Notebook in hand, poet Tess Taylor retraces Dorothea Lange’s steps through rural California in our podcast: mo.ma/2KP1qes 

Song In Which We Yet Sidestep Disaster by Tess Taylor

In her third volume of poems (following Work & Days), NPR online poetry reviewer Taylor examines what it means to live close to the edge, both symbolically and in the real world. Growing up on the Hayward Fault, near El Cerrito, CA, she knows what it’s like to live on the edge, whether she’s surviving the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 or raising children in a country and a world that seem on the verge of collapsing underfoot: “Below us the crust is molten, is nationless.// We light only our lamps on the rift.” Conversational and sometimes personal, Taylor’s verse always comes across as fresh and lyrical. She includes poems built on fragments that reflect what it might feel like to have the earth shift beneath you—“We are animal/ in the broken ecosystem”—even as she offers readers another look at what’s broken beneath us. Here, readers encounter rampant violence, the “war” at the border, and issues of ecology and equity, and she asks us to consider the large questions and small: “Even in the face// of devastation// we must make art.

By STEPHANIE DANLER

APRIL 27, 2020

The Times asked authors to track what they do in isolation. Stephanie Danler, author of the bestelling novel “Sweetbitter” and the forthcoming memoir, “Stray,” juggles child care, book promotion and Instagram while waging a low-grade “music war” with her husband and toddler (settling on John Prine, Will Evans and Curious George).

I pull down some poetry and bookmark a few poems to share on Instagram. I’m drawn into Tess Taylor’s “Rift Zone,” a collection about the violence and contradiction at the heart of California. I’ve read it through twice and it’s brilliant.

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Shortly before the state of California ordered its citizens to retreat indoors, I met up with poet Tess Taylor for a hike on a steep hill near her home.

It was one of those perfect California days: warm; dappled sun; early spring flowers popping.

Everything looked and smelled tangy.

"There are so many smells to love here, like rosemary or Ponderosa pine needles in the sun," said Taylor, as we hiked up the steep gravely trail to the summit. "All of these are very specific California smells."

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MoMA Magazine Podcast:

Across her long career, from her landmark 1939 photo book An American Exodus to the pages of Life magazine in the mid-1950s, and from the pages of government reports to the walls of museum exhibitions, pioneering photographer Dorothea Lange grappled with the relationship between words and pictures, the subject of MoMA’s recent exhibition. In 1961 she concluded that, “All photographs…can be fortified by words.” Whether or not one agrees with this statement, the intersection of photography and poetry merits special attention.

In 1938 the poet (and soon-to-be-appointed Librarian of Congress) Archibald MacLeish published Land of the Free, which he described as “the opposite of a book of poems illustrated by photographs. It is a book of photographs illustrated by a poem.” The vast majority of these photographs were by Lange, including eight of the first nine. In the exhibition cataloguewe reproduced these spreads, allowing readers to appreciate the ways in which MacLeish’s “soundtrack” (as he referred to his poem) serves as a visual counterpoint to her memorable images.

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“Graveyard, Monticello” and “Route 1 North, Woolich, Maine” by Tess Taylor

Both poems appear in her first book, The Forage House (Red Hen, 2013). Taylor recently had her poems featured in the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words 7 Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art. She is also the author of Rift Zone (2020) and Work & Days (2016).

Here, Taylor discusses her career as a poet who works in archives and how the American Antiquarian Society helps foster that special work. Tess Taylor was a 2006 Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.

Tess Taylor’s new poetry collection Rift Zone is published this month. She shares five books about writing place in a time of crisis.

Seamus Heaney wrote this rich book about place and belonging in the late 60s and early 70s, as the sectarian violence of the Troubles was breaking out all over Northern Ireland, where he then lived. Strangely, he also finished some of the poems during a sabbatical in Berkeley. These are poems for home dialect, home place, but also for trying to find a way, in a violent time, to take a long view. In Rift Zone, when I name geologic time or deep California history, I’m trying to help us stay connected to something bigger than the present moment.

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Watch Episode 3: Tess Taylor

Buy the books: Rift Zone and Last West

Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, The Forage House, which was a finalist for the Believer poetry prize, and Work & Days, which was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed her as “the poet for our moment.” In spring 2020 she will publish two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the MoMA, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press. She is a poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Watch the video here…

Read Heather and Tess’s original Alta Asks.

Last West and Rift Zone are ambitious works that uncover fault lines in California’s geology, human history, and future.

• By Heather Scott Partington

April 7, 2020

Watch Tess and Heather take this interview LIVE on Monday, April 13, 2020 at 12:30 p.m. PT for Alta Asks Live.

Tess Taylor’s poetry is a literary collage: an assemblage of the poet’s words and the ontology of California itself. In two collections out this year, Rift Zone and Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, the poet juxtaposes her personal longing for security against the state’s complex geologic and human history. Rift Zone draws our attention to the “fragile real estate” Californians claim, as well as invisible lines within and around us. Last West puts the poet’s work in apposition to notes and photographs taken by famed WPA photographer Lange. Taylor travels the roads Lange traveled, drawing together the artist’s time and our own: “Different people,” Taylor writes, “the same problems.”

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In the preface to the ambitious third book from Taylor (The Forage House), Ilya Kaminsky describes the work as “many investigations of American fear.” While fear may be a subtext to these poems, they are an exploration of American violence and fragility, amplified by the fact that the poet lives in El Cerrito, Calif., a city that sits atop the Hayward Fault. Taylor’s poems are often made up of multiple sections, in a controlled sprawl that mirrors the area about which she writes so richly. A descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Taylor explores her own identity, reminding readers of the foundation and origins of American violence. One poem opens with “Tonight the train shuts for another death./ Jumper: Third this month,” and it is followed by another that begins “& after the vermillion opera curtain/ rose on Giovanni raping/ the tiny distant woman on the stage,/ we drank champagne at intermission.” In these layered poems, Taylor often steps beyond herself to address her own privilege: “Sometimes I think that all/ privilege is/ is some safer vantage/ for watching the trauma, America, happen,” she observes. Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts. (Apr.)

by Nick Ripatrazone, April 3, 2020

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing this month.

Rift Zone by Tess Taylor

California: pastoral, urban, suburban—home to myth and magic. Taylor’s book is geologic in concept and theme, both panoramic and particular (her lines are ripe with texture, as in: “Blackberries choke the bike path; / schoolboys squall like gulls or pigeons.”).

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by Vanessa Hua April 2, 2020 Updated: April 2, 2020, 10:20 pm

Poet Tess Taylor questioned what it means to be creative, when every day feels like a radical reinvention of life.

“These days, helping myself and my family steer a way around sadness, anger, grief, loneliness, boredom or despair feels like its own art form. This emotional work of getting around and through takes time, even before the time of sitting to write, or dreaming of a poem,” said Taylor, author of the forthcoming “Rift Zone.”

Tess Taylor, author of “Rift Zone”Photo: Adrianne Mathiowetz

She still gets up early to work and think, but once her family is awake, she needs to be present for what’s happening to all of them. Her creativity manifests in getting low on the floor, building forts or a puppet theater, playing with crayons, and walking outside and identifying plants or planting the garden.

The other day, her 4-year-old daughter wanted to cut out paper hearts and march them in a line across a piece of cardboard. “We need this, Mom,” she said. “We need this heart parade.” “The truth is, what Emmeline needs, I need too — some release, some being together, some time to see the clouds or go on a scavenger hunt,” Taylor said.

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by Michael Bourne

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

3.23.20

Six years ago, when Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), her best-selling novel about a pandemic flu that decimated the world’s population, she couldn’t have known that her next novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020), would arrive at the height of a pandemic flu outbreak that, if not as lethal as the fictional “Georgia flu” of her earlier book, is nevertheless upending the world economy—and, not incidentally, her twenty-five-city book tour.

………..

Still, digital events aren’t for everyone. Poet Tess Taylor is publishing two collections this spring, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, due from Red Hen Press in April. Taylor was able to attend a reading for Last West at MoMA in February, but most of the subsequent events for that book, along with twenty-five more events planned for Rift Zone, have all been canceled.

The two books contained a decade’s worth of poems, Taylor says, and she spent a year organizing the events to support them. “It feels like building a sandcastle,” she says. “You know, you build it up and up and up and then a wave comes and it knocks it down. I don’t know if I’m sad or angry. I’m all those things, and then sometimes I’m just humbled because what’s going on is so much bigger than just us or me.”

Living as she does in California, which is currently under a shelter-in-place order, Taylor says she will be throwing herself a digitally streamed “imaginary book party” with fellow poet Judy Halebsky, inviting friends “to have a glass of wine and watch us give our reading” online, and plans to regularly post poems by poets she admires. But she admits to feeling ambivalent about moving her live events online.

“I’m using social media because I want to be in a community right now at this moment when we can’t go out in the world, but I love people,” she says. “I love human beings. I really miss them. I love bookstores and want to support them. I love the feeling of live poetry, having it read, being in a room where someone is sharing their words and their breath with you—in the most wonderful way, not in a toxic way. Poetry is a beautiful way of sharing breath, and I miss that.”

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“She inspired me as a model of persistence.”

So says Tess Taylor, a poet in the Bay Area, who undertook the journey once travelled by Dorothea Lange, the extraordinary woman photographer.

Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, is Taylor’s work in conjunction with the sweeping retrospective of Lange’s work Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Lange documented migrant people—some coming to California for jobs, some leaving farms that had failed in the big act of climate change we now call the Dust Bowl. She also photographed Japanese internment.

by Barbara Hoffert
Jan 17, 2020

Place: As important in poetry as in prose, place figures largely in John Freeman’s The Park (Copper Canyon, May), which visits Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens over four seasons, the better to understand public space, human interaction, and who gets what in our cultural moment. And Rift Zone (Red Hen, Apr.), from NPR online poetry reviewer Tess Taylor, recaptures her California hometown, smack on the shuddery Hayward fault in an arena recalling Spanish settlement and Japanese interment.

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Rift Zone, by Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press, April 7, 2020): From the press: “Taylor’s ambitious and masterful poems read her home state’s historic violence against our world’s current unsteadinesses—mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious—a fearsome tremor of a book.”

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It’s true that 2019 was another difficult year in so very many ways, but it was also a banner year for reading.

While we know that 2020 will find us facing ever more political upheaval, fighting endless uphill battles for equality and freedom, and screaming into our pillows at night, we can also assure you that there will be great literature to bring us solace, to inspire and enlighten us, and to offer us moments of escape.

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Tess Taylor, an acclaimed writer who was born and raised in the Bay Area, has spent the last year traveling back to the places in California that Lange once photographed. From her travels, she has written a book of poetry, “Last West,” that will be a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures” exhibit this upcoming spring. Read more…

This year, I've read the poetry of Mark Jarman, Tess Taylor, and Nicole Sealey with gratitude. 

by Lauren F. Winner  November 17, 2017

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