Bio Note:
I actually became a writer by trade shortly after I finished college in 1964, but I was certainly not a “poet” at that time. Nobody was, I thought-- except maybe for the Beats and Sylvia Plath. I called myself a copywriter, and started out writing for the Sears Roebuck catalog in Chicago. But after spending an instructive year with that jumbo publication, I was hired by the Chicago Tribune to write promotion and publicity pieces for them. I genuinely loved it. I remained there until 1970, when I married a Milwaukee attorney named Allen Taylor and moved to Milwaukee, where I lived for the next 40 years. In 1975 we had a child, Reed Taylor, who grew up to become my hero. At that point I’d never written a poem in my life, outside of birthday greetings and a few off-color limericks. Poetry just didn’t happen to me until Reed entered the first grade, and I decided to go to grad school to study linguistics at UW-Milwaukee. Unwittingly, I signed up for a weird-sounding course called “Literary Stylistics”-- and my whole world took a preposterous U-turn. We were asked to look at poems as structures—taking them apart, putting them back together again, not worrying so much about decoding cleverly hidden meanings. I began to realize that nothing can wreck the experience of reading a poem faster than sitting around arguing about what the poet is “trying to say.” That’s not the poem! It may have been the idea behind the poem, but I quickly learned that poems are not “ideas.” They’re words. And it’s how those words are put together that turn random insights into poems. So with lightning speed I switched majors and lurched toward a PhD in English instead. It took a while, but the rest is history. Mine, at least. Writing poems, teaching other folks some approaches to writing them, and reading them to audiences around the state and beyond became my life. I wound up being appointed Poet Laureate of Milwaukee and, later, the Poet Laureate of Wisconsin—honors for which I will be forever grateful. I taught at UW-Milwaukee for 15 years, published seven books of poetry (my latest and probably last in December 2021). Poems, essays, and columns of mine have appeared in many publications. (Check out my website to find out which ones, if you’re interested— www.mltpoet.com). Quick epilogue: when Allen passed away in 2012, I moved to Madison and eventually married David Scheler, a kind and perceptive man, hilariously funny, also a fine poet. I’m still writing, and still teaching regularly at Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden Seminar Center in Door County, Wisconsin, Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut, and, irregularly, elsewhere. The four poems that follow reflect certain junctures in my life that were and remain important to me as a sort of timeline. I hope you enjoy them. |
If, in October
I should be driving past a row of brick-and-shingle bungalows when maple leaves are sticking to the sidewalk and a rain-glossed school bus starts to swing its yellow bulk around the corner, there you are again—framed in a wavy leaded window, watering a long-fingered philodendron while the Victrola clatters out Landowska’s version of the Little Preludes through the glass and I am nine years old —and you, the center of my small universe, are the love of my life, to whose powdered presence I come home blissfully, day after dangerous day utterly innocent of a distant time when you will turn from me and withdraw into my archive of losses. Even your quaint name, Alice, melts to nearly nothing on my tongue.
Subject to Change
A reflection on my students They are so beautiful, and so very young they seem almost to glitter with perfection, these creatures that I briefly move among. I never get to stay with them for long, but even so, I view them with affection: they are so beautiful, and so very young. Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung, they’re expert in the art of introspection, these creatures that I briefly move among— And if their words don’t quite trip off the tongue consistently, with just the right inflection, they remain beautiful. And very young. Still, I have to tell myself it’s wrong to think of them as anything but fiction, these creatures that I briefly move among— Because, like me, they’re traveling headlong in that familiar, vertical direction that coarsens beautiful, blackmails young, and turns to phantoms those I move among.
Poem for a 75th Birthday
To Allen Marcus Taylor, 1926 - 2012 Love of my life, it’s nearly evening and here you still are, slow-dancing in your garden, folding and unfolding like an enormous grasshopper in the waning sun. Somehow you’ve turned our rectangle of clammy clay into Southern California, where lilacs and morning-glories mingle with larkspur, ladyfern and zinnia— all of them a little drunk on thundershowers and the broth of newly fallen flowers. I can’t get over how the brightest blooms seem to come reaching for your hand, weaving their way across the loom of your fingers, bending toward the trellis of your body. They sway on their skinny stems like a gang of super-models making fabulous displays of their dumb and utter gratitude, as if they knew they’d be birdseed if it weren’t for you. And yet they haven’t got the slightest clue about the future; they behave as if you’ll be there for them always, as if you were the sun itself, brilliant enough to keep them in the pink, or gold, or green forever. Understandable, I decide as I look at you out there—as I lean in your direction, absolutely satisfied that summer afternoon is all there is, and night will never fall.
Day After I Die
they will find the cure for whatever got me, and a unified theory of physics will be announced by a consortium from M.I.T. Following the funeral, Earth will be contacted by intelligent beings from the Farquhar galaxy-- immediately after which Tesla will announce a car that can run forever on table scraps. Within the week, Abbott Labs will introduce an age-reversing cream on the very heels of a morning-after diet pill that tastes exactly like a Cadbury’s Easter Egg. Finally, the woman they hire to clean and fumigate my house will come across a sheaf of my old poems (tucked optimistically inside a catalogue from The Gap) and turn them over to her Thursday client, Billy Collins, who (ignoring an infinitesimal twinge of envy) will gallantly take charge and see to everything-- including, of course, any immortality.