Q&A with Henry Taylor
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Now retired and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Henry Taylor taught at Roanoke College, The University of Utah, and American University. With Ed Tedeschi, a Roanoke student, he co-founded Roanoke Review in 1967. Among his six books of poems is The Flying Change, which received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
What follows is a transcript of the audio interview which took place at via Zoom on April 29, 2021, between Henry Taylor, Pulitzer prize-winning poet and cofounder of Roanoke Review, Cameron MacKenzie, a book reviewer of Roanoke Review, and Roanoke College student Olivia Samimy, who at the time served as a content editor for the Review.
Mary Crockett Hill: Hello, and welcome! My name is Mary Crockett Hill, the editor of Roanoke Review and I am so happy that I can be here today for this conversation with Henry Taylor, who is the cofounder of Roanoke Review, as well as a Pulitzer prize-winning poet! [As he is] the person who got us started in 1967, we're really happy… to have a conversation with him.
We're here today with novelist and short story writer Cameron MacKenzie who also is the book reviewer for Roanoke Review. And Olivia Samimy, who is our content editor. She's a student at Roanoke College for a few more months, maybe just one month, and then will be heading off to graduate school in library science. And so, I'm going to leave things up to you. I'm going to kind of fade away and listen in with eager ears.
Henry Taylor: Thanks very much.
Olivia Samimy: Thank you so much for speaking with us, and I think I have the first question, so we are going to start with that. So, you founded Roanoke Review in 1967, over 50 years ago, as a place for other poets to share their work. Do you feel that this experience influenced your own writing career?
Henry Taylor: Well, I don't know that it had a very strong direct influence. It was something that it just felt really good to be doing. Ed Tedeschi was a student, he was a senior, I think, and he came to my office one day, and said that he thought it would be a good idea if Roanoke College had a magazine that looked beyond the bounds of the campus. And I said, that sounds like a good idea, how can I help you? And he said, I need a faculty advisor, for one thing. I said okay, I'm on, and we had a little discussion about what to call the magazine. I can't remember now some of his ideas about that, but he wanted to be out a little bit on the edge, and I thought something a little more traditional would be better and so, in my role as faculty advisor, I strongly advised him that we call it the Roanoke Review. And we beat the bushes among my friends and acquaintances for the first issue. We had some really distinguished people in that first issue. Malcolm Cowley, for example, and so we were off and running.
Olivia Samimy: Great, thanks so much for your answer and for founding it. It's still a joy to work with. So, I'll turn over to Cameron for the next question.
Henry Taylor: Sure.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah sure! Again, it's great to get the chance to talk to you especially about this really remarkable collection that is just out. I know we’re excited to talk to you about not only your work but your process and just maybe even some general thought about poetry, and I hope we can start if you could read us the poem “Silo,” and this is one of the newer ones. I feel like there are really a handful of poems in this book that just sort of span the decades, that are able to just coalesce so many themes at one time. I feel like “Silo” is one of them, so if you could read that for us to start us off.
Henry Taylor: Be glad to, thank you.
Silo
From dinner with my sisters at the farm
I walked out through the back yard just at dusk,
down toward the dairy, to what we had called
“the new silo” for more than forty years,
it being the only concrete silo on the place.
They laid the jointed blocks to forty-five feet,
a thin steel ladder bolted to the side,
a crow's nest at the top. You entered it
by lifting the net-steel platform like a trap door,
climbing through, settling it back into its frame,
then standing on it. When I was about twelve,
that was one of the places I needed to be.
From up there I could watch how the barnyard
fitted between the barn’s end and the shop.
Now against the sky the big silo loomed,
and it came to me to try the climb, to see
if I still could. I had taken care enough
as a boy, had never slipped, but now I was
cautious almost to a fault, speaking aloud
each step in the procedure, when I saw
that years had opened a gap in the domed roof,
and I could see across to the other side
where, on the concrete ledge, a slim barn owl
stared without blinking from its heart-shaped head.
It made a quick short lean in my direction,
combining a greeting and a closer look,
dropped from the ledge into the dark, then rose
toward me, wings snapped shut for the exit hole,
pulled a swift breeze across the top of my head
as mind and reflex argued with each other
whether to hold on or let go, and soared
into a darkling absence that abides.
Cameron MacKenzie: Thank you. This poem I feel, like so many others in the last volume, and really sort of throughout the poems in this book, dwells on absence, by that last line, that “a darkling absence that abides.” Is this the same absence in your mind that we see in say “The Living Room at Springdale,” with the shadowy non-space or the hollowed shoe tree in “The Final Morbidity of the Interior Embezzler?” What's this relationship, the absence of things not there, things gone?
Henry Taylor: Well, in fact, the last word of the poem is “abides,” and the absences are paradoxically not entirely absences. They're visitable. You can get to them… almost. You know, you can get to them enough to sort of imaginatively inhabit them again and there's consolation in that. The book Crooked Run, which was the immediate predecessor to this one, is essentially a chronicle of a piece of land that is very gradually being gobbled up by the expansion of the suburbs of Washington DC, and so, in some ways that's going to be gone for good. But it's not… it's not a cause for grief exactly, it's just things that slip away from us need to be recalled. It's what history is about. The hollowed shoe tree on the other hand, I would just mention that’s just, that's not really an absence. That's just a smuggler’s trick.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah, that's in the final morbidity, interior embezzler right along with it.
Henry Taylor: Yeah, right. Yeah, I was made extremely happy one day when I got hold of the Library of America collection of Wallace Stevens. Yeah, and as far as I know, it's the first collection of Wallace Stevens to include any of his writings about business and insurance and stuff like that. I mean he was Vice President of the Hartford Insurance Company. So he wrote tons of stuff for their house organ and whatnot, and nobody ever picked up on it, except maybe in volumes of letters. So here was this little essay about fidelity and surety claims. You know when people make claims on their insurance because somebody has stolen a bunch of their money, and he actually said that wonderful thing about embezzlers.
Cameron MacKenzie: Oh really? That's great yeah, I see definitely you know, you have a relationship with Stevens, with Eliot, I believe William James is in here. Who else were you pulling from?
Henry Taylor: Well, my earliest- the earliest influences on me were probably in many ways the strongest for a long time. There was a brief period as when I was an undergraduate when I thought that James Dickey’s way of writing poems was the only way that was worthwhile. And he was very kind about that and tried to explain to me that I probably had my own voice somewhere, and that I ought to be bearing down on finding it. But my first book was called “Dickey-haunted” by some reviewer, and he was quite right. I didn't keep any of those poems when I brought about three or four poems from that first book into this collection. I left the Dickey ones behind, but I remain indebted to him for showing me how to do a certain number of things. George Garrett was another powerful influence, partly as a writer, and also as a teacher. He came to the University of Virginia in the fall of my third year there and became a close friend until his death about a dozen years ago.
Cameron MacKenzie: What you say about voices is really fascinating, especially the way that this book is set up from the newest poems to the oldest poems, and so we travel back and see, at least to my mind, how the voice changes or how the voice sort of evolves. Could you read, I believe it's “Riding a One-Eyed Horse” which to me feels similar to “Silo,” but, or rather the theme seems similar, but the feel is different, or the tone is different.
Henry Taylor: Now this a poem whose surface topic haunted me for years. I was a teenager when I first saw somebody trying to manage a one-eyed horse in a schooling ring that had jumps in it. And the aim of the rider and the people who were around at that moment, was to see if the horse could be shown without the judges detecting that he couldn't see out of one of his eyes. His eyes looked normal, both of them looked fine. So he didn't have a whiteness or a film or anything in the bad eye. He just couldn't see out of it, so the idea was to ride him in such a way that he could see the jumps out of his good eye and not reveal to the judge–it’s against the rules to show a horse that’s unsound in any way–so they were going to try to pull this off. They decided, finally, that nobody had the nerve to ride him that straight. That it was too hard to keep from tilting his head a little bit when you get started approaching a jump, but anyway that stayed on my mind for years, and one day I was sitting in the backyard of a house I lived in in McLean, Virginia, when I was teaching at American University, and I sat down and I wrote the poem fairly quickly and touched it up over the next few days.
Riding a One-Eyed Horse
One side of his world is always missing.
You may give it a casual wave of the hand
or rub it with your shoulder as you pass,
but nothing on his blind side ever happens.
Hundreds of trees slip past him into darkness,
drifting into a hollow hemisphere
whose sounds you will have to try to explain.
Your legs will tell him not to be afraid
if you learn never to lie. Do not forget
to turn his head and let what comes come seen:
he will jump the fences he has to if you swing
toward them from the side that he can see
and hold his good eye straight. The heavy dark
will stay beside you always; let him learn
to lean against it. It will steady him
and see you safely through diminished fields.
Cameron MacKenzie: You said earlier about “Silo,” that it's so important that last line “abides” to that it's not an emptiness or rather it's an emptiness it's a presence.
Henry Taylor: Yeah.
Cameron MacKenzie: And in such a way it's handleable or it's livable or something.
Henry Taylor: Right.
Cameron MacKenzie: Is that the same sort of thing that that's happening here?
Henry Taylor: Well in a way, although I’d— I'm not saying here that I feel nostalgic for the days when I rode horses or anything like that. What I’m doing really is saying here, if you find yourself in the position of having to ride a one-eyed horse, there are a few things you ought to remember. And that's essentially the thrust of the poem.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah. Yeah.
Henry Taylor: And there was a period of time when it appeared in various editions of X. J. Kennedy's Introduction to Poetry. They finally dropped it after a while, because it got too hard to evade all the online analyses of it. And it was too much work to have to find all those and make sure they weren't in any of the student papers.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah.
Henry Taylor: But one of the things that Kennedy asked, the first time he printed it, was whether the horse stands for something else. I would be very, very hard pressed to say what it would be.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah, do you find that sort of analysis interesting or more amusing? As you said, you're simply explaining the thing.
Henry Taylor: I think it's… I think it's a reasonable approach to a poem to see if there's symbolism in it. And if there's no real reward to the answer, maybe then you have to back off from it a little bit. I remember many years ago, being an undergraduate and sitting in a room listening to Mr. Faulkner answer questions about his work, as one of the things that he did every year during his period of being writer in residence at the University of Virginia. He would show up sometime in the spring and he would come up to the podium and he would spend a lot of time putting his fingertips together like this, get them lined up just right and put it down on the podium and look around, and he hadn't yet spoken except to say very quietly “thank you” to the professor who had introduced him. And he looked around and it came to all of us, you know as a kind of threat, that he had come to answer questions, and he was not going to speak till he got one. Often in a situation like that the silence is broken by somebody who might have a little more nerve than sense, and so you would get something like “Mr. Faulkner, do you have a philosophy of life and if so, what is it?” “Fear God, women, and the police,” he would say. Finally somebody asked him if Joe Christmas was a Christ figure. Well, it would have been better to say “what are the ways in which you see him as a Christ figure” or something like that. But Mr. Faulkner said, “I'd have to get that book and read it again before I would understand what you're talking about. You're interested in symbolism, I reckon. I'm not. I'm just interested in telling an interesting and entertaining story dealing with the eternal dilemmas of the human heart.” And you know that sounds simple enough but give it a shot sometime. Tell an interesting and entertaining story dealing with the eternal dilemmas of the human heart. Give it a shot. It’s hard.
Cameron MacKenzie: When you go back through this, say, from “Silo” to “One-Eyed Horse,” to read from the most recent to the earlier poems, you know it brings up a lot of interesting questions, but do you see differences in theme or technique or voice? Do you see a change in your voice or an evolution in your voice from the earlier to the later work?
Henry Taylor: I don't see anything radical. I see increasing, maybe, depth of maturity here and there, but I have met many fine poets, who have come to the crossroads at some stage in their career, somebody like James Wright, for example, who wrote two books of poems in rhyme and meter, and then, partly under the influence of Robert Bly, started writing free verse. He gradually came back sometimes to traditional form, but it was a real break for him to go from “Saint Judas” to “The Branch Will Not Break.” I haven’t had anything like that happen to me. And I’ve always felt that there were times when free verse was a good idea, and there are times when rhyme and meter are a good idea. And I think back to… there was a book called Naked Poetry, an anthology that came out in the late 60s, a second edition sometime in the 70s, which presented a bunch of contemporary poets, as if they had never written metrically. Some of them hadn’t, you know, there was Gary Snyder, for example, maybe was in there, but a few of the poets were very well-established formalists, as well as people who had written free verse. Robert Lowell is a very important case in point. They asked people for statements about their attitude toward meter and rhyme and omitting it. And Lowell said, “I can't understand how any poet, who has written both metered and unmetered poems, would be willing to settle for one and give up the other.” And I've always felt that was a kind of sympathetic position for me.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah, I don't see free verse – the style is very consistent. Maybe, I'm sure it's intentionally consistent, but why not experiment with different sorts of forms or something much more loose. Well, why not go further afield, I guess?
Henry Taylor: Well, I have experimented with those things, but none of the results of struck me as publishable. In my graduate school year 1965 to 1966 I worked with William Jay Smith— primarily, a formalist. But he had just published a book called The Tin Can, which is filled with poems in extremely long lines, the kinds of long lines that you have to run under. They’re too long to fit the width of the page on one line and so you indent the leftovers. And there are poems, mostly in “An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards,” that do that. “Burning a Horse.” The smart-alec poem about keeping your lawns up to snuff in the neighborhood; it's called “Buildings and Grounds.” Those are long line poems that don't rhyme. Which is probably about as loose as I’ve gotten. I don't feel called to go further in that direction. I’ve on a few occasions given it a shot, but they don't work for me.
Cameron MacKenzie: Olivia?
Olivia Samimy: Yeah, thanks so much. I was hoping we could get you to read another poem. This one’s “Creek Walk.”
Henry Taylor: Okay, there are two poems in this book called “Creek Walk.”
Olivia Samimy: Yes, we're going for the one on page 87 starting with “Strolling the banks.”
Henry Taylor: Okay. I should say, maybe that Crooked Run is a real creek that drains a portion of western Loudon County in Northern Virginia, and I grew up along it in two or three houses. And so I devoted a whole book to sort of picking up pieces that had washed up on the banks here and there.
Strolling the banks of Crooked Run
I round a bend and happen on
a skeleton and rippling shreds
of bone-white skin in the oxbow pool.
It takes but a glance to identify
the stark remains of a tall foxhound
held in a nearly running posture
here at the end of a neighbor’s pasture.
The open jaws might appear to say
we all must find our hard deathbeds,
but today I'm out to overrule
such hurts as I've been mastered by.
The earth's plain speech is all I’ve found:
no agony in the mouth stretched wide,
just water rinsing flesh away
and bones on their final seaward ride.
Olivia Samimy: Thank you. One thing I really love about this poem is how it takes something that seems like an ordinary occurrence, the skull in the river and makes it seem so like mundane and focusing on the everyday of the earth’s plain speech. So a lot of your poems do tend to focus on everyday occurrences, so I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the role of the mundane or everyday in your poetry.
Henry Taylor: Sure, sure. It's an odd thing. I had that experience quite literally, I did take a walk and went down the stream and found this skeleton soaking in the water there. And at that time, I knew that part of my reason for walking around the banks of Crooked Run was to find another poem that I could put in a book that I had already decided was going to be called Crooked Run. And so I knew when I saw it that there was going to be something to come of it. Most of the time when I write a poem that has something to do with an ordinary event, it's an event that I recall, and that in fact I have recalled, maybe dozens or hundreds of times before, without thinking that it might go into a poem. So suddenly there's another ingredient, and I don't know how to define it, except to say that there are times when you feel more like writing poems than you do at other times, and how do you bring that feeling about? Well, people have tried all kinds of bizarre experiments to do that. Rimbaud said you had to be drunk all the time, and look what happened to him, but you just never know; sometime that experience will come into you at the time when you feel like writing, and there it is. How accurately the event ends up reflecting the real event that may have inspired it is a matter of the poet's choice.
Olivia Samimy: Yeah, sounds good, so just a follow up question to you: Is it a struggle to ever find something new to say about the mundane, you keep writing you know poems about similar topics about, you know the same river?
Henry Taylor: Yes, there are times when you write something, and you get it done and I think to myself, “Well, this is not so much, you know this doesn't do the job,” so it goes into a pile of discards. And you know it could happen later on, that I could be more fortunate with it, but sometimes the feeling that there’s significance here is just misguided and so it's not. It ends up being a trivial remark about something that happened.
Cameron MacKenzie: Is that something is that a choice that you come to through the work?
Henry Taylor: Yeah.
Cameron MacKenzie: You sit down you think it's going to be important.
Henry Taylor: Oh yeah, yeah, you sit down and you start. I think it's important to believe, while you're writing, that what you're writing is good. Very unproductive to sit there and say to yourself, “This is terrible, this is terrible,” you know that's not going to work. So some of the time you may be fooling yourself. But you've got time to cool off and go back and look at it again and find out that yes indeed, in fact, you're fooling yourself and the question is, can you rescue it or not? Sometimes you can, many times, you can.
Cameron MacKenzie: How do you keep the confidence up to sit down and keep doing it if a lot of times it just doesn't work?
Henry Taylor: Well, I've been at it long enough to know, a) that it has worked several times, and b) that time is short. You know, I'll be 79 in a matter of weeks and two things happen there. One is that some of your mental processes slow down. Your ability to generate creative energy is somewhat diminished. So you seize the opportunities that come. And I find these days that they don't come all that often. Lately, I write a lot more prose than I do verse. I write critical essays, appreciations of this poet or that writer, and I do a lot of stuff for a magazine called The Hollins Critic which comes up about five times a year from little up the road from where you are.
Cameron MacKenzie: When you were younger, how did you, before you had a track record of success, what was it that drove you every day to sit down and try to make the ordinary into…
Henry Taylor: Well, first of all, I very rarely spent time writing every day. I can go comfortably for several days or even weeks without writing anything. Because I do think it's important to feel like writing poetry, if you're working on poetry. I don't have to feel all that inspired or anything if I've got to just sit down and willfully crank out another page or two of a critical essay. And I’ve probably got a deadline somewhere down the way, and I’ve learned that it is a good idea to not to push those too hard. But nobody's out there saying “where's that poem,” you know, they're not. That's not happening, and so I don't have deadlines for those. But when I was young, I discovered fairly early on that there was something deeply enjoyable about the process itself, no matter how disappointing the final result might become. I learned that at a very early age, that this was fun.
I remember a number of years ago, I was still an undergraduate and I worked at a bookstore across University Avenue from the grounds of the university, place called the Noonday Bookshop. And Erskine Caldwell came to the university and gave a talk one evening in Cabell Hall and answered questions afterwards, and a little old lady asked him in a kind of tremulous voice, what was the part of the writing process that he enjoyed the most. And he said, “I don't enjoy any of it,” and went on to the next question. Well, the next day he came over to the Noonday Bookshop to sign some books that we'd gotten in for the purpose and at one point, there was a little break and I went over to him and I said, “Mr. Caldwell, I believe I caught you in a lie last night.” Well, he was, as you might imagine, shocked that an impertinent undergraduate would approach him that way. He said, “Really?” and I said, “Yes, sir, you told that poor lady that there was no part of the writing process that you enjoyed.” And he looked off out the window for a minute, and said, “You're right, that was a lie, I don't really know what came over me. I'm sorry.” I didn't have a whole lot of experience in those days, but I knew that a person of his gifts didn't have to make a living by agonizing. Purely, I mean, unrelievedly.
Olivia Samimy: So hopefully we can move on to another poem. If you wouldn’t mind reading “Landscape with a Tractor.”
Henry Taylor: Alrighty. *Dog barks* Sorry about that. That wasn't me.
Landscape with a Tractor
How would it be if you took yourself off
to a house set well back from a dirt road,
with, say, three acres of grass bounded
by road, driveway, and vegetable garden?
Spring and summer you would mow the field,
not down to lawn, but with a bushhog,
every six weeks or so, just often enough
to give grass a chance, and keep weeds down.
And one day—call it August, hot, a storm
recently past, things green and growing a bit,
and you're mowing, with half your mind
on something you'd rather be doing, or did once.
Three rounds, and then on the straight
alongside the road, maybe three swaths in
from where you are now, you glimpse it. People
will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.
It's a clothing store dummy, for God's sake.
Another two rounds, and you'll have to stop,
contend with it, at least pull it off to one side.
You keep going. Two rounds more, then down
off the tractor, and Christ! Not a dummy, a corpse.
The field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.
Telephone. Sirens. Two local doctors use pitchforks
to turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening.
And the cause of death no mystery: two bullet holes
in the breast of a well-dressed Black woman
in perhaps her mid-thirties. They wrap her,
take her away. You take the rest of the day off.
Next day, you go back to the field, having
to mow over the damp dent in the tall grass
where bluebottle flies are still swirling,
but the bushhog disperses them, and all traces.
Weeks pass. You hear at the post office
that no one comes forward to say who she was.
Brought out from the city, they guess, and dumped
like a bag of beer cans. She was someone,
and now is no one, buried or burned
or dissected; but gone. And I ask you
again, how would it be? To go on with your life,
putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles,
and seeing, each time you pass that spot,
the form in the grass, the bright yellow skirt,
black shoes, the thing not quite like a face
whose gaze blasted past you at nothing
when the doctors heaved her over? To wonder,
from now on, what dope deal, betrayal,
or innocent refusal, brought her here,
and to know she will stay in that field till you die?
Olivia Samimy: Thank you. Incredible poem. So, I wanted to talk about for this one, how we talked about in “Creek Walk” you like to focus on the everyday and the mundane, and this is the opposite of that, you know, this is a grotesque occurrence, so what made you depart from your writing about everyday occurrences and how did it change your writing process?
Henry Taylor: Well, every now and then particularly in the poems in The Flying Change, which is where this poem was first collected, there are several poems in that book that take up not merely the mundane and everyday, but the way that violence has of coming suddenly into the mundane and the everyday and turning it into something else entirely. I can think off the top of my head of three or four other poems that do that. The longer poem about working up fallen trees for firewood. “Taking to the Woods,” where suddenly there's that recollection of the guy being killed by a couple of train cars being coupled. And my thought was that this is how life is, that it goes along apparently minding its own business for a while and all of a sudden there's this thing that happens. And this poem is written in such a way as to try to avoid suggesting that it happened to me because it didn't. Notice that it is in the second person for most of the way until it gets close to the end and the speaker says, “I ask you again.” A man that worked for my father had this experience on our property and it haunted me until I was able to find a way to write about it.
Olivia Samimy: Thank you. I wanted to ask you also about a quote you said in another interview that I think relates to this poem really well. You said, “I think it's too easy to write every now and then, a poem too dependent on the intrinsic power of its topic and not dependent enough on the resources of poetry.” So I wanted to ask if you felt like this with this poem, it was a concern of maybe being too dependent on the power of the topic?
Henry Taylor: I was aware that that was a possibility. The same goes for another poem in the same book called “Barbed Wire.” And matter of fact, I wrote “Barbed Wire” in response to myself having said that, not on the occasion that you quote, but I had spoken to a group of graduate students at American University about the dangers of relying too heavily on the intrinsic power of the topic, subject matter, and not enough on the resources of poetry, so I tried to write “Landscape with Tractor” in such a way that the language had a certain level of its own power. And I was talking about some of the slightly older poets than I, the confessional poets—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass—who were trying, not always successfully, to find ways of saying something other than “the horse stepped on my daughter's foot and there's blood in her riding boot.” I felt that a certain number of the poems, but some of those people were too dependent on the shock value of the of the actual material, and when I said that to the graduate students, I said to them, I could tell you a story about something terrible that happened to a horse. And if I put my voice in the right hypnotic frame, as if I were giving a reading or something, you might think you were hearing a real poem, but you might not be. And, as I was driving home, I thought about that and said, “Well, are there things that I could do with that episode to make it have enough linguistic power, enough local richness in the language to support the weight of the event?” Sometimes I succeed and sometimes not.
Cameron MacKenzie: It was very conscious with this poem in particular, that balance between the event and the language.
Henry Taylor: Oh yeah, sure, anytime you start, anytime you're about to tell a horror story you want to be able to get your words lined up right. I've just been thinking a little bit, somewhat shallowly, about H. P. Lovecraft because I wrote an essay about a guy who reviewed the Library of America Lovecraft volume, and one of the things that he points out is that Lovecraft mastered a language, which at times is laughable because of its antique qualities, but he does not describe the horrible so much as use language in such a way as to make you get in touch with your own fears and be frightened. Because he hasn't told you exactly what it is. When he does tell you exactly what it is, it's not so successful. I'm not a very frequent reader of Lovecraft myself, and don't intend to be, but I thought that was interesting that this writer, Luc Sante, pointed that out.
Cameron MacKenzie: The way that you're able to use language, particularly for me in poems that are dealing with work, with the physical, with action, the way that you write action is so striking and so unique. If you could read “Afternoons with a Boomerang” on 106. That to me is one that really just sort of encapsulates your ability to write action. I'd love to hear you.
Henry Taylor: Thank you.
Afternoons with a Boomerang
An insect afternoon
of annoyance, discontent, the vain wish to be
far away, and I sit on the patio
staring at lawn, woods, receding green patches
with the impossible loveliness
of vanished children's books—
yet here it is around me,
consoling if not healing; I know no kinder place
in which to bear involuntary gloom.
Then across the patio comes a blur,
red shorts, legs, arms, three strides to grass
and I can focus now
on Richard, coming out
from under the weight of his own troubles, his hand
cocked, gripping a bright handmade boomerang
that now he throws, like a knife at a target.
For sixty instantaneous feet
it flies straight, then yanks left
and banks upward, tilting
into level flight, a spun, evanescent circle
back to the house, then toward another sweep
by the woods, flickering in and out of view
against backgrounds of sycamore
and maple, sky and grass—
a flutter of silence
to where he pirouettes, watching the cycle close
as the end of the spiral drops within reach
and he plucks it from air. Our separate woes
may not pass for more than a moment,
but this is the moment.
Not that he never misses:
the stick will spin too hard to be caught, or a stray
current of air from the woods grabs an edge,
or he has to look into the sun. Sometimes
the gravel driveway breaks his stride
over the dampening grass.
Twenty minutes, half an hour,
and his arm tires; still, it always feels like forever,
infinite small variations within
the aboriginal pattern, and I think
that whatever their use among hunters,
artists most deeply own
these physical mysteries
of getting a skill right, or nearly so, or, rarely,
of getting it wrong, the shout going up
at the botched release, the sharp smile of disgust
as the boomerang goes off course
and snags itself in a tree.
Error and correction,
flight and return, my son pulling hard as he can
toward making a life that is his, lifting
himself a little from his private griefs,
and me, for a while, out of mine—
and though the pain returns,
he gives, in fading light,
a look of birthright ease to a difficult thing.
Whatever unrolls on this spiral path,
lifelong though it may be, and hard, is worth no more,
in the end, than these crystal instants
of grace and lighthearted awe.
Cameron MacKenzie: I mean, what's great for me, again, the description of the actual act which is remarkable, but then you tie it to what artists do. I feel like so much of your poetry explores physicality, especially like a perhaps a mind-body connection, and the way I phrase this question, I don't like the way I phrase it. I'm still going to ask it, because you can say it’s neither of these things: is poetry, for you, is this sort of poetry the manifestation of that connection or is poetry the explanation of the connection that you've experienced?
Henry Taylor: I guess manifestation is better. I grew up on a farm, and so I acquired a number of physical skills over the years that quite a few folks don't have. I still know how to put hay bales on a wagon so they won't fall off. I'm very grateful that I don't have to do it, but if I had to I could. I spent years and hours with horses and got to a level of proficiency with riding and training and showing and competing that was pretty good. And I don't ride anymore, either because I’ve gotten to an age where falling off would probably be worse for me than I should subject myself to. And falling off is part of the deal, and if you get on you might not always fall off, you can go for years without falling off, maybe, but sometime you're going to fall off. Just happens. And I don't- I’m not ready to do that. But for a long time, I was, and the mystery of being able to communicate with a horse to the level that you really can without using any words is really something. It's amazing the conversations that you can have with a horse using your legs and the balance of your body in the saddle and your hands. You know you're riding along, and you decide to attempt something with the horse, you can feel the horse saying, “is this a good idea, boss? You think how to do this?” and you can say to him somewhere along the range between, “If you know what's good for you, you will do this,” or “Let’s take it easy now. Think this thing through. This is really no different from things you've done before. You can do it.” And this range between authoritarian dictatorship and kindly encouragement, that's the range in which you operate with the horses day in and day out, without using a single word. I mean you might say “whoa” sometimes, but essentially, they don't use language. And yet the level of communication is profound, and I’ve always found that fascinating to think about and I feel like that that's where the poetry is sometimes. It's in the words that you have not been able to say or write down, but somehow need to suggest in the words that are there.
Cameron MacKenzie: I was going to ask you about horses. Has anything replaced horseback riding for you?
Henry Taylor: Oh, I haven't looked for anything to replace it, I haven't needed that, you know. I mean I don't do any sports or anything. My wife and I live a pretty low-key reclusive life here in the semi-arid portion of the Southwest. And I haven't sought a replacement for the horses. The horses really were all consuming during my teenage years. It was kind of late in the game, when I started thinking about writing as it is something that I would be spending much of my life doing, yeah.
Cameron MacKenzie: It was the horses first?
Henry Taylor: Horses first, yeah.
Cameron MacKenzie: How do we- as certainly as I can or can't do the things that I did when I was in my twenties, that's becoming increasingly evident to me. How do we mourn the physicality that we don't have anymore?
Henry Taylor: How do I mourn it?
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah, not even you, but just we, how is it mourned? Is it mourned?
Henry Taylor: I don't, I don't find it mournful. I feel happy being able to do what things I can do. And I take pleasure in just ordinary life. Right now, it's a little harder to do, you know we're all surrounded by various sensible restrictions. But one of the things that my wife and I like to do is to go downtown in Santa Fe and just walk around the block that we've not spent any time on lately. And we go into every single shop that we pass, even though from the outside, it might appear that there's nothing in here for us. And it may turn out that way, but it's not dull, nevertheless.
Cameron MacKenzie: Olivia?
Olivia Samimy: As we’re like looking back on horses and your experience with them, makes me think of like how much of your poetry does have that looking back quality, so I was hoping, you could read “Breakings” for us, on page 145.
Henry Taylor: I should say that a combine is a machine that simultaneously cuts and threshes grain, and in the day that this poem is looking back on, these machines were in a moderately early stage. They were pulled by a tractor. And instead of catching the grain in a gigantic bin, the way they do now, there was somebody who had to ride on the side of the machine, and there was a tube that came down the side of the machine and forked into two tubes with bag clamps on their ends. And you had to sit there and put bags on the ends of these things and wait till they filled up, switch the lever over to the other empty bag, and take this bag, and tie it, and throw it onto a platform that you tilted every so often and dropped into the field. It was nasty, nasty work. The barley, for example, has little microscopic or nearly microscopic spines on it that get between your clothes and your skin and make you very, very, very uncomfortable.
Breakings
Long before I first left home, my father
tried to teach me horses, land, and sky,
to show me how his kind of work was done.
I studied how to be my father’s son,
but all I learned was, when the wicked die,
they ride combines through barley forever.
Every summer I hated my father
as I drove hot horses through dusty grass;
and so I broke with him, and left the farm
for other work, where unfamiliar weather
broke on my head an unexpected storm
and things I had not studied came to pass.
So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a longe line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining forces.
Olivia Samimy: Thank you, and so like I said, a lot of your poems have that sort of frozen in time quality, so I wanted to ask why you think you often find yourself, looking back on these moments in like the past in rural Virginia?
Henry Taylor: I enjoy thinking about it. It’s a period of time in my life that was very pleasurable most of the time for me and I just have a good time thinking about it. As I said earlier, it doesn't always turn out that my thinking leads to writing something. But once in a while it does. This poem was actually inspired by another poem called “Breakings” by a man named Thomas Whitbread, who was a friend of mine, for a long time. He's no longer living now. But he had this poem about the way different things break. And I thought yeah, I can do that too, and I can broaden the scope a little bit by talking about breaking horses, which doesn't mean that they're made into little pieces. And it was a poem that was okay with him, I'm happy to say.
Olivia Samimy: So, as you said you no longer live in Virginia and this poem was written, it was in the collection between 1962 and 1965, so has your perspective changed as you look back on these moments, now that you're farther away, both in time and space?
Henry Taylor: Well, maybe. I learned to like the West. In the late 60s, I took a job, when I left Roanoke College, where I taught for two years, at the University of Utah and moved out there. I don't think I’d been west of the Mississippi at that point, and I found there were qualities to the Western landscape that appealed deeply to me. And there's also something about living at a higher altitude. I've gotten to a place in my life where that's not always the best thing for me, I have a slight heart condition that causes shortness of breath sometimes, and it's easy to get short of breath at 7200 feet. Salt Lake City is only 4200 feet, but it was enough to notice for somebody who's moving there from nearly sea level. But I loved the feel of being in that atmosphere. This semi-arid near-desert quality. There's a kind of stripped-down purity to it that interests me. Makes it so I feel like we've come to a place that we're not going to have to move from. Until we have to move from the Earth.
Olivia Samimy: Thank you, I think that ties in with Cameron’s next question for the South and regions.
Cameron MacKenzie: It does, I think. Henry, how are you feeling? I think we've got maybe one more poem…, which is “My Dear Sister Hannah.” This is a long poem and, you know, we don't have time to get through the whole thing.
Henry Taylor: No, we don’t.
Cameron MacKenzie: If you could start on page 66, at the bottom “second day morning.” Does that sound like a good place to begin?
Henry Taylor: And go to the end?
Cameron MacKenzie: Yes, and go to the end.
Henry Taylor: Okay, let me just say just by setting this up, this is a letter written in 1864 from a woman named Carrie Taylor, who lived in Purcellville, Virginia, to her sister Hannah Stabler, who lived over around Sandy Spring, Maryland. And there is such a letter…. This poem is a versification of that letter. It draws heavily upon it. And the Quakers did not use names of the days of the week, so second day is Monday.
This is about a burning raid that was conducted in western Loudoun County in December of 1864 by some Union troops that were trying to destroy the provender that could be supplying Mosby’s troops. Mosby was that guerrilla warfare guy that hung out in that Fauquier and Loudoun counties. And he would strike in the middle of the night and make off with a colonel, or something like that, from a Union camp. And they wanted to deplete his supply sources, so they burned up barns and drove off livestock and so on. This woman is writing to her sister about how that happened.
Second Day morning. I am ashamed
to write so bad a letter,
but time is too scarce to write it over,
and I might not do it better,
for the subject makes me so nervous
I can hardly write.
Since I began this, another loss
struck us Seventh Day night,
when our good blind mare died suddenly.
William had ridden her
a day or two. She had the colic,
he thinks. One thing is sure,
he has lost his last horse, poor man.
He is down to one colt now.
One of our cows came home this morning—
mine. Alice’s pretty cow
is gone. Whole flocks and herds are loose
along the mountain road,
and people are busily taking them up
by stealth and force and fraud.
We have hogs, and would butcher tomorrow,
but there is still the threat
of soldiers returning, for we have heard
they are not done with us yet.
I despise the rebels more than ever
for causing this awful mess.
Some weak-minded people will perhaps
be more [illegible] after this,
but all I can say is they never had
any unionism about them.
True, these were Sheridan's orders and men,
though we could have done without them.
Alice thinks it would be nice to have
a photograph of us
around the officer, pleading for the barn,
but we looked so dolorous
I doubt we would gladly send it to you.
William says ask Robert
if there is an old blind horse about
he could trade for a bare cupboard.
I don't feel like starting over here,
but if we went away
we would be beggars. Uncle Henry
still has his barn today,
Uncle Aquilla’s is not burned either,
so close to the house they spared it,
and Jonah Hatcher’s is not; he bought
them off, as I have heard it.
I must close. How I wish to see thee!
Alice has much to tell,
and would write, but is too near crazy.
Do write us. Love to all.
Sincerely, thy sister.
Cameron MacKenzie: I love the “[illegible.]” That's fantastic.
Henry Taylor: Thank you. I was going to say that, you know as a person who has been called a Southern writer and has been at various times, while I was for a while, a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, I’m still an inactive member, I need to remind people that I'm also a member of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers. And it's an interesting thing to have grown up being a Southern Quaker, because the values and attitudes of the of the Quakers are significantly at odds with many of the values and attitudes that built the rural South. The Quakers were abolitionists, and they were pacifists, so they didn't cheerfully take sides with anybody who was fighting, but they were more in sympathy with the Union position than they were with the people defending slavery. This took place in Virginia, this burning was in Northern Virginia, but Carrie Taylor and the people she mentions, when she says that they despise the rebels for causing all this, she's not kidding.
Cameron MacKenzie: Yeah, this poem for me it's sort of coalesces you know stuff that I see elsewhere, like “The Dining Room at Springdale,” where you talk about the decline of glories toward bed and breakfast. And I'm from Virginia, from Loudoun County actually, but—
Henry Taylor: Are you really?
Cameron MacKenzie: I am. My Loudoun County a probably a little different from your Loudoun County. I was in there when it was becoming what it is now.
Henry Taylor: Yeah, population now in the neighborhood of 450,000.
Cameron MacKenzie: It's a different place now. Yeah, but you know as such, this question of Southern-ness you know that, certainly, it has to be addressed. But what is it and how is it to be addressed? How do you understand southern-ism and how do you approach it when you write?
Henry Taylor: Well, I don't think about it as a part of the process or anything like that. I think about it from time to time, because people do ask the kinds of questions that you're asking, and it is an interesting topic. Why is it, for example that we single out southern literature, a little bit more sometimes? People are getting better about this, but it's more of an entity than New England literature. New England literature was really something in the 18th and 19th centuries, but people don't think about it that way anymore. And in fact, there are plenty of southerners who don't bring to mind the south, when you read their work, but there are qualities of southern-ness that are different from certain other kinds of regional qualities. The sound of the slight accent, or the deep accent, if you're trying to get ready to be in The Dukes of Hazzard. The bent for certain kinds of storytelling and certain ingredients of storytelling that I think of as peculiarly southern. You read a poem by Robert Penn Warren and you find a very complicated mixture of deadly seriousness and lightheartedness and humor, and a self-conscious willingness to use unexpected words.
There's a wonderful short passage in a longer poem…. “Folly on Royal Street before the Raw Face of God” is the name of the whole poem, and it runs two or three pages and it's a recollection of three young men walking around in the French Quarter in New Orleans in springtime, drunk out of their minds and reciting Milton.
We
Mouthed out our Milton for magnificence.
And then there comes this little passage:
A cop
Of brachycephalic head and garlic breath,
Toothpick from the side of mouth and pants ass-bagged and holster low,
From eyes the color of old coffee grounds,
Regarded within imperfect sympathy
La condition humaine—
which is sure-God what we were.
Now I think that's typically Southern storytelling. And I think when a man says, with a straight face, that a cop has a brachycephalic head, and goes on to say his pants are ass-bagged, and then speaks a few lines further on of “La condition humaine,” you have somebody whose range of diction is vast, and who likes to invoke the whole range in a tight space. You find this, I think, more often in southern storytelling than in that of other places. So I think that may be one of the ingredients that I enjoy thinking about.
Cameron MacKenzie: That’s very interesting. Thank you. Olivia, do you have a question?
Olivia Samimy: Yeah, so we talked about how, Cameron and I, how this one poem, “My Dear Sister Hannah” is one of the only poems about women, so I was curious if you could speak to that and why you feel like they don't appear in more of the poems.
Henry Taylor: Well, my wife appears in the dedication poem, and a former wife's mother appears in “At the Swings.” But what you might be noticing is that "My Dear Sister Hannah" is a substantial poem spoken by a woman, and I think that is indeed unusual in poems by men. But as inhabitants of this or that poem, women turn up more often in this book than you imply, maybe as often as men. And horses.
Cameron MacKenzie: We got one more question for you. You retired from teaching in 2003, and has that affected the writing at all? What's the connection that you felt between the teaching and the writing?
Henry Taylor: Well, I think that there was a certain amount of, it’s complicated, but there was a certain amount of encouragement to be had from working with student writing. On the other hand, as you doubtless know, the demands on your time working with students’ writing are very considerable and so when you're doing full-time teaching, you're not doing full time writing. Most of us couldn't do full time writing and survive. I mean that's the economics of it. People who have the kind of gift that Arthur Hailey had, or more recently John Grisham has—incidentally, I respect and admire Grisham for several reasons beyond his exemplary professionalism—then you can afford to write full time and, if you choose, behave philanthropically toward your neighborhood. I had a conversation with John Grisham once about serious literature and popular fiction. And he told me how he had sort of knocked himself out over his first novel, working away at it, taking himself as seriously as if he were Faulkner, and when he got it done, what he realized he had was a piece of popular fiction. He said, “This is what I can do, and I can do it well. And I don't deceive myself about that. Now Steve King, you know, he thinks he contains literature, and he may.” But that's a difference that is important and what we're talking about. If you can write like Grisham that you can write full time. And the other way to do it is to be somebody like James Merrill, who was born into enormous wealth. He wrote full-time except about every seven years, he would take an anti-sabbatical and go somewhere and teach for a year. But ceasing to teach freed me up in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, I went through a period of something akin to depression, I guess, for a while and I wrote virtually nothing for several years, during the time that we lived in the Pacific Northwest. When we moved down here about six years ago, things began to open up again.
Cameron MacKenzie: That's great. It's the sunshine.
Henry Taylor: Yeah, that's a big, big part of it.
Cameron MacKenzie: Well Mr. Taylor, thank you so much for taking the time.
Henry Taylor: Thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks Olivia, I appreciate both of your questions. Nice to be here. I should have worn my Roanoke College sweatshirt, but it’s a little warm for it.
Mary Crockett Hill: I can't tell you how much I enjoyed just listening in and hearing all your wise words. I took some notes that I think will crop up in some of my own writing. I’ll try to remember to give credit where credit's due when it happens. Thank you so much.
Henry Taylor: Thank you. Thanks a lot, Mary.
Mary Crockett Hill: Lovely spending time with you and hearing your good words.
