Tess Taylor

Poetry helps us unearth and delight in our bright, fierce human experience; to sound our truths, our life pulse, which cannot be stamped out. 

Noticing joy can be a guiding force, helping us name what matters in our lives. Joy, Mary Oliver suggests, helps us discern what we love, and, just maybe, helps us figure out how we want to live.

A year into the pandemic, when everything was grim, Hannah, a friend who I knew from my time working at a farm in the Berkshires, called to ask if I would like to build an anthology of contemporary gardening poems. “People are taking such solace in gardening now,” she told me.

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As we come to Labor Day, many of us have a small break — possibly to get one last trip to the beach, to rush to organize the next school year — and perhaps, to think about what work is, what rest is, how they interact, what we wish them to be in our lives.

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‘Beowulf’ and Beyond: A Poet Who Embraced Translation

As seen in a new collection, “The Translations of Seamus Heaney,” the Nobel laureate was a prolific and skilled interpreter of other poets’ work.

This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining.

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN — What do you do when the air fills with smoke from wildfires?

Well, if you’re a New Yorker or East Coast person and this is new to you, just know that you’re joining a reality that people across the West have been facing for several years now, in increasing chapters. In my life, we’ve experienced worsening wildfires in California and fled smoke several times, as well as just making do with it sometimes hanging over our lives for weeks.

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This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining. 

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN — I know they say that April is the cruelest month. But honestly, May, just before the school year ends, seems to be pretty wild, as well. How can everything on earth be due now?

Recently, just when I thought I was far too busy to take on another thing under the sun, I remembered that I had volunteered for a whole day at my son’s school to teach some poems to the sixth grade class and then to take a bunch of third graders to do weeding and garden bed-clearing at a community orchard.

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By Tess Taylor

Art as civic repair

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.” Read more…

(CNN) Somewhere in the middle of "Homeland Elegies," the sprawling, ambitious novel published earlier this year by playwright Ayad Akhtar, the main character of the novel, who is alsoa playwright called Ayad Akhtar, is speaking to his mentor, a college professor named Mary Moroni, who suggests that he write down his dreams. "The more you can dwell along the weave, feel the lattice work, the closer you'll be to the vital, vivid stuff," she advises him. Read more…

(CNN) On Saturday morning, as the outcome of the election grew more likely, but in the last moments before the it was called, the TV anchors had fallen into a dull sports-casterish palaver. Low music played, black-and-white photos flipped on rotation. We heard again about Joe Biden's stutter, his childhood in Scranton, his love for his father. It was nice enough, but I admit: I was on edge.

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(CNN)This is how you live during a fire season during the sixth month of a pandemic: One day at a time. Our bags had been packed for a while now, our canned goods and go-boxes at the ready. We'd already been through a couple of red flag warnings this year, and we expect more. And: Everyone around us is living this way. Everyone is weary, and everyone does their best to have a stiff upper lip.

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(CNN)Wednesday, it was as if the sun never rose. Dawn was murky, and by 8 a.m., it seemed to get darker. A moldering reddish-bronze haze rose around us but also made no light. Inside the house, we re-lit our lamps against the gloaming. The windows swam black, and outside, all morning, above the trees, the sky glowed grisly red. Where we had left the windows open to the night breezes, our papers, clothes, combs and brushes were coated in a fine layer of ash. The air hung, gritty and oddly cold. It was hard not to feel a deep foreboding.

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(CNN) We did not get the chickens because the pandemic was coming. We did not get them to survive what has often felt like the end of the world and has certainly been the end of the world as we knew it.

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Opinion by Tess Taylor

Updated 11:47 AM ET, Tue March 17, 2020

(CNN)2019 and 2020 had already been difficult years, crisis and adrenaline wise, in our household. During the summer, when I was a visiting poet at a residency out of state, an angry, confused woman wandered into my class and said: "I have three guns and I want to use 'em." We all froze. It wasn't totally clear if she had the guns, and in this world, at this moment, it didn't have to be. We each know that, when we teach in America, we are already in danger.

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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

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.

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Tess reviews Tom Sleigh's The Land Between Two Rivers, and House of Fact, House of Ruin

Read the full review here

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 ...

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(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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