In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jake Skeets’s poetry collection Horses is a mesmerizing elegy of land and grief.
Ada Limón wrote of the book:
“With its gorgeously wrought poems that both eulogize and praise, Horses is a singularly stunning collection. Skeets is a poet singing back to the often-frightening world; how lucky we are to overhear this awestruck music.”
In his own words, here is Jake Skeets’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Horses:
Will the Universe Be Like This? (feat. Menhir) by Suso Saiz
I think Horses is a response to pressure. I imagine the book opening with sound, disrupted, distorted, but oddly in sync as it rises slowly from the dark. I started drafting poems, lines, and threads that eventually became my second poetry collection during the pandemic and I often work best to ambient or electronic music when I’m in that stage. Songs with lyrics tend to over-excite me so I often start with noise. Sound is a wonderful trailhead into a poem. We close our eyes, we listen, and we take a step forward.
“Burning” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I mentioned pressure and as we wade deep into the liquid of darkness. I wanted the book to burst out from all sides near the start. What better way than the song “Burning” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s not a meditation but an accusation regarding water and fire. Horses opens with a twelve-part poem, the number twelve being significant to Diné lifeways, and this song represents the pressures that the book notices as we venture further and even more further into a future marred by—uncertainty, I think.
“Lord” By Young Fathers
The pressure caps as we reach what we might consider salvation, but where there is light, there is shadow. I imagine sound transforming from distortion into melody as we move along into the book. At the center of this song: a horse and a government. I imagine we begin to realize the responsibility of language. This song captures that for me. In this song, we reach one juncture, one moment of decision, as we always do, as we must. Will we make the right decision? What is the wrong one? Have we already made up our minds? The future will tell.
“Valentine, Texas” by Mitski
Maybe by now, we realize we might be dreaming. A strange lucid dream as we wake behind the wheel of a pickup truck, driving through a dirt road at night. Lights glimmer from low mountains around us. We are surrounded by those we love. We might even smile. We notice a small rain on the windshield. A reprieve. A distraction. A joy.
“My Blood Runs Through This Land” by Black Belt Eagle Scout
By now, we have been driving all night. It’s morning, blue and stone-like, damp from the night rains. We lower the window to feel the cool air. To remind ourselves we are still alive. In the second half of my book, I try to return to the ground, to the earth beneath us. I take us across the vast distances of the Navajo Nation. Through the red hills, late lakes, desert blooms, and vast sky. We begin to make the connections between land and the body. We realize we have been alive all the while and we are lovesick, desire ridden, and all we want is a cigarette or a cup of coffee as the sun rises. Because we are awake, life returns and all of its policies. I feel like Native people know this feeling. They know what’s happening and it’s happening in this song by Indigenous musician Black Belt Eagle Scout.
“Land” by Patti Smith
We forge into day, daylight-drunk or actually drunk, thirsty for the evening. Every word we ever spoke comes to haunt us. As I was revising Horses, I was in residency at John Grisham’s house in Oxford, Mississippi. As the fog hovered above the grass around me, I walked around his estate and listened to this song and Patti Smith’s Horses album over and over. It taught me everything I needed to know about longevity. Being alive is longform after all. As we ride into the poems in the second half of the collection, I hope we note how messy human lives can become when all we want is to be held, touched, loved. Writing a poetry collection feels like this song. Don’t believe me? Write one. My advice: dance sometimes, it’ll help.
“Blanket Me” by Hundred Waters
Maybe we’re hungover, even more lovesick. Every book I write might be a love poem. And loving at a time like this sure does feel shameful and I often to blame every part of myself that yearns. But isn’t poetry about yearning? I don’t know. I just know that poets write the best love poems, poets and the band Hundred Waters. Perhaps Patti Smith is some type of climax in the book (if not every song). Then, this song is the morning after when the smell of him is still on you and there’s a wildfire outside.
“Hey Babe” by Hataalii
As the wildfire rages and there’s news about a storm across the country, you sit inside a bar making cute faces with a strange man. This is that song. Something to forget about something. Someone to forget about someone. For at least one moment, you feel like you could offer the world to somebody. Even with the wildfire outside.
“A Spell, A Prayer” by Corrine Bailey Rae
The fire reaches us. Or at least we dream it. Have we been dreaming all this time? What does it mean to dream? Near the end of writing Horses, I was attempting to fix loose threads. All the yearning was over and I was in the thick of it. What people don’t tell you about spells and prayers: they are hard work. But we do hard work for things we love, for people we love. Poetry is a type of spell. Poetry is a type of prayer. I’ve been praying all my life then. I’ve been magic, too.
“715 – CRΣΣKS” by Bon Iver
What they don’t tell you about writing poetry is how much it takes you away from your normal life? But what is a normal life when there’s a wildfire burning outside. Oh yes, the wildfire. When we walk along the rivers of our lives, we must always remember that there is a wildfire burning in the distance. Bon Iver was the glue of sanity as I finished Horses. If Patti Smith was the engine, Bon Iver was the long smoke after. I remember sitting by water when I finished the book. Only to start another one. Something must be wrong with me.
“TERRITORY” by The Blaze
At the end of the book, we reach a new world, or at least the gesture of one. We are still waiting for it to arrive in our ordinary lives: a new world. Until then, we sit next to people we love. We think about our childhoods, our parents, all the former people who altered our paths. At the end of the book, I try to offer my readers some clarity—as much as a poet can offer. I explain things. I hold their hands. I let the sounds return to music. Together, we try to become the moon. The essay at the end of the book is a reminder that we have to get to bed still, that there’s morning waiting for us, but we can dance for a bit longer because remember, we all must dance sometimes.
“Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus
Do I even have to explain? I told you dancing is one thing that might get you through. Listen to the music, the beat, the lyric, the sound, the image, the thrust, the pulse, the swing, the quake, the touch, the smoke, the light, and let your body sway. I’ve been serious about dancing. But, oh, yes, there’s still a wildfire outside.
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, selected by the National Poetry Series and winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and an American Book Award. A Whiting Award recipient, Skeets is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the Nation’s third Poet Laureate. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.