Meet the Poems: All the Pretty Horses

In this series, Meet the Poems, Andrew takes you through how he wrote some of his most popular poems.

This is a poem inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. It’s written in blank verse and was one of a number of poems from my second collection, Stay, inspired by novels. Being an English teacher has meant that I’ve been obliged to read a number of novels I otherwise might not have had to read. However, this has been great as it’s forced me to read books which have challenged some of my preconceived ideas and notions. The other great thing about teaching English has been that it makes you really well acquainted with a text. This is certainly my experience for texts such as The Grapes of Wrath or Macbeth. Most of the novel-inspired poems in Stay are books I’d taught in the classroom, however All the Pretty Horses is not. I’d been taken in by the writing of Cormac McCarthy ever since I read The Road; I didn’t realise novels could be written in that way. The plot of The Road is simple: a father and son have to navigate a post-apocalyptic world. It was McCarthy’s style I loved and the vividness of the barren landscape he painted, while retaining a warmth and connection between the father and son. 

All the Pretty Horses, though, is a different book about horse riding (something I have zero experience of) and two characters John Grady and Rawlins as they travel south to Mexico in search of work. McCarthy is one of the great writers about masculinity and this book, like The Road in some ways, does not major in plot, but in the nuances and subtleties of the relationship between the two characters. It captured my imagination and I felt like I wanted to respond to it with my own poem. Cue: 'All the Pretty Horses'. 

Imagery

One of the things that is often parroted in creative writing classes is ‘show don’t tell’ i.e. let the image speak for itself, and indeed this is something I’ve written about before in this blog post. It’s certainly a style that is on display in McCarthy’s writing which is full of imagery. I was inspired by this method and it’s not only influenced this poem but others I’ve written since. You can see my attempts to do this in lines such as ‘kicked/ the campfire down to ashes’ to convey the sense of purpose and movement in the characters. 

Line Breaks

Looking back on this poem now, I can also see that I’ve been trying to play around with line breaks within the format of blank verse (something I’ve written about here). The use of the ‘ — good God – / the stars’ is a bit of a stretch but I think I manage it, and it hopefully conveys the sense of wonder at the night sky. One of my bugbears with contemporary poetry, in fact all poetry, is poorly chosen, sloppy, clumsy  line endings where the sentence is just broken off and is left dangling over the next one - very rarely do poets manage to carry this off. When ending a line I’m thinking about whether the line itself, first and foremost, makes sense when read alone. After this criteria is met then I can start to think about which word to end on, but also which word to start the next line on. Line endings give a poem momentum, so it’s important to spend time getting them right.

Dialogue

I’ve always loved dialogue in poems as I think introducing more speakers adds a layer of complexity. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is a great example of this (I've written about this poem in my Desert Island Poems series here). I’ve attempted to introduce speech in different ways here, chiefly through ‘Mexico tomorrow’ but also with unquoted dialgoue such as ‘Tonight it’s warm/ and the moon bright enough, says John,/ to guide our way.’ Sometimes introducing dialogue doesn’t always have to be with speech marks. I like these subtle ways of experimenting with different speech techniques as it allows for variation in syntax and narrative perspective. 

Vocabulary

When I play my mother at Scrabble she gets infuriated that I always play for points as opposed to trying to find the ‘loveliest word’. Isn’t ‘arroyo’ a lovely word? Shouldn’t poems just have lovely words in them all the time? Okay, maybe not, but it doesn’t do any harm. One of the things I loved about reading McCarthy was the new vocabulary I came across. An arroyo, for example, is a fast flowing river, which can also be dry depending on circumstances. I think diction or vocabulary (call it what you will) adds colour and texture to the poem. ‘Galloping’, ‘buttermilk biscuits’, ‘saddling up’ all great phrases which bring the scene to life.

The Ending

The rule of three, or tri-colon crescendo is a timeless way to end a poem e.g. ‘to strive, to seek, to find…’ Is it an easy way to end a poem? Do I rely on it too much? These are questions I ask myself often about this technique, and often I do try to come up with another way, as it can be a bit of a cop out. However, I think it’s more important to think about the words chosen in the triplet as opposed to the technique. Here the poem is taking the image of the border and exploring both its physical and metaphorical importance in relation to these two men, which is also the importance of borders to all men.

You can buy signed, first editions of Stay, the collection in which this poem appears, here:

STAY (Signed) Paperback

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STAY (Signed) Hardback

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