An opinion piece in the NYTimes today about the amazing journey of following the path of Dorothea Lange through California, and the questions she leaves to us now.
by Tess Taylor
Read MoreMarie Ponsot, Poet of Love, Divorce and Family, Dies at 98
After a promising start as a published poet in the 1950s, Marie Ponsot put her career aside. She was a single mother in New York City, with seven children to raise. But she did not stop writing. She filled notebooks with her poems — and then stashed much of her work in a drawer, showing it strictly to friends.
It would be almost a quarter-century before her poetry began to re-emerge, and when it did, she found wide acclaim.
By the end of her long life — she died on Friday at 98 — Ms. Ponsot had translated dozens of books, published seven volumes of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, taught at Queens College and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. She died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan, her daughter, Monique Ponsot, said.
Ms. Ponsot was first published in the 1950s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — the Yonkers-born poet who championed the Beat poets from his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights — in the same series as Allen Ginsberg.
Read MoreFour New Poetry Collections Confront Despair With Wonder
DOOMSTEAD DAYS By Brian Teare
“To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion.” This quote from John Ashbery’s “Houseboat Days” anchors Teare’s latest volume, a book about climate change, apocalypse and grief, but also a book Teare composed while walking. In wandering, his poems deliberately cultivate attentiveness to the motions of mind. Unfurling, in poem after poem, Teare’s long hikes range from California and the Point Reyes coastline to Philadelphia, where he now teaches at Temple University. They are alternately rural and urban, tender and apocalyptic, written in the face of oil spills and also under a “raptor’s / accurate shadow / falling over me always / premonitory.” Teare’s forms often jag across the page, capturing an essayistic consciousness in staggered strokes of thought.
Read MoreTess Taylor on “Field Report: April”
On "Field Report: April"Today before sitting down to write about the poems in Work & Days I was out in the garden, by which I mean basically the whole space around our house. We have tomatoes and kale and fennel and favas in garden boxes out front, artichokes on the sidewalk median strip, lemons, potatoes, rhubarb and figs in the back. It is California, says my husband. The landscape should be edible.
Read More31 Books in 30 Days: Tess Taylor on Ada Limón
In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tess Taylor offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Ada Limón’s The Carrying (Milkweed).
Read MorePoem of the Week - THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘Daylight Savings’
‘A cold dark keeps arriving, punctually, sooner’
Shortly after finishing her first collection, The Forage House (2013), the American poet Tess Taylor began interning on a small farm in rural Massachusetts, planting peppers and studying soil composition in the area. Heavily influenced by the work of Hesiod and John Clare, her next collection, Work & Days (2016) – which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic” – was inspired by that year of living close to and working the land. Describing her project in a recent interview in Mass Poetry, Taylor said “I spent time trying to weave continuities between old poetics of farming and new ones in ways that felt genuine. I wanted to feel the act of attempting to connect to food and the earth as radical”.
“Daylight Savings”, first published in the TLS in 2002, bears the mark of someone who pays close attention to the rhythms of the seasons. Taylor’s choice of the sonnet form and her repetitious rhyme scheme also echo our own human attempts to impose structure on the natural world, especially where time is concerned. Daylight Saving Time, or DST, was first proposed in 1895 by the New Zealander George Hudson, who worked as an entomologist and used the longer daylight hours in summer to collect his insect specimens. At first glance, the “extra hour” gained by the poem’s speaker also seems an unasked-for “gift”, reminding her of “easy August days” and “making the passing morning lighter”. Yet by the afternoon, she sees the downside of this strange bargain we strike each autumn: in order to gain that earlier light, we must also resign ourselves to the “cold dark” of a night that comes ever “sooner” as winter approaches. Like the dormant fields themselves, we must let our own “illusions” of summer finally “falter” as we admit the truth of another year’s inescapable passing.
Daylight Savings
How strange it is as we verge on November
and the fields go bare, and days grow tighter
to wake and find, as if from thin air
an unexpected gift: An extra hour.
This generosity recalls the summer’s
easy August days, time and desire
to make long love and read the paper,
both. Unanticipated leisure
makes the passing morning lighter.
The sun on empty vines and stubble fields seems cleaner.
Encroaching thoughts of cold seem further off.
Seem – that is to say, these are measured offers:
by afternoon the light’s late illusion falters.
A cold dark keeps arriving, punctually, sooner.
TESS TAYLOR (2002)
Read MoreNew York Times Book Review
Tess reviews Tom Sleigh's The Land Between Two Rivers, and House of Fact, House of Ruin
Read MoreCNN OP-ED: Can we make 2017's toxic outrage into 2018's humanity?
This winter, just after I'd written an op-ed for CNN about gun violence, I received a bunch of notes, mostly lovely ones, in my inbox. Some were unpleasant, and among them two really stood out to me ...
Read MoreBarnes and Noble Review "Voices Unbound" by Tess Taylor →
When I was growing up in San Francisco, singing choral music in the San Francisco Girls Chorus, I and my fellow choristers were, for the most part, learning to perform music that had, for most of its history, been sung by boys or men.
Read MoreCNN OP-ED: Do we love our guns more than our children?
(CNN) - When I was 12, in the sixth grade in El Cerrito, California, one of my classmates brought a gun to school. She was a bright fellow student -- flamboyant, funny, sometimes moody -- occasionally in trouble...
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