Ann Arbor’s Keith Taylor offers two new poetry collections

by Martha Stuit, Pulp

Keith Taylor is launching two new books published this year.

The University of Michigan lecturer emeritus and former bookseller offers 40 years of poetry in All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977-2017, which was published in January. Then he studies the natural and human world through his poetry collection What Can the Matter Be?, which debuts in August. 

Taylor will read from What Can the Matter Be? at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor on Saturday, August 10, at 3 pm. 

All the Time You Want begins with dancing and concludes with painting. A note to the reader informs us that the poems appear “in roughly chronological order.” These poems map the formative places in Taylor’s life by traveling through Canada and to Ireland, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Isle Royale, Paris, Big Sur, South Bend, North Fishtail Bay, and other places.

Another throughline of the poems is the birds—the crested shelduck, snowy egret, pigeon, cerulean warbler, great horned owl, and ancient murrelet. Or you can follow the art and see “the gaze out past the painting / to all the other stories / no one else could ever understand.” 

These selected poems encounter the ups and downs of the poet’s life and experiences. One day there is “a momentary sense / of the utter loveliness of things” and another day brings “nothing but the clear, sour odor of skunk.”

Most of the poems are a page or two long, but two poems are longer: “Bear Stories” and “Hitchhiking.” Both recall impressive moments, one outlining confrontations with formidable creatures and the other hearkening back to a past time when people regularly dared to stick out a thumb and get a ride to somewhere else. 

What Can the Matter Be? registers change, endings, and optimism across its four sections: “1. The Extinction Report,” “2. The Longing for Home,” “3. Some Things Last,” and “4. Botanists in Love.”

The first poem answers the question of the book title’s inspiration that, yes, it derives from the song “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” as both the song and the poem—“Johnny’s Too Long at the Fair”—have similar titles, as do the book and the song depending on which title the song is going by. The poem’s lines, which are interspersed with song lyrics, remind us of the lockdown and discontent in 2020 when “I haven’t been / outside in months.” This poem sets the scene for the first section in which the poet examines what changes—or doesn’t—over time. 

These new poems show that the world constantly evolves even as the poet remains or revisits places. The premise is less so control over the poet’s corner of the universe and more so actively observing. Watching the same spots or being with the same people year after year reveals their incremental aging or progress.

This level of attention fosters an understanding of change, even just in the course of a few hours when, “On a warm afternoon I doze off / then awake to the almost storm.” The poet notices that “Suddenly there was a summer / without monarchs” and that “The moon is red / tonight” from “Canadian Fires.”

Taylor’s poem “Learning to Live With Our Neighbor’s New Fence” evokes Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” and suggests how to both make do and push back against the neighbor’s choice:

They probably won’t expect the vines
we’ll plant or the elves and fairies

of rot we’ll encourage, spreading
slowly into their back corner. 

More workarounds arise from fears instilled by past events, and in the basement of “The Things We Do”: 

I check almost daily
for thin streams running

across the floor
toward my books

or into the closet
where we keep our winter coats.

A metaphor flashes, as it does in many of Taylor’s poems, in these preventative checks. 

What Can the Matter Be? teaches us how to be a part of our environment. “Infant Baptism,” one of several poems mentioning the poet’s family members, takes us to a scene in which the baptism occurs outside at night when “Snow fell on her face / and she didn’t cry” under the gaze of a snowy owl. “Let Them Be Left” tells us that, while the landscape is “beautifully indifferent,” human emotions like hope are still possible because “Here alone in all this space / I cannot believe our world is dying.”

Taylor’s poems not only recognize the gravity of moments but also the levity through affection for the natural world and fellow humans who “think we might stay a while.”  

Taylor and I corresponded about how he chose the poems in All the Time You Want, metaphors throughout the two books, and themes and places in his poems. 

Q: The last time we talked for Pulp was when Ecstatic Destinations was about to be published and you were retiring from the University of Michigan. What has the time since then been like? 
A: Oh, it has been good! I’m not one of those old guys who hates retirement because they can’t fill up the time. I’m going all the time—reading, writing, studying, bird-watching. I’ve put together one chapbook, a Selected Poems, and a full-length collection in the last six years since retirement. I’ve had two very interesting residencies—one at the University of Michigan Biological Station and one at Isle Royale National Park. I’ve done one long trip to Europe to see the big Vermeer retrospective in Amsterdam last year. And, oh, yes, I’m not going all the time. I do nap regularly.

Q: Forty years of poetry are contained in All the Time You Want. How did you go about selecting these poems? 
A: The dates on the book, 1977 to 2017, are not arbitrary. I think my “breakthrough” poem happened over the Christmas/New Year’s vacation of 1976 to 1977. I was 24 years old. Even though I don’t think that’s a particularly good poem anymore—it’s not included in this book—it was the poem where I found a way of writing that sounded like me and like no one else. 

The poems in my new collection, What Can the Matter Be, come after that 2017 date for the most part. And, yes, they are the poems of the Covid years. That was also the year I published my book, The Bird-while. That seemed like a good marker to end on for the Selected Poems.

I did pick some of my poems that have had a bit of play, but I was also looking for poems that I liked or that had appealed to one or two people but had not been out there in the world very much. There are poems of mine that I think are good poems, perhaps even better than some in here, that are not included. They’ll have to wait for my Collected Poems! 

Q: There is not a table of contents or page numbers in All the Time You Want. How did you decide to structure this book?
A: I’m no longer sure the lack of page numbers or contents page was a good idea. But it was mine, not the publisher’s, so I have to live with it. My idea was that in a Selected Poems, individual poems stand alone, they don’t necessarily connect or comment on the poems around them. They don’t form an arc that moves through the book. Well, I was wrong! The poems do connect! That was probably my greatest revelation once I started exploring this book in public. My life as reflected in the poems does have a kind of arc! 

Lack of pages also makes it difficult for people to critique or even teach this book. 

Q: You collect striking anecdotes, and you convey them through poems and conversations. All the Time You Want offers dancing, a banshee, bears, hitchhiking, Isle Royale, Paris, and more. Tell us how you go about turning these stories into poems. 
A: I’m not really sure I know how it happens. I remember small moments and vivid images, some of them from decades ago. At some point, they begin to feel like metaphors, although I’m not often sure what they could illustrate as metaphors. Metaphors for what? I try to get them down exactly as I remember them in a structure and language that feels as if they honor the experience, knowing full well that many of the experiences have been completely distorted by time and memory. When some readers find the metaphors meaningful, those poems might be successful in their small way.

Q: Metaphors appear in What Can the Matter Be? as well. The poem “Tall Oaks” talks about how a decaying tree stump is “looking like a metaphor / for something we didn’t understand.” So sometimes there is a significant moment or thing, but the meaning is opaque or open to interpretation?
A: Both: opaque and open to interpretation. It is my sense of the interplay between mind and world that the things we experience in the world, the things we see, the things that are, often have meaning. Meaning for us as individuals and quite possibly a larger meaning, one that connects all of us. Now, that meaning might not be understood outside the event or image; it might feel like metaphor even if it is entirely self-enclosed. This might be as close as I come to a religious experience. 

Q: You talked about how the poems in All the Time in the World turned out to relate to each other in ways you had not anticipated. What about What Can the Matter Be? How do you see those poems speaking to each other?
A: I think there are poets who organize their books simply by picking the best poems that they’ve written over a four- or five-year period. Of course, many of those poets might be thinking of particularly ideas or feeling particular strong emotions in that period, so the books assume a natural unity. 

In What Can the Matter Be, I have tried to impose an order that deals with a particular problem and tries to find ways to resolve that problem. The first section is dark. It is despair. Extinction. Covid. The possible collapse of our political system. In the second section, I try to come up with some idea of home, of belonging, although I don’t think that ends up being resolved there. In the third section, I’m trying to find things that last, that survive the more obvious catastrophes of the first section. And, yes, typical of me, those end up being moments in the natural world. Even in what might be called “wilderness.” The last section is happier, as its title suggests: “Botanists in Love.” Although there are a couple of gentle references to my own death, it is basically looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of receiving gifts from the planet itself, even though there is no way that we can deserve these gifts. Water. Food. And, yes, love. Those botanists in the last poem bring it all together in my mind. 

Q: One aspect of What Can the Matter Be? that I noticed was the light. “Evening, Late October” brings illuminated trees reminiscent of women in paintings. In “Shadow Blue,” “the late sun casts shadows / from maples or hedgerows, / blue shadows, but a blue / like no other….” The moon and shadows appear in other poems, too. Where does this focus on the light come from? 
A: I don’t think I realized this until after most of the work on the book was done. And your question brings it into focus. Light is an essential part of the resolution I was talking about. Given everything that has happened, that is happening, to find ourselves in the light might be the biggest gift of all.

Q: Let’s talk about one more aspect of What Can the Matter Be? The poems observe a neighbor’s fence and travel to Isle Royale, among other places. The book’s description says that the collection explores “how rootedness in place allows a sturdy vantage point from which to see and reflect on the wider world.” How has this connection to place influenced your poetry? Is this “rootedness in place” part of what you mentioned earlier about finding “a way of writing that sounded like me”?
A: When we find new plants in our garden, plants that have come in from elsewhere, that we didn’t plan for, we call them “volunteers.” I am a “volunteer” here, in Ann Arbor, in the upper Great Lakes region. Education brought me here, and good work kept me here. Above all else, I married a woman from Detroit, so love and that kind of spiritual force has nurtured me here. I am a successful “volunteer.” 

So the themes and issues, the images that preoccupy me, arise from this place now. I don’t know what came first—the ideas or the place—but I certainly can’t distinguish between them now. I live HERE. I am of this place. My language and my passions rise from the streets and fields, the plants, the people, and the birds that live here with me.

Q: Every now and then authors have two books published in one year—an impressive feat! Have you experienced that before? What is it like?
A: In the early 1990s, I published two chapbooks in the same year, both of them from tiny little regional presses. Only a few people paid attention, so it was easy to feel as if I was giving each of them the love they needed. In 2006, I published a collection of poems, Guilty at the Rapture, with Hanging Loose Press in New York and a book of translations from Modern Greek, Battered Guitars: The Poetry and Prose of Kostas Karyotakis co-translated with William W. Reader, with an academic press in England. They felt as if they were in different worlds, so I didn’t feel I was cheating on one to promote the other. It does feel different this year. Perhaps that is because a few more people are paying attention. Perhaps it is because one is a Selected Poems, and it feels like a justified step toward the collection of new things. I’m still processing this!

Q: What is on your stack to read this summer?
A: The books I can see from here: the brand new Emily Wilson translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey—this is the fourth time I’ve read them in this life, and will likely be the last, and this translation is very vigorous, very accessible; Chigozie Obioma’s new novel, The Road to the Country; several new books of poems, but the one I can see from here is C. S. Giscombe’s Negro Mountain; Kenn Kauffman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed; and Lynne Spriggs O’Connor’s Elk Love: A Montana Memoir. That should keep me going for a while, anyway.

Q: You alluded to a Collected Poems. Where are you going next with your writing?
A: Mostly I will be happy if I can keep finding little moments that turn themselves into poems. All through my life, once I’ve finished something I’ve always wondered, “Is that it? Will I ever do anything else?” That emotion, that resistance to the void, is clearly more pronounced once one has entered his 70s! But I have hopes! I’ve been taking notes on a big historical project for 40 years now, and I would like to find some poems in that stuff. We’ll see. Mostly, I feel as if I will find a way to keep going, if I can keep my wits about me. Doing something like this with you helps too!