Tess Taylor and her poetry of Californi‪a‬

The award-winning poet and former poetry reviewer for NPR shares her feelings of living on the "Rift Zone" that is California.

For many, it's a time of uncertainty and isolation. But in poet Tess Taylor's humble opinion, turning to verse can provide solace. Her recent book of poems is "Rift Zone," and the following essay is part of our arts and culture series, "CANVAS."

"Given things both personal and global, I’ve been holding this book in my hands for nearly a year, reading and re-reading its narrative. And in that time it’s only become more timely, which you could call prescient or you could say underscores the multi-layered heat and pressure of systemic injustice: the bedrock on which this country was formed and out of which it continues to form—to crack and slip, to fracture and erode, to erupt and create."

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Tess Taylor’s is an important voice in an emerging body of work from white poets excavating the histories of whiteness and privilege, who seek to understand precisely how these ideas were first created and then maintained through willful ignorance. This book provides excellent examples of how white poets can participate in the project of decolonization and liberation without culturally appropriating or enacting a white savior complex. As someone who recognizes how my own poems have sometimes failed in these ways, I’m grateful to see models for writing the archive of white privilege and systemic racism in a way that allows white readers to imagine what being a good ancestor might look like from their subject positions.

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This interview started via email a month into lockdown here in Charlottesville, VA. Tess had agreed to correspond with me from her home in El Cerrito, CA, well before the public suspected COVID-19 would make landfall in the U.S., and its arrival stateside delayed our dialogue. I sent her the first question on April 4th. I wanted to talk to Tess about her work in part because not long ago I’d moved to this town where her father’s family has deep roots, and because her first book, The Forage House, confronts and reckons with her ancestors’ participation in Virginia’s plantation economy. With each subsequent book, Taylor has turned her attention to new subjects and poetic modes without ever losing sight of history, document, context—her second book, Work and Days, employs an ecopoetic form of the georgic, while her third book, Last West, explores documentary poetics through an ekphrastic examination of Dorothea Lange’s California photographs and notebooks. And with her fourth book, Rift Zone, Taylor returns to questions of race, place, reckoning, and conscience, though this time the poems are situated in the El Cerrito of her childhood. I sent Tess the final question the morning of May 26th, not long after which the video of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police went viral and, as Tess suggests in her final answer, prompted Black and indigenous activists in nearby Richmond, VA, to tear down statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and of Christopher Columbus.

—Brian Teare

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Award-winning author, Tess Taylor, is the latest author to join Cheryl’s Book Club on QC@3! The author, a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, is sharing the wisdom of two new books of poetry, Last West and Rift Zone – both published in 2020. Last West traces the path of Dorothea Lange, the famed American photographer who captured American life during the Great Depression and the years that followed. Taylor reimagines the sights and sounds of the era in a stunning collection of poetry, recalling the people, places, and things of Lange’s journey: migrant workers, Dust Bowl refugees, tent cities, internment camps and more. Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone traces real and metaphoric fault lines in California, a place vulnerable to earthquakes. Taylor explores how fault lines – through history – have created fissures in and a reimagining of community. Tess Taylor remembers these moments through the lens of Hayward Fault, which runs through Taylor’s hometown. Cheryl and Tess chat about this poignant poetry collection, and Tess reads from Rift Zone. For more information on, Last West and Rift Zone, go to https://www.tess-taylor.com/.

El Cerrito author Tess Taylor reads from one of her two new poetry collections, "Rift Zone." Rift Zone is set around Taylor’s hometown, a California suburb lying along the Hayward fault. Her other new collection is "Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange."

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Acclaimed poet Tess Taylor is poetry critic for NPR’s All Things Considered, and a columnist for CNN. Her most recent book is Rift Zone (Red Hen Press, 2020), which the Los Angeles Times called “brilliant.” In his introduction to the collection, Ilya Kaminsky describes Taylor’s voice as “invaluable” and she is a “poet for our moment.” Her other books include Work & Days (Red Hen Press, 2016), named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by The New York Times; The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013), a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award which The San Francisco Chronicle called “stunning,” and the chapbook The Misremembered World, which was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. In February 2020, Last West, an exciting book length commission from the Museum of Modern Art, was published in conjunction with the MOMA show, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures. Her work explores California and the American West, her life as a critic, and the intersection of poetry and journalism.

Lori talks with poet Tess Taylor about her two new poetry collections published earlier this year--RIFT ZONE and LAST WEST: ROADSONGS FOR DOROTHEA LANGE. Tess tells Lori why she wanted to write about settling again in the California town where she grew up, her collaboration with MOMA on the Dorothea Lange poems and her creative process. Along the way, Tess reads some poems found in the collections.

Given the way history is inadequately taught throughout schools across the country, it’s safe to assume that it would be a challenge for anyone to recount at least a half-detailed history of their hometown. For 18 years, I never knew that Harlon Block Park in my hometown of Weslaco, Texas, was named after one of the young Marines who participated in the second flag-raising photograph on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima during World War II. There are many people with similar experiences as mine, and anytime one dives into the past there is a risk of revealing more than one bargained for. But when it’s examined with the present, and when it seeks to be understood on a level that it wasn’t before, you arrive at something akin to Rift Zone, Tess Taylor’s third poetry collection. Lyrical, elegiac, and always willing to unveil what lies beneath the surface, Rift Zone powerfully engages with the past and seeks to unveil the complicated histories behind the places we call home.

“Whose fault // our fault” the poem “Three Dreams, 2018” opens. Tess Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Rift Zone, tenders to her reader the language of fault, rift and fracture as her songs and aubades touch upon the geological, ecological and political of our lives.

Tess Taylor’s previous book of poetry, Work & Days, was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Now, with her extraordinary new collection, Rift Zone, Taylor presents her most powerful and timely work yet. Rift Zone shows a critically acclaimed poet—known to many as the on-air Poetry Reviewer for NPR’s “All Things Considered”—at work on a one-of-a-kind endeavor, mapping a California and a country at the brink. Addressing issues of gun violence, homelessness, and climate change, Taylor reveals the fault lines, literal and figurative, in her Northern California hometown and our country as a whole. At the same time, Rift Zone is a deeply intimate and tender book about parenting, specifically about becoming a parent in a fraught time.

Taylor is in conversation with novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Stephanie Danler.

In this series from The Paris Review, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

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

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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