Poetry in Locomotion: Kate Partridge Converses about Eadweard Muybridge, Horses, and an Inspiring Corgi
I've been really obsessed, recently, with Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion series, but grappling to figure out what that means for my poems (if it means anything). This is an example of one of the plates that I like—a view of a horse running from the side and the back. What I find fixating in this image is that it manages to be both entirely fragmented and continuous simultaneously. I think about how to make this kind of effect in time and in anatomy within my poems—each line its own horse, but also the same horse still running. I don't think I've figured it out. Thinking about these photos did lead me back to Elizabeth Bishop, to whom I often circle back, and her maxim about Spontaneity, Accuracy, and Mystery. I think that Muybridge's photos are often able to have those qualities in very discrete ways; each new frame of the horse seems, to me, a new horse—a sort of spontaneous, new being that is generated by the image. Muybridge was als
