Join contemporary poet Tess Taylor and author Jasmin Darznik as they discuss and read from their recent works inspired by the life and work of New Deal photographer Dorothea Lange. Moderated by art historian Dr. Sally Stein.

(CNN) Like many of us who loved her, I can't remember the exact moment I fell for the work of Joan Didion. I imagine I first found her as a 16-year-old, flipping through used books at Moe's, the legendary Berkeley bookshop. But it's possible that this isn't true, because it seems like she was already there — at friends' houses, in bookstores, on bookshelves and in magazines we loved to read.

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The following interview took place between Tess Taylor and Tom Laichas on 23 August 2021. It has been edited for length and clarity.

TL: You took courses in urban studies as an undergrad, did a masters in journalism, an MFA, and have an abiding interest in geography and geology. Yet you don’t work in a city planning Department, aren’t anchoring All Things Considered, and aren’t monitoring JPL’s seismographic equipment. Given the alternatives you might have pursued, why poetry?

TT:There is something about that life with books—with reading and being in the conversation about books—that kept calling me. There are times when I have looked for a more proper day job, but I just kept feeling I’d like to write for a few more months. That feeling has continued for twenty years! I’ve been lucky to be able to cobble together a life of teaching and writing nonfiction so I have some freedom to get some poems written.

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Throughout his political career, Joe Biden has frequently invoked his favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Biden quoted Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” an adaptation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, which posits that “once in a lifetime / the longed-for tidal wave / of justice can rise up / and hope and history rhyme.” Months later, after the brutal attack on the U.S. Capitol, Biden assumed office under the watch of fifteen thousand members of the National Guard. He did not quote Heaney, but he did suggest that his presidency might usher in one such rhyming moment, and he promised to end “our uncivil war.”

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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with poet Tess Taylor, discussing her proposal for the U.S. moving political division through the arts.

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“It was really powerful to be on the road following her footsteps. It just gave me an incredibly profound respect for her grit.”

In the 1930s and ‘40s, photographer Dorothea Lange drove up and down California and across the American West, recording people and their living conditions with her camera and notepad. Eighty years later, poet Tess Taylor saw echoes of Lange’s photographs of temporary housing, migrant labor, and precarious livelihoods in contemporary California. Taylor retraced Lange’s steps, following itineraries from her notebooks. Taylor’s book-length poem Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange explores Lange’s legacy in California, combining her notes and photographs with Taylor’s lyric poetry and oral histories. The result is a poignant exploration of the social and environmental challenges facing California today.

In this episode, Tess Taylor and Getty photographs curator Mazie Harris discuss Dorothea Lange’s career, iconic images, and continuing impact. Taylor also reads excerpts from Last West.

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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/.

Tess Taylor, a Bay Area native, spent two years following the trail of Dorothea Lange through California, revisiting Lange’s notebooks, and the sites she photographed as a lens for understanding California now, which resulted in Taylor’s book LAST WEST Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange. In this event, patrons have the chance to visit the virtual views of the DOROTHEA LANGE: WORDS & PICTURES exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and talk about poetry, photography and Lange’s legacy with Taylor and MoMA curator of photography Sarah Meister.

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.