Does this one cut it? I would say it’s not the best example of a poem, although it’s a nice bit of something. What bothers me is that there is almost no figurative language or wordplay of any kind and no attention to rhythm that I can detect. There is vivid description, so the Imagists would like it. And, as I pointed out, there’s witty irony.

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First off, there’s the matter of some degree of trust — trust that the poet isn’t trying to foist something off as a poem just because he or she says it is. For instance, Taylor also writes poems with more obvious structure to them. So when he breaks a line, I figure he probably means it, and will give him some slack. What he means by a break may differ from poem to poem, and even from line to line within a poem. As Arcadia shows above, there does seem to be a difference between allstrungtogether prosody and the “enjambed” version. Sometimes the linebreak is a break in time, setting the meter, rhythm and sounds of one line up to play against another. Sometimes it’s a loop, maybe knotted with punctuation to slow the reader down for a breath. Sometimes it works more like a winch, pulling the reader down closer to the text of the next line. In any of these cases, the placement of the breaks can elicit a certain kind of attention — attention that may be hard to quantify or codify, but that in quality simply feels different to read than prose. Then again, I’m no expert, and tend to be pretty forgiving as long as I don’t get the sense of being jerked around.

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Other folk might not be interested in this question (what constitutes a poem and why); I am. I write a good bit of poetry myself, some of which has been published in a small way many years ago, when I thought I cared about publishing at all.

But I do care about this. I really and earnestly do. I am glad that Harrison is doing this and doing it well.

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One of the features that marks off writing as poetic or as poetry is the compression of action. Scenes move to an internal rhythm, almost dream-like. Notice the shift between the first sentence and the next. One moment the poet is looking back, the next he’s there in the corral with his riding instructor. Good prose would give some connecting lines, but here it just shifts — like a dream.

In the second stanza, there’s a nice description of the filly bucking, flinging off its rider “as you would throw a rock” (btw that’s a really odd phrase — it’s not precisely observed), but the next sentence the instructor is getting up. No transition line. As I said, we move here as in a dream — the pace of action is different from that of prose.

And finally, why does he say he learned two things? Again he doesn’t draw it out, we fill it in. This allusiveness is again a mark of the poetic framework.

So I think it a poem. That said, I hesitate over some of the choices the poet made. The line breaks align too easily at the grammatical pauses so there’s no particular surprise or tension in the words. And there is a sloppiness in the word choice which others have noted. As a result the instructor’s closing words don’t have as much surprise or energy as they deserve.

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He turned and mounted. She took two steps, then leftthe ground, I thought for good. But she came down hard, humped her back, swallowed her neck, and threw her rider as you’d throw a rock. He rose, brushed his pants and caught his breath, and said, “See that’s the way to do it. When you see they’re gonna throw you, get off.”

I think that this is a whole different critter.
The mere fact that a poem breaks up the structure of a sentence in order to highlight or alter the rhythm of its reading is sufficient to turn it into poetry.

Of course
That doesn’t work
necessarily
for all sentences,
duzzit?

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I am afraid that the younger set, is so poorly educated, they do not know what poems are. If they did, they would hate them like normal folks and me

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I do like the story it tells, and the fact that it’s a nice scene with a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s hard to do in such little space. And it’s also clear and doesn’t fidget with vocabulary – in other words, it’s easy to understand and pretty simple. I like simple poems from time to time, as long as they’re not simplistic, which this one borders on being.

I also like the pedestrian, everyday nature of it. Quotidian poems are sometimes the best.

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