, about one of my favourite racehorses, who unfortunately passed away from colic about two years ago. It is a series of poems about memories I have of him, or imagining various points in his life. Though, it's less focused on a history than it is with individual memories, or why he stuck in my head...moments like him getting his horseshoes put on, or him trying to eat my hair, or various races of his. I especially love the idea of doing a series about the same race...I've been trying to figure out for a few years now how to write a love letter to the Illinois-breds who were 2 in 2013...who were babies, the fall I was first starting to go to the track a lot. I've tried to figure out how to do that in prose and failed miserably...but I think it's something that is just too big a topic with too spotty an available set of information to do in a piece of prose of any size. It probably needs to be poetry, haha. Perhaps, about a maiden race, or a series of maiden races, from that fall...
DH: Why do you think that the great stylists of racing writing generally work in prose? Is there a place in the sport for devoted artists other than those whose media are visual?
NN: I think, as with any field, there's a place for all kinds of artists to engage with the sport: visual, poetry, prose, musical, dramatic, anything. If it speaks to you, jump in and create something new! As for why so many of the great racing writers typically work in prose? I think it may be a lot about the opportunities the sport offers for prose -- telling a history of a racehorse, writing newspaper columns or articles about the sport, writing books designed to inform people about a complex sport as well as to entertain them. A lot of times, prose about horse racing is timely, useful, or both.
DH: Do you think the sense of urgency really prevalent in the sport right now contributes to content erring on the side of utilitarian, or that creators feel that they have to create in service to the sport?
NN: I don't know if it's the sense of urgency so much as it is the sport's existence as a niche sport. Even before this year, when there really has been more of a sense of urgency to not only try and clean up the sport's house but also an extra feeling of necessity to explain to the public about horse racing? Horse racing has been a niche sport for years, and even without the sense of urgency, there still seems to be more of an an audience to inform and try and grow the sport...like you said, the urge to create in service to the sport. But, it shouldn't dissuade people from at least spending some of their creative energies to create something that's not necessarily informative or instructive. I struggle with that a lot myself, feeling guilty sometimes for the time I spend writing poetry instead of working on nuts-and-bolts kinds of things. But, a month or so ago in a writing workshop that I do with some of my scavenger hunt teammates (so, not racing people!) I shared some of my racing poetry. And, it was so validating for them to read it, bring me good critiques, and not have most of their questions be, "what in the world are you talking about?!". It was the first thing that really made me see that...yes, just as with other people writing about what speaks to them, me writing about horse racing can say something that's not just about horses running around in circles, but can speak to the more universally human, too. It's easy to forget that when you spend most of your time in this small world, this niche of horse racing.
Yours from racing's microcosm,
Diana