“It seems, to me, very very clear, just given the absolutely visceral necessity that so many different kinds of people in different kinds of places have felt, the need they have felt for some kind of artistic expression.  You know, it cuts across class, it cuts across race, it cuts across nationality, it cuts across language, that there is a need to recognize and formalize our response to things in a way that I can only call aesthetic and artful, and that that is tied into what beauty may be.”
    – Keith Taylor

ONE PAUSE POETRY INTERVIEWS POET KEITH TAYLOR AT WHITE LOTUS FARM  
Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 21, 2011 

​(content warning: suicide, implied abuse/sexual assault)
 
Sarah Messer:  Alright, let’s get started. Thank you for coming here.

Keith Taylor: My pleasure.

Sarah Messer: Now, some of these questions you might not like, so I’m sorry.

(laughter)

Keith Taylor: (laughs) She refused to show me these questions, so I couldn’t prepare.

Sarah Messer: What is the role of beauty in a poem? You can also talk about the role of beauty in your poems.

Keith Taylor: This is actually one that, skating around things, I was thinking about, saying, “okay, what’s Sarah going to ask me?”

​Sarah Messer: (laughs)

Keith Taylor: Because whatever the role of the arts is in general, the arts touch on other kinds of human experience, spiritual experience, psychological experience, but they are not those things. The arts are not in and of themselves a spiritual exercise or a psychological exercise; they are an exploration of the aesthetic in us, the exploration of beauty.  But what is beauty? I don’t want to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder because maybe it’s not, then I’d be wrong, but there’s a recognition in us – there is a need – there seems to be a need in our species for an aesthetic response to the world. And that aesthetic response is a response to beauty, but beauty could be a lot of different kinds of things. 

I happen to respond probably most profoundly at this point in my life to things in the natural world. They get me involved in certain kinds of activism. They are good deal of my study. Not my exclusive study, but a good deal of my study is to learn things about the natural world, and I find those things beautiful. I can find those things beautiful when I see a bald eagle tear apart a dead carp that had been lying there and rotting for two and a half weeks. I can find it beautiful when I see a cooper’s hawk pick off a titmouse in my backyard and I watch it devour absolutely everything. And when I go looking for bones and drops of blood afterwards, I don’t find much. A whole creature has been eaten and there’s not any blood on the snow. And I know that there are people – there are poets, lot of poets – who respond to things in the world that we consider ugly, and they don’t try to make them “beautiful,” but yet the response is an aesthetic response and I think important as an aesthetic response. So, what is the role of beauty?

Sarah Messer: Wait, what you just said was really amazing, that it’s not necessarily a beautiful thing, but the response is an aesthetic response.  

Keith Taylor: Right, and that’s important.    

Sarah Messer: Can you say more about because I’ve never thought of it that way, but I think you’re really right.

Keith Taylor: I’m thinking on my feet, so I might not make any sense.

(laughter)

Sarah Messer: Tim O’Brien has this phrase in The Things They Carried where he says, “the mind hates it but the eyes do not.” So, he’s responding to this moment in Vietnam where his friend stepped backwards, he was playing catch with his friend and his friend stepped backwards onto a landmine and blew up, but in his first response to it was that it looked really beautiful, but then his mind figured out what happened and it was horrible. So, I’m wondering if that’s something about what you’re saying a little bit, like, that there’s something that’s ugly but somehow – it’s not that it’s erasing the ugliness by rendering it in language but – is there something that happens, like you said, aesthetic?  I don’t know the answer, I’m just saying.

Keith Taylor: No, and I don’t either 

Sarah Messer: (laughs) 

Keith Taylor: but it seems, to me, very very clear, just given the absolutely visceral necessity that so many different kinds of people in different kinds of places have felt, the need they have felt for some kind of artistic expression. You know, it cuts across class, it cuts across race, it cuts across nationality, it cuts across language, that there is a need to recognize and formalize our response to things in a way that I can only call aesthetic and artful, and that that is tied into what beauty may be.  I mean, I do like – I mean, I think Stockhausen?  Was it Stockhausen in 2001?  

(offscreen “yeah”)

Keith Taylor: – the German composer of wonderfully weird music – who said that 9/11 was beautiful, was the height of an artistic moment, and that’s kind of what we’re saying here with Tim O’Brien.  I mean, he wasn’t justifying it, although he spent the next ten years trying to explain his response, but we skate toward that direction, which is dangerous, which, you know, does not come across well on CNN, but it’s kind of interesting. The Tim O’Brien thing is pretty good.  It’s not quite what I mean, but I think it’s close. You know, O’Brien really is meaning there’s something – before the horror registers, there’s something beautiful in the display of things.

Sarah Messer: Well, maybe it’s, getting back to what you said first, about perception. There’s a perception.  

Keith Taylor: Yeah, but it’s a difficult question. Most of the stuff I’ve written in the last fifteen/twenty years is more conventionally beautiful. I like to write about birds; I like to write about trees; I like to write about the Great Lakes. It’s pretty hard not to say that those are beautiful. I’m also continuing to try to write about my great-grandmother’s suicide, so there’s nothing particularly beautiful about that book, but the response is an organizing response, which is aesthetic, which I think deals with the nature of beauty, but oh it’s tough. I haven’t been very articulate.
 
[Years later I read Bianca Bosker’s book “Get the Picture and found these quotes, which help:  "Beauty ... doesn't have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn't have to be something we agree on. Beauty is that moment your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention."

And, here, on the purpose of art: "The jostle we get from art can be found nearly anywhere. There is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains from compressing our experience. Art is a choice. It is a fight against complacency. It is a decision to forge a life that's richer, more uncomfortable, more mind-blowing, more uncertain. And ultimately, more beautiful."]

Sarah Messer: Yeah, no, that’s great.

Sarah Messer: Okay.  Alright, next question.

Keith Taylor: Phew. (laughs)

Sarah Messer: (laughs) Maybe we need a break. In your poems, how do sound and vision connect? Like, talk about how you think of the line sonically, or if the poem comes in visually, or how they intersect or don’t.

Keith Taylor: This gets into lots of areas that poets spill a lot of ink about, or a lot of ink has been spilled in the last hundred years. I think that probably the formative influence for me when I started actually writing poems, and when I made the leap from student to writer, was the image. I got that sense of an image as it was captured primarily in Asian poets and how those poets were transmitted into English or French. An important part of my writing life was trying to capture images; although, those images were often couched in little stories. I think probably my motivation for poetry, the thing that’s further back there is sound, is the mnemonics of sound, rhythm and repetition, the easiness of that sort of thing. And, of course, I try to be a little subtle. There are a lot of contemporary poets who talk about the sonics of sound, and basically what they’re talking about, to my mind, is overly-alliterated series of words, and that just seems too easy. So, this is not sonics; this is alliteration. We’ve been talking about this for two thousand years, and you’re just alliterating seven times in a row. That’s not very inventive. 

​A lot of our contemporaries are doing that, and then they say it’s sonic. Come on, that’s not very subtle. Our experience with language has been a lot more complex than that. You look at Laura Kasischke’s poems, those of you who were with Laura last night, you look at Laura’s poems on the page and it seems as if she’s all over the place. But you hear her read it and it changes. Did you hear those rhymes last night? And they were all through the poems. Wow!  It’s kind of like Kaye Ryan’s, skinny little poems that, when you read them quietly, they look like just skinny little poems, and then when you hear her read them or you read them aloud, you realize there’s all these irregular rhymes. Last night I was like, “whoa, I do not think of Laura Kisischke as a great rhymer, but there were all these good rhymes and meter.” 

So that’s what poetry does. Poetry organizes words and organizes the sounds of those words.  ou know, back in the day, Pound divided it into three things: there were the poems with sounds; the intellectual poems/philosophical poems; and the poems that were trying to sing. I think that was a useful distinction. My hope is that they can all function in the same poem, and maybe I’m not there yet. Maybe that’s the ultimate goal.  

Audience Member: Can I ask you a related question?

Keith Taylor: Sure

Audience Member: I’m curious, Keith, about the notion about sound in your own writing, perhaps the organic, you know, that which spills out, and sometimes when I write things it’s like, “woah, isn’t that interesting?” I’m wondering where that came from versus the craft.

Keith Taylor:  Yeah, there’s a couple of things to say about that. I mean, first of all, there is just simply the dumb luck of it. You keep doing it, and sooner or later, you know, those monkeys are going to type Hamlet, at least “To be or not to be.”

(laughter)

Keith Taylor: So, there’s that, the dumb luck of it, but I think all of us who have written anything, whatever we’re writing, there have been times you come back and look at it like, “woah! I wrote that! You know, that’s kind of amazing.” So, there is that. Of course, as any kind of luck, it happens when you put yourself in the place where luck can happen to you, so if you go looking for luck it’s more likely to happen to you. Not always, there’s no guarantees, you still can have a miserable life –  

​(laughter)

Keith Taylor: - but then there’s also the fact that you work at it, okay? So, I mean, I’ve spent forty-five years now thinking every day about poetry, and reading poetry almost every day, and writing it almost every day. So, I’ve learned some things, and some of those things are not very articulate, as you already know (laughs), but they’re there, and so I can play off those kinds of things. Sometimes that’s a problem because I will write something and then I’ll immediately know what rhythm I am echoing that, in some poem by someone else, was important to me 25 years ago.  So there is that simple fact of doing it. 

There’s actually a third element too, which is one that took me the longest to convince myself: there is talent. There are people who are just better at it than other people. There are a lot of people who are better at it, inherently, than I am.  I had a friend back in the day. He was real smart, but I knew he wasn’t working very hard. But then he would just knock out these poems which were just incredible. And he’d not change them and he’d send them off to The Nation and Poetry Magazine, and he’d get an acceptance. 23-24 years old, and I wanted to shoot him, you know? (both audience and Keith Taylor laughs) I didn’t, he was a friend. He clearly had an ability to find these things.  Now, nothing ever came from that particular person’s ability. But he taught me one thing. I didn’t want to believe in talent. I told myself that it's all hard work. I’m a farm boy. I have to work hard all the time or I’m going to go to hell. Yet it was clear this guy was just ahead of me. I’ve learned to live with it.  

Sarah Messer:  This one’s a little easier, I hope. What was the first poem you ever wrote, and what were the circumstances?

Keith Taylor:  I first moved to the United Sates when I was in the 6th grade. I remember this.  I even have a copy of the poem.

Sarah Messer: Awesome!

Keith Taylor:  I came from rural western Canada. My father was a minister in a small, very conservative denomination. It was an off-shoot of the Mennonites. We came to northern Indiana where there was another little part of our group.  We lived in South Bend, and it was 1963. I spoke funny. I was right on the edge of puberty. It was the beginning of the 60’s. I’d gone from rural western Canada to what was then a dying industrial town. Studebaker had closed in South Bend; South Bend was very beat up. There were all the things that were just about to happen in the United States. I was shy because I didn’t know how to deal with these Americans. The first day of school I got kicked out of school because we had to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance. I must have stood up, but I didn’t know the pledge of allegiance, and part of my little adolescent brain just didn’t want to. “I’m not going to pledge allegiance to that because I’m a Canadian.” (laughs) But they kicked me out of school. They would say, “why aren’t you saying the pledge of allegiance?” And I just stood there, you know, being a little boy, my lip quivering.  (Imitates younger self) I’m not going to cry in front of these authority figures. So (imitates teachers) you got to go to the principal, so I go to the principal.  (Imitates principal) First of all, why didn’t you say the pledge of allegiance? I just stand there, my little lip quivering, and they kicked me out of school. First day of school in the United States.

(laughter)

Keith Taylor:  And so, it set the pattern for my public-school education. I didn’t really fit in. I always hoped my English teachers would notice me. I remember I wrote this little thing about the mountains, because I came from the mountains, and was nostalgic for them. I hadn’t yet learned to love the Midwest, and I wrote this little thing about mountain goats talking to each other. And my English teacher didn’t believe I wrote it, believed I copied it out of some book for children, which means I just got pissed off at him. And then of course, they’d always fail me because I would spell color with a “u” and favor with a “u” and centre “re” and theatre “re”. This was, you know, the continuation of 1950’s education. 

But somewhere in there, I wrote something. The first winter, sitting, looking out my window at my backyard, in this very blue-collar neighborhood in South Bend, Indiana, I watched the snowstorm, and I wrote it down. I didn’t write it in lines or rhyme or anything else. I knew about poetry because it was part of our religious culture. We couldn’t watch television, we didn’t go to the movies, and we worshipped the Book. And we memorized the Book in the King James translation, which, by the way, is beautiful language. When you got a bunch of that in your head as a ten-year-old, you know, you have a sense of beautiful language in your head. I wrote down those words about snow, and I took them to one of the few guys I talked to. He said, in our 6th grade class, “Oh! You should make it a poem.”  And I said, “how do you make it a poem?” He said, “Oh, you just scramble all the lines and make them look pretty.” 

(laughter)

Keith Taylor:  And I called it (jokingly dramatic tone) “The Passion of Winter.” I scrambled all the lines and my English teacher, who I had those problems with, just went nuts for it and was like “I have a poet!”  And then, at that point, right at the same time, I became genuinely fascinated with books. During my rural upbringing, I could always go out and do things outside. We were always outside. Now, I was living in a midwestern American city, not feeling very comfortable, and I used to get beat up a lot too, so I became absorbed in books. Those things happened in the same two- or three-year period, and it formed me. 

And at some point, the sixties happened.I was in high school in the late 60’s. I was separated from my religious upbringing, and it became, for me, books. Books and a certain kind of high culture. It wasn’t a product of my background or education, because I was not very well educated. I wanted something else. I ran away from home a couple times when I was still a kid, and then when I was 19, I got enough money for a one-way ticket to Europe. I went to France and stayed there in a kind of trance for the next three to four years. I was desperately poor, working menial jobs, but I learned another language for the first time. I was in love for the first time. It was a wonderful moment, and I learned a sense of culture that I didn’t have before.

Sarah Messer: Great. This is a good transition into the next question which is about translation. If you could just talk about that, your experience with translation.

Keith Taylor: Sure. Okay, so I come from a country that is officially bilingual. Although I come from the most franco-phobe province in that country, but French was always around us. If anybody in the 50’s or the 60’s in my Alberta was learning French, they weren’t announcing it in public. And then there was that whole sense of the Bible, and my father was a minister. He became the president of our tiny little Bible college with 35 students because he had an official degree from a liberal arts college down in the States, of course. His degree was in Classical Greek, and he learned Greek so he could read the Bible, the New Testament. And so, Greek was around our house all my life. The only class I went to in high school was Latin. I read a poem last night – which is a new poem. I’m still not sure it was very good – which came when I started looking at languages early on.  And it was an image again of what was going on in my head when I was trying to learn a language. I went to a part of my brain I’ve never or barely been to before. And it was hard to open the door into that part of my brain. I had to, you know, crank it open and oil the hinges, and it still kind of squeaked like an old movie (mimic creaking door sound), and once I looked in there, it was all clean, uncluttered, with all this space that could be explored, and it smelled good. I still feel that when I study languages. It’s amazing. I’ve worked with probably ten languages, but the only one that was ever really good was French, and I don’t use it enough now. I have to go back and relearn things, but I still have that feeling. It’s like, “woah!  There’s this part of the brain that I don’t use in any other situation.” 

And then, of course, if you are passionate about books and passionate about writing and passionate about the sounds of language, all kinds of languages, then you have this literary tradition that opens up for you, and you have all these other things to read, which is so cool! And some of those things move me enormously, and sometimes I think I could translate that experience into English. And it would be good for me to try. It would be a good exercise to try, but I can also let other people in on it who are not going to, for whatever reason, have time to get filled with that particular language. And there’s something kind of beautiful and wonderful in that. Also, as a writer, you’re looking for other kinds of influences. There are certain things that shape us as writers, but we’re always running up against the confines of our language. I’m always up running – (gestures to Sarah Messer) you probably are too – running up against pronouns in English. How the hell do we get that pronoun to refer to what we want it to refer to? That’s why the hardest thing in our language for foreign speakers to master is pronouns. And it’s, you know, how do you do it? We can look and see how somebody else did it, which is kind of fun, in another language, in another situation where pronouns are more complex or less complex or maybe where they don’t even exist. And that’s a lot of fun and instructive for how we learn our own language. 

I’m also intrigued, as a poet – there’s that Robert Frost thing, you know, “poetry is what is lost in translation.” I’m not sure I agree with that. I’ve worked a lot with modern Greek poets, and the best-known Greek poet is Cavafy. W.H. Auden wrote an introduction to a Cavafy translation in the late 50’s, which has become a rather famous essay for those who do modern Greek stuff in English, in which he says – Auden, who was a very formal poet, who was very much in that Robert Frost vein of poetry is what is lost in translation – in which he say in this introduction, “I would recognize a poem by Cavafy, no matter who translated it, no matter where I saw it, and no matter which language that I read it in.  It could be Greek.” He said, “I don’t know why. That puzzles me. I don’t know what it is.”  I mean, I can guess what it is because there’s some pretty unique things about Cavafy, but it’s almost as if Auden, almost reluctantly, is saying that, “no, poetry is what survives the translation.” 

(audience and Keith Taylor laugh)

All the other things might get lost, but the poetry is what survives the translation, and that’s kind of cool! I have had that feeling.  I’ve translated a little bit from French, less from Spanish, and quite a bit from modern Greek, even though my modern Greek, even when it was good, was not great.  I had a co-translator whose Greek was significantly better than mine, but I was dealing with a very troubled poet who had no reputation in English. Kostas Karyotakis.  He’s not always very well known in Greek.  He’s a depressive, gloomy poet.  He’s the Greek Sylvia Plath except he’s gloomier than she is. He also was a suicide. I spent ten years working on this dark poet, and I’m a pretty jovial, kind of superficial guy. 

(laughter)

Keith Taylor: So, I spent ten years with this gloomy Greek. He died at 32. He wrote some great poems, but his greatest poems were probably still to be written when he died. My co-translator, who was the one with a more academic mind – he wanted to translate everything this guy published in his life, which means we translated and spent a lot of time on some really bad poems with some great ones in there. It was a wonderful feeling, by the act of translation, to move into/to cross over into this other life, which is what we do when we read anyway. That’s what reading is.  If we’re empathetic readers, we come out of ourselves at least a little into another life, and to do the act of translation that movement outside ourselves is a lot more important.

Sarah Messer: What about frustration? You talked about it a little bit already, but, you know, have you ever experienced the failure of language? Just a moment of frustration.

Keith Taylor:  Yeah, absolutely. You had Clayton Eshleman around here, and I think Clayton Eshleman, at one time somewhere, said that he publishes about a tenth of what he writes, and that seems to be it. I think his percentages are probably right. That seems to reflect my experience of it too, which means 90% of it doesn’t come up to snuff or is fodder for the 10% that might go out there, and, of course, you know that the 10% that does get published, probably only about 10% of that deserves to be published (laughs).

So, there’s just the frustration of the process. It takes a long time – and again, there are people who write quickly and very well and brilliantly or at least some point in their life write brilliantly, quickly. But for most of us, it’s a constant battle. Whatever standard we set ourselves, we just can’t seem to measure up. Then, of course, there’s that standard that’s out there in the world, which changes constantly. You know, the poems that were being published in 1979, even the poems that we would recognize as great poems, probably could not get published now, and the poems getting published now, the poems getting all the attention now, 40 years from now, they’re going to go “who’s that?  What did he do?”  So, I mean, those frustrations are built into the process of making art. 

​I’ve never felt overly embittered by it, but other people have. We’ve all heard it: “why is that SOB getting all this attention and nobody’s reading me? Why are they making so much money and I’m still working in a bookstore?”  I never felt that, maybe it’s the rural thing again, that I never expected anybody to pay attention

(both Keith Taylor and Sarah Messer laugh).

So, you know, when I got to be fifty, people started paying attention, which was like, “woah, when did that happen?”  It’s so cool. I mean, I go around and I do a lot of those things, particularly around the state and around the Midwest and occasionally outside the Midwest, and you don’t make a lot of money doing this. Why do I travel across the state to read to 12 people? Our house is paid for, we’re kind of comfortable, and my wife’s busy. I’m busy. She says, “You don’t have to go do this. We don’t need the money. We don’t need that 200 bucks, we’re fine without it.”  I said, “but nobody paid attention until I was fifty, and now they want me to come! How could I say no?” 

(laughter)

Keith Taylor: But so, in the process, I never got frustrated or embittered, but lots of people did. I mean, the guy, my example of the guy with talent, he clearly got embittered because he thought the world should sit back and pay attention to his talent, and when they didn’t, he was frustrated. 

And there are the frustrations of the work.I have things I want to write that I’m not going to be able to write. Several people here know the story about when I discovered my Irish immigrant great-grandmother’s suicide, which happened in western Canada, and I discovered it on State Street in Ann Arbor in a book that was about to be sold for three dollars. And I’ve written about that, and Tom Fricke and I did a conference at Michigan that this discovery was a part of, “The Documentary Imagination.” I wrote one good essay, which I think is probably the best essay I’ve ever written, but I wanted to write a whole book about her. I did a lot of research. I even got a grant from a now-defunct part of the University of Michigan. Maybe because they gave me a grant is why they’re defunct (laughs).  And I did the research.  I went out to Alberta and amassed a bunch of material, maybe too much material, and, thinking this was going to be a book at the time, I had an agent who came through the bookstore, and he said (imitates voice), “Keith, this is your million-dollar book!”  It didn’t happen. I didn’t write that. I wrote one good essay and three sort of tangential essays and a few poems around/about all of that information, so that’s frustrating.  I would have liked to have written that book.  I think it could have been an important book. It was a window into a small history. We all know that the history of women is the history that’s been overlooked, particularly the history of poor women – and this discovery I had about my own family gave me a little window into that. It seemed like a book that needed to be written, but I have not yet been able to write it. I was actually working on polishing one of the essays just this morning before I came in, so that’s been a frustration.

Audience Member: Can you talk more about your great grandmother’s – or do you not want to?

Keith Taylor: Sure, I can – no no, I’m happy to.

Audience Member: I’m curious, you didn’t know about it?

Keith Taylor: No, nobody did. I found a book. So, I was working at Shaman Drum Bookshop, and the owner of that bookshop used to go around to small academic journals – there are all these little academic journals that are in basements around the university, and they have readerships of five people scattered around. 

(laughter) 

Keith Taylor: You know, really arcane stuff. And they get review copies sent to them, like arcane material. This is the only hope these poor authors have of a review (both Keith Taylor and audience laughs), and, of course, most of those books aren’t reviewed, so the guy who owned Shaman Drum was always trying to figure out a way to keep the bookstore going. He would go around and he would give these people 10 bucks for a 100 books, and then he’d go and put them on his sale tables outside. Of course, most of the books would be destroyed in the snow and street people would take them and collectors would take them to try to resell them, so he didn’t do it make money. He did it to draw people in. And these were arcane books. I used to price these books and put them out there. He had two copies of this gigantic book which had all the Latin names of all the insects in Missouri. 

(laughter)

Keith Taylor:  Now, there’s going to be a few people interested in that, in Missouri, maybe three in Missouri –

(laughter)

​Keith Taylor:  – but he had them for three bucks. One of the ones I remember was farming practices in 12th century Syria.  You know, I can imagine being interested in that, but that’s pretty specific.  So, we pulled out some of these before Art Fair – you always put this crap out for Art Fair because, you know, you can sell anything at Art Fair. 

(laughter)

​Keith Taylor: He pulled up one book, and he looked at the title and he laughed. He sort of threw it at me and said, “Keith, nobody in three states would read this except you.” The title of the book was Pioneer Policing in Southern Alberta, Dean of the Mounties, 1880-1914, and I looked at that and I said, “No Karl, even I’m not gonna read that.” I took it upstairs, I was going to put it on the street for Art Fair, and I decided I had to look up my hometown.  When I went to it, there was one reference to my hometown, and when I read it then I realized what this was, police reports from the prairies in that time when Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces. Alberta became a province in 1904, which is when my Irish immigrant relatives arrived. There’s one story, it’s called True Faithful Wife, and there were a couple of things that threw me off at first. My family’s name was Finlay, and the mountie had written Findlay, so that threw me off. Plus, that little place – where they were, fifteen miles outside of my hometown, had a regional name called Kansas. Later on, I found out that they changed it in 1909, but I always knew it as Westcott. I was curious, “well, I don’t know what that is. It’s close to where I grew up. Isn’t this a weird coincidence with my own people.” As I read it, I realized all the other names were the same.  All the other stories recounted to the mountie about why this woman might have gone out to kill herself, were the same, and I realized as I was reading that I was reading the story of my great-grandmother’s suicide, and nobody alive knew that she did it. They had hidden it, successfully, in my grandparents’ generation. She had 11 children, nine of them survived. They’d been desperately poor in North Ireland, and they’d come over, and they were desperately poor in Alberta. Their house burned down, their first crops were destroyed by hail, they had no money, and clearly great-grandfather was a little bit of a son of a bitch. When I got to the end of the police report – I’m ruining my narrative over here, my essay tells it better – when I got to the end of the police report the mountie had transcribed her suicide note. So, in July of 1996, I was on State St. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, reading the suicide note of my great-grandmother written in 1907 in Alberta. I almost fainted. I’m pretty good in frightening or bloody situations, but I almost fainted. It was like (gestures indicating something akin to vertigo) “whoa.”  It was addressed to her older children, one of whom was my grandfather, and it starts out, “Your father told me to leave the place this morning if I would not sleep with him. I love my children; God knows I love my children. I don’t want any more children.” So, she went out to the outhouse and drank a jar of acid. 

(audience gasps)

Keith Taylor:  There are lots of very obvious and important ramifications of that, things about history that we need to keep telling ourselves. So I wrote an essay about finding that, which coupled with the stuff I could find from the family, so I think I did okay by the essay. The fact that that story came to me 90 years later, the one of her descendants who has thought about stories, is pretty strange. Because I had written some poems about these people when I came back from Europe, I knew the names, I knew the stories, I collected some of those. I was probably the only of her descendants who would recognize it because of those stories. And I felt a little as if this story had a life of its own and that I had a certain responsibility to it since it found its way to me.  

Audience Member:  Where can we read the essay?

Keith Taylor: The essay is – you can get to it on my website, which is www.keithtaylorannarbor.com. There’s a section in there on online stuff, and I published it first in the Michigan Quarterly Review. [It was reprinted around 2015 in a book of Michigan creative nonfiction. Elemental, edited by Anne Marie Oomen. ]

Sarah Messer: So, what advice would you give to high school students who want to write poetry? I know you have been to high schools.

Keith Taylor: I have been to high schools; I used to go to high schools a lot. I go to some private high schools that pay a lot of money, and then I always make sure I try to go to some rural, usually west Michigan and northern Michigan high schools as well that don’t have anybody. It often feels like the most useful thing to do is to go to some of those schools. 

​I can tell them, “Yes! See, in some small way, I have done this. You can do it, too!  Don’t let your economic condition, don’t let the reputation of your school, don’t let the fact that you screwed up in a high school education, don’t let any of that stop you. The republic of letters is indeed a republic, and it’s open to people who have persistence and have ability and who don’t give up. And maybe you’re gonna be 50 years old before much of anybody gives you any strokes for that, but along the way you can have a pretty good time. You get to know lots of cool people, and you get to go to cool places. You’ll probably never have a lot of money, but that’s okay. So just keep doing it; just keep trying.”