To say Tess Taylor is a poet is reductive. Indeed, the El Cerrito-based author’s (tess-taylor.com) work sprawls to incorporate not only a poetry chapbook (“The Misremembered World”), poem collections in two books (“The Forage House” and “Rift Zone”), a farm journal (“Work & Days”) and the intriguing “Last West,” a book released at the side of the Recent York Museum of Modern Art’s “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures,” the primary major solo exhibition of Lange’s work in greater than 50 years.
“Last West” incorporates images, historical archives, notebooks and oral histories with a pastiche of perspectives from Taylor and other artists, writers, scholars and critics. And that’s not all. Taylor has served as a poetry reviewer for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and chaired the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle for six years.
Her editorials, poems, nonfiction essays and book reviews have appeared on CNN and in The Recent York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Travel & Leisure and other publications. An educator, Taylor conducts private and community workshops and has taught at UC Berkeley, St. Mary’s College and UC Davis. She is on the low-residency MFA creative writing program faculty at Ashland University (near Cleveland). A recent conversation with Taylor begins with, as expected, three latest activities added to an already busy schedule.
“My plate is just too full, for which I’m immensely grateful,” she said.
Taylor in 2023 is working to finish an anthology of gardening poems, “Leaning Toward Light, Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them;” writing a monthly column on poetry and every day life for CNN; and developing a six-part podcast series with the Getty Research Institute. Each podcast focuses on one letter from a twentieth century artist’s life from which a story about what it means to create art is told.
“Each life is a master class in creative stamina,” Taylor said. “Every person and story has riveted me. Making multiple trips to the Getty to work of their archives, I get to spread the entire papers out and piece together the story of a rare life out of wealthy fragments. One in every of the things that’s cool is that in an archive you meet artists in the course of their dailiness.
“In contrast, in a museum you meet artists at their most finished. Artwork is purported to be an act of genius. It’s polished, on a white wall and framed. There’s something delightful and fascinating about finding the genius of that concept in a notebook as a doodle next to a coffee stain. And seeing it’s next to a reminder to select up dry cleansing.”
Taylor has kept and continues to maintain her own notebooks.
“I’m compulsive about notebooks. I at all times have no less than one. I even have one for to-do lists and one for spurts of ideas and language. I write by hand because I like that somatic connection. I can hear myself pondering, and I can get the words out. It’s some of the essential things for anyone to write down. When you’ve got thoughts, give yourself permission to overhear your daydreams and write them down. I even have a gazillion notebooks.”
Taylor stores them, then mines them later for poems or fragmentary ideas price pursuing. After reviewing them a few times, they go into deep storage.
“I haven’t been brave enough to read the notebook I kept in the primary month of the pandemic, because I used to be so miserable. I’d write these mad-person entries in the course of the night. It’s a record of us all in our confusion and grief, and it’s all too fresh. I haven’t had the courage to have a look at them yet.”
Less terrifying notebooks were those she kept will writing “Rift Zone” and the notebooks Lange compiled that led to Last West, the 2 books released in 2020.
“Each books are deeply about California. I live (after getting back from living in Recent York) six blocks from the home I grew up in El Cerrito. Once I got back, I wanted to write down about California. I used to be a grown person, a printed author, a parent. California was deeply familiar and fresh at the identical time.”
She said the state is an intensifier, a mirror of world dichotomies: great beauty, apocalyptic weather, equally extreme wealth and poverty, prophetic shifts, modern with progressive firms and Silicon Valley but in addition ancient with redwoods and impactful, geological history.
“All of those got here to ‘Rift Zone,’ which is about living with precarity, on fault lines, in a spot that’s an intense, leading indicator of wider global crises.”
The Lange book written parallel to “Rift Zone” got here after learning Lange had photographed people and places in El Cerrito in 1942. Taylor visited UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the Oakland Museum of California, following an odd urge that had caused her to incessantly repeat, “write about Lange” in her notebooks. Intrigued by the rhythmic, list-making, staccato voice present in Lange’s note-taking, the mashup of topics and quotes Lange recorded hatched a project. Taylor visited the entire locations Lange wrote about in her notebooks and wrote letters in response to the photographer.
Concurrently, while working with an encampment in Berkeley, providing aid and listening to people who find themselves unsheltered, migrants and living under enormous economic pressures, Taylor recognized a profound connection to Lange’s documentary photographs of migrant families within the Thirties.
“It felt incredibly contemporary, 80 years later,” she said. “After which each books got here out in 2020, a really precarious time for all of us.”
The poems Taylor is writing now are emergent and appear “in little dream forms” in her notebooks. In writing workshops, she suggests being vulnerable to students in addition to being open to uncertainty, willing to face in indecision and specifically, clipping the ends of accomplished poems.
“You’ll be able to cut out the last 4 lines and end along with your query in mind, versus playing out the heavy conclusions. It brings people right into a place of commentary; a spot where we will raise questions we don’t settle. We live in an era where persons are certain and furious.”
Allowing space inside art for uncertainty, tenderness, confusion, breath, community, real and metaphoric tectonic shifts, ambiguity and paradox is vital, Taylor says. Together with those things, she says, the creativity we keep in our minds or in actual notebooks is to be crammed with obligatory doodles; grocery and to-do lists; precise language and knowledge; and memories and dreams that pool and feed into the sounds, rhythms, silliness and seriousness of poems — and life.
Lou Fancher is a contract author. Contact her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.