RIFT ZONE, Taylor’s third book, is due out in 2020 from Red Hen Press. Her poems trace literal and metaphoric fault lines between past and present; childhood and adulthood; what is and what was. Circling an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault, these poems include redwood trees, hummingbirds, buried streams, and the otherworldy cries of new babies. They are also records of American unease, American violence, American grief. They include arson on the site of a Spanish landgrant, white supremacist violence, guns in the local elementary school and the painful history of Japanese internment.
In this conversation with Ilya Kaminsky, Taylor discusses the roots of the book.
If you had to choose some lines from your previous work that echoed in your mind, in your inner-ear when you wrote this book–or perhaps the opposite (if it is more helpful), what lines you wanted to shield from, what you didn’t want to hear, as you wrote this book– what lines might that be? I ask because I would like to explore that idea of mapping into the sound-work in your books, too. Not just content.
I do see now how this third work, Rift Zone, communicates in overt and subterranean ways with works I made before. It’s a book about core sample, about excavation, about digging. But I didn’t know it would be this until the end, or near it. I rarely, if ever, think of former work directly when planning new work. In fact, planning is the wrong verb there, because when a poem or fragment of a poem emerges, it is a mystery to me—it emerges, I follow. It was only after the book was done, as it became clear that, in excavating the history of my hometown, my backyard—I could see that I was in dialog with concerns I had before.
Poems have their own lives, their own beginnings. They do begin in sound—fricative sound, little vowel songs. Sometimes they begin in absurd noticings: “I see the cleaners sign has now become the leaners” or, overhearing my mind reciting the names of the dead while I walk through the town graveyard. Yun, Kobayashi, Menendez, Revere. Why those names? What lives (and deaths) converge here?