song

By Nathan Fako

Photo Caption: All the Tired Horses in the Sun by T. C. Cannon (painted between 1971-1972)

T. C. Cannon Fair Use

In 1970, Bob Dylan released Self Portrait, his tenth studio album. It was met with poor reviews and disdain from fans, the long history of which is well-documented online. Curiously, Dylan made a choice that alienated fans, whether intentional or not. The opening track, “All the Tired Horses,” does not feature vocals from Dylan at all. Where had the dynamo gone? Where was the “Rolling Stone,” the Dylan of “Corrina, Corrina,” the young man “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What did he mean, foregrounding a voice, a choir of voices, that didn’t belong to him? 

Around the time Dylan’s song was released, a young Kiowa-Caddo man named Tommy Cannon–popularly known as T.C. Cannon–returned from the Vietnam War and painted two horses under an ochre sky. One red horse, one blue. He named the piece All the Tired Horses in the Sun. Cannon tragically died eight years later, just a few months before his big opening show at the Aberbach Gallery in New York. While his life was short, Cannon was a prolific artist, known as both a painter and a poet. Was his painting a response to Dylan’s song? Inspired by it, surely, but carrying the message forward somehow? Transforming it? 

Finally, in 2018, a year before being named United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo was commissioned to write a piece for a book about Cannon. She wrote “All the Tired Horses in the Sun.” The piece has to do with Harjo’s Mvskoke identity and issues faced by Indigenous communities; perhaps, the piece has something to do with not just Cannon’s painting, but Dylan’s as well. 

Artists respond to the world around them; the world is filled with artists. How do we make sense of intertextual connections like those presented here? I don’t have an answer. We engage with art, think about it, are moved by it, and in some cases, make art in response. We keep our minds open. One avenue of entry that often proves to be interesting, if even as basic exploration, is the use of one work to frame another work. This is sometimes called a lens. So let’s use the Harjo poem as a lens for viewing the Cannon painting, and then listening to the Dylan song. 

First: Harjo. 

The poem begins with “Forever.” Harjo creates a landscape with anaphora and end-stopped lines. Readers have the sense of a weary propulsion. A tired procession of family, “my cousin. Auntie. Uncle. / Another cousin.” The poem opens in the center, and the subject is complexified. Up to this point, we are given context through the title, made to think of family members like horses in the sun, and then: “Vending machines and pop. / Chips, candy, and not enough clean water.” So we are handed food insecurity. Harjo’s choices are very intentional. The harshness of the end-stopped lines, the word choices having to do with junk food, and the absence of enough clean water paint a picture of a landscape that is difficult; it is hot, dry, “waiting and tired.” The final line of the poem is a call to action: “Go water the horses.” We the readers have the ability to positively impact our communities.  

Applied to the Cannon painting, Harjo’s poem provides the figures with further meaning. The two animal shapes are so close to one another that they touch. The blue from the horse’s coat is echoed in the lighter-toned saddle of the red horse. Their heads are down, likely to indicate that they are grazing. This is a family, pressed down under the weight of a sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas, a hot ochre with marshmallow clouds. The saddles indicate these are working animals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to link a working horse conceptually to the grim reality of Indigenous dispossession in our American history. So we have the sense of hot work, with one’s family, in an open landscape with no space for shelter.  

To my eye, the Dylan song–stay with me, I know it’s odd to go backward–ties the three works together. Making a lens of the poem makes the song quite simple, and in my opinion, poignant. There are only two lines of lyric in the song: 

If we apply the connotative landscape we have built by working backward, we have a picture of the horses in our minds. They are family members, moving through life under a hot sun, without enough clean water. Our families are working, the sun can be oppressive, and there is not enough. There is never enough. How can an artist–existing in a political landscape like the one inhabited by Dylan and Cannon in the 70s, the one Harjo has inhabited throughout her long career–rationalize the act of making art? How do you unpack the choice to be creative when there are so many practical problems in the world that need fixing? And how do you grapple with becoming a symbol–as Dylan was–for something you may not want to stand for?  

Simple: you focus on what you have to. You make the art. There’s no sense in hand-wringing.  

You go water the horses.