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H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
What one must always comprehend of poetry is that it is an experience the reader must relive.
—John Ciardi
~~
I fell in love with poetry when I heard Gary Snyder read his poem “Hay for the Horses.” That was thirty-one summers ago on a big porch surrounded by Ponderosa and Jeffery pines at a Squaw Valley literary conference. The last day featured readings by the faculty. I was a wannabe fiction writer and had brought along stories about cattle ranching in the Kansas Flint Hills, fly fishing and my take on the American War in Vietnam. I had never considered writing a poem until I heard Snyder read. I knew how hay was harvested because I’d done the work and I was amazed that his poem told the story so beautifully and so big in such a short space of time.
There was a social gathering after the readings where I overheard a group of young writers commenting. “I guess it was a good poem,” one said, “but nothing I can relate to.” And “I really could care less about barns and hay bales and sweaty boys.” This, while I was wondering what it was that could turn putting-up hay into poetry! Years later I ran across John Ciardi’s book How Does a Poem Mean? His quote, the epigraph for this essay, explained my immediate comprehension and love for “Hay for the Horses.” I had lived every word and nuance.
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting. Left in the field, the baled hay would rot and mold. Barring a drought, we put up 3 crops every summer.
Making the bales was a process completed before we arrived. The rancher had cut the alfalfa with a mechanical scythe attached to a tractor. After a day or two in the sun and with the aroma from its violet and purple flowers still sweet, he’d raked the cuttings into windrows. The next day a baling machine scooped up and fed the windrows through a chute where the alfalfa was compacted, secured tightly with baling wire, then dumped to the ground in rows ready for bucking. Imagine, big green loaves of bread, 18 inches square and 3 and one-half feet long that weigh 90 to 100 pounds. Picking up and loading those bales required strength and attention.
We arrived at the ranch a little after dawn. The rancher had hitched his hay-wagon behind the tractor, ready for us to ride the empty flatbed to the field. There, he drove slowly alongside each row while two of us grabbed bales by the wires then bucked them aboard. The other two stood on the bed where they stacked them 5 layers high, the first layer side-ways and the second lengthwise—a weave of sorts—alternating each layer to secure the load for the ride to the barn. At the barn, the rancher parked the wagon below the loft’s big door. The boys stacking bales waited on the wagon while the boys on the ground climbed a ladder into the loft. Then, as Snyder says succinctly, “With winch and ropes and hooks,” the wagon boys hoisted the bales up to where, like 2 Captain Hooks from Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” the others gripped their hay hooks, ready to stab the bales and pull them inside.
The farmer’s wife made lemonade-runs mornings and afternoons. She brought lunch too. The first day, all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we could eat. The second, we feasted on fried chicken. We’d come to expect her chicken which the rancher had promised before we signed on. It was included in our verbal contract for the nickel-a-bale the four of us would divide equally as wages.
I remember my first harvest that first summer. After two days—daylight to dark—we had loaded, off-loaded and stacked in the loft, 1,280 bales. That is 1,280 bales x 5 cents a bale = $64, divided four ways = $16 a piece. Bucking hay was itchy, sweaty, and gritty hard work that left us bone-weary, but we could see what was accomplished at the end of each day—the art of it, the pattern, shape and beauty of a job well done. As a bonus, all those days haying, helped us get in shape for football.
In the 1970’s, I hired my own hay-bucker boys. Then, 5 years into the registered Hereford business, my ranch manager convinced me we could save 3 week’s work every summer if we had a round-baler. He explained the new baler scoops up windrows, wrapping the hay layer over layer, from inside to out, to make a waterproof bale weighing about 1,200 pounds. When a bale is proper size, the machine secures it with baler twine and drops it onto the meadow where it stays, without rot or mold, until needed. When it’s time, the bale is picked-up by a forklift-like contraption attached to the back of the tractor, moved to a manger, and dropped inside—a process of harvesting and feeding hay untouched by human hands.
I remember my first season of round-baling, standing high-up in that empty loft, leaning against the big door frame, and watching the new machine doing the old work. I was believing I had made a major contribution to what Snyder might call, The lost art of bucking hay. Yes, the round baler was efficient and quick, but it didn’t feel right without my high school boys. What had I done?
The young writers at Squaw Valley who didn’t know the work of bucking hay might have tried to imagine “. . . flecks of alfalfa / Whirling through shingle cracks of light.” Or, Snyder might have explained before he read. It is a conundrum. Will poems about people working at their craft be consigned to history books? Snyder, in another poem, “Axe Handles” quotes Pound, “When making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.” Poems done well preserve knowledge and show the way. The axe handles metaphor works for a lot of things—like what is in plain sight. This is something Ciardi would encourage the poet to write—poems the reader can live in.
Hay For the Horses
Gary Snyder
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of hay dust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.
~~~~~
Copyright 2025 H.C. Palmer
“Hay for the Horses” by Gary Snyder is included in this essay under the “fair use” copyright statute.
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Thanks for this essay, a tribute to Snyder and to the way poetry connects to the world. Not just the experience of work (I never bucked hay, although I did play in a hayloft when I was a kid, so the dust and the itchiness are there in memory), but the pleasures of what language can do with work, as in those wonderful last vernacular lines.
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Yes. Thank you…A tribute to Snyder. “Here in the mind brother, turquoise blue. I wouldn’t fool you…”. And, back to “The real work. What is to be done!”
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Thank you, Al
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I was very happy to see this essay. HC knows the joy and misery of haying. Probably, one of the hardest, most physically demanding jobs I ever had. Seeing the fields laid out in front of me seemingly as endless as the sky. Knowing I’d be bucking bails across of all it of was gut wrenching. Of course, I wasn’t in very good shape at the time. Thanks for memory, the poem of it.
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Well-said, Al. Thank you,
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Great memories, Luray. You were a step or two ahead of me and my buddies back in the late 40’s and early 50’s. Our balers spit the bales out in the ground. That’s when and where the buckin’ started. Those were truly glorious days
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H. C.’s essay took me back to my first readings of “Hay for Horses,” a poem that I knew was accurate, even though my own extensive experience with getting bales of hay into a barn involved an elevator rather than the ropes and hay hooks. A few of those hooks hung in our barn – relics of the old baler, the one we had before the barn fire. The new baler made smaller bales and threw them into the wagon as Dad baled. My sisters and I did most of the unloading. We worked in pairs, one of us relaying bales to the sister who placed each down on the moving elevator chain. (A slightly curved bale had to be placed concave side up, so the chain would catch the ends and carry it up the incline into the hay mow.) It was important to use just the right amount of force to to swing the bale onto the moving chain without falling onto it yourself. Years later, the dairy cows sold, Dad courted horse owners by dropping off samples of his best hay. Inevitably one of us or one of our kids got the phone call: Any chance you can help load hay? Dad knew just how we could fit 70 bales into the bed of the second-hand appliance delivery truck and secure them with rope before heading off to one of his customers. Of course often we would go along, touring the quickly-gentrifying neighborhood, having put aside whatever our plans were for the afternoon.
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What a beautiful description, Luray. Thank you!
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I do remember those heavy wire-tied bales. The summer before the barn fire, I sometimes drove the tractor-very slowly- as our part-time hired man hoisted them up onto the flat wagon bed and cousin Larry stacked them. I was heading toward my 8th birthday. They really could be heavy, especially if the hay was just a trifle too moist.
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Beautiful description, Luray.
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Good stuff, your story. My mom called it, “Character building.”
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Too much to tell. I heard Snyder read from my front row seat during senior year at st. olaf, 1971. He sat cross legged on the dais in front of us; then the custodian came in as he began, to cuss us out for the mess we had made the night before. It was from a different group, but Snyder seemed very amused by that introduction.
Then that very summer, I got work as the 22 yr. old hired man at a dairy farm in Western Minnesota (Tumuli Township). Besides cattle work, we also grew hay, and one of my first jobs was to work on the wagon stacking the hay bales. as they popped out of the baler. It was a record year for rainfall, and we determined that we either baled the hay wet or it would rot in the field. So I stacked 40 lb. bales of hay 4 layers high. then later went into the hayloft to restack up there after it was a bit dryer. My partner up in that hot, humid space, dropped his glasses between bales, and I remember screaming to the baling crew below to stop. The things you never forget. Kolle, the farmer,, was the uncle of my then girlfriend Paula, who went on to a successful life as a psychotherapist, and like me, never looked back at that place (till I do here). I hated that summer for so many reasons, but baling hay was one. My first mistake was to stack those bales while wearing a short sleeved shirt. Only happened once. Then I learned the meaning of a “farmer’s tan.”
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Brilliant, Jim. You need to write a memoir.
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I have worked on a farm in Finland, but that was 1957/58 and we lifted the cut grass onto wooden ‘teepees’ with big wooden spikes at intervals from bottom to top, to allow the grass air between to dry out in the short summer days. Yes, it’s backbreaking. But, whatever you do, from bookkeeping to sorting stuff on a conveyor belt, to serving tables, the lines that are the killers are the last ones: “I thought that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that’s just what I’ve gone and done.”
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My family owned a ranch in Texas for many years. I grew up mucking out stables and digging post holes. I never saw the poetry in that life until I read Sean Sexton’s poems. I will always be grateful to him for showing me the invisible beauty that was in my life.
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I have never worked on a farm, bucked hay, or any such things, but this essay and Snyder’s poem bring it all to life. The language of the trade, to me, is delicious on the tongue–as Hopkins’ puts it, “and all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.” I genuinely don’t understand those students who can’t see how brilliant the Snyder poem is just becuase they haven’t experienced what they’re reading about. I’m not native-American but I love Joy Harjo’s poetry. I’m not African-American, but I love Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden. I learned from them things I didn’t know. Isn’t that also what poetry is for: growing our compassion, our ability to imagine the reality of other lives and people? This essay does that, bringing to life your life, your experience so that I may inahabit it and see the world in a bigger way. Your poetry does this too. Thank you, H.C.
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Thank you, Mike.
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Thanks, Mike. This sounds like the beginning of one of your wonderful essays on poetics.
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This elegant essay reminded me of the Gary Snyder reading I attended many years ago in Seattle. Snyder opened with the words, “I’m taking requests,” which caught everyone off guard except for poet Robert Sund whose hand shot up. Robert shouted, “Hay for the Horses,” which pleased Snyder and led to a wonderful night.
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Beautiful. I wish I’d been there.
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Thank you, Michael
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Thank you for the second time today as now I remember long drives across the country, the dry hills and coming upon green valleys
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Thank you, Barbara
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What a world, indeed, and how moved I am by this essay — and how I love ‘living in’ that poem. Such subtle nostalgia. The “round baling” did save time, I know, but gone was the “hay-wagon behind the tractor, ready for us to ride the empty flatbed to the field. Gone the lemonades and chicken from the farmer’s wife, “included in the verbal contract for the nickel-a-bale the four of us would divide equally as wages.” That sweaty camaraderie between the boys. What a perfect description — as powerful as Snyder’s poem.
And this: “I was believing I had made a major contribution to what Snyder might call, The lost art of bucking hay. Yes, the round baler was efficient and quick, but it didn’t feel right without my high school boys. What had I done?” had this subtle, poignant echoing of “What did I know. What did I know…”
What a way to start my day! Thank you, H.C.!
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“Those Winter Sundays” did come to mind while “working” on this essay—as it does when I’m thinking of my obligations to friends and families and neighbors. My father and Hayden’s father, so alike and so trustworthy, banking those fires. I can live in that “banking.”
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Thank you, Laure-Anne!
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Lovely praise, Laure-Anne. Thank you.
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What a masterful overlay of autobiography and art, and especially the art of humanizing and memorializing hard work. I recently drove through the Flint Hills and can imagine the scope of bucking bales in what might seem near-endless prairie; but this essay and poem get me closer to the experience and, crucially, to understanding its importance.
–Robert Stewart
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Well-said, Robert. Thank you.
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Thanks
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Thank you, Bob
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Thank you Bob. You have taught and mentored so many, so well. The list is long and I’m so grateful to be one of your students and a friend.
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Saturday! A perfect day for this prose, this poem in the month of March drawing to a close and we’ve been getting a little rain almost every day and have come to that feeling about things as would a man with a barn full of stacked Alfalfa, or a field of round bales, facing the remainder of a hard season. It’s a moment worry can rest, something sublime as this telling, the wonderful Snyder poem. I’m so grateful this day has come—wished, even hoped for yet unseen. And the equinox! The first day of Spring! We’ve crossed a wilderness to arrive in this place we’ve stood all along. What a world .
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Sean, you are so close to nature. What a gift you are to the rest of us in our built worlds.
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Thanks, Sean
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