The Lightning Room With Maggie Millner

Here, Maggie Millner’s “Equus” – in our December issue – goes to Andalusia.

1. One on level, this poem is about longing, a longing that can only be dealt with in a visceral, sexual way. What is one emotion that belongs entirely to you? What things have you arranged inside yourself and built into horses?

It’s a fairly common coping mechanism to visualize grief as an object that might then be isolated and expelled from the griever. It’s a fairly common exercise in poetry, too: to concretize the abstract, to compare the world to a stage or fear to a handful of dust. In “Equus,” horses are the physical form of the speaker’s desire. Their departure signals a sense of loss and longing.

2. Horses appear in poems every so often as a marker of sexual strength or intensity, but here you do something different. Here, the horses seem to signify desire itself. Why pick horses?

Horses inhabit a space between domesticity and wildness – between tameness and danger – that I find compelling. They signify a kind of cowboy nostalgia. They wear shoes. Maybe horses work so well as figurative carriers of human experience because they’re also physical carriers of human cargo. In a poem that seeks to explore the defamiliarization of one’s own body, horses feel like appropriately strange, appropriately liminal figures.

3. Please define the term “horsebeautiful” (I think it comes from Russ Woods):

Long-necked women are horsebeautiful. Some buildings and most musical instruments are horsebeautiful. Babies and fruit aren’t horsebeautiful, but motorcycles are.

4. Can you explicate at all the word “nuzzle,” which does not appear in your poem but somehow feels appropriate?

I think this poem has more to do with “muzzle” than with “nuzzle.” The latter connotes a tenderness, a nonsexual (or perhaps postcoital) affection that I don’t think exists in the space of “Equus.”

5. In about 1492, the last of the Muslims were kicked out of Andalusia by the conquering Catholic Spanish kingdoms, leaving behind an idealized and glorified land, painted in nostalgia, that generations of poets would return to in their writing. Can you turn this into a metaphor?

I don’t know if that’s my metaphor to make. It reminds me of Mahmoud Darwish’s line, “I look out on the wind searching for its homeland / in itself…” (appropriately from Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, trans. Jeffrey Sacks).

6. RELATED: what can you do with those blank fields, those empty pastures?

To extend the metaphor, I guess you can plant some hayseeds and wait for the horses. Blank spaces can actually be very comforting for a writer, I think; they are quiet, latent, and expectant. Henri Lefebvre was talking about something else when he said, “Space is never empty; it always embodies a meaning,” but it seems to apply. An empty space is a space full of potential – full of creative possibility.