Tess Taylor
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TESS TAYLOR’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book, Work & Days, was called “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephen Burt and was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor received a Fulbright US Scholar Award and is currently in residence at Queen’s University Belfast.
Published 05/03/17 |
Howl: What is your writing process like?
Taylor: I write in all different kinds of ways— definitely, I begin by being the kind of person for whom it is vitally important to carry a notebook. When I don’t have one handy I am nervous. I put all kinds of things in my notebook. Right now I have notes about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen which I taught yesterday and a memory of something that happened in Spain a few years ago which I mean to work into a poem. These notebooks are critical to me, even though they are often full of indecipherable fragments. For me they are a first map of what is rattling around in my head. Sometimes it’s pure discharge, or silly nonsense, but sometimes as I write my mind will snag on something, an image or set of sounds, and I write into it. Then, later, I get disciplined about going back and finding those snagged things and trying to start arranging them into a file or pattern. This is sometimes a loose process or sometimes tighter. Sometimes I know what will go in or what’s next and sometimes I don’t. It all happens in spurts, and sometimes I get caught up in work or my kids get sick or we just get busy and the writing part goes to the side until I can get back to it. What I do think is important is to cultivate a watchfulness and an alertness- both of what is happening in the world and what is happening in the mind. And it’s also really important to read a lot. Reading is what gives you a sense of what you do and don’t like, whats possible to do in language, what you might want to imitate or steal. The best writing is enabling and it nourishes your own thinking. It helps you find a way to whatever you might want to say.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Taylor: I edit in spurts— sometimes it’s just like weeding a garden. I really like a clean line and I also value and weigh the sound of things. I was trained as a choral singer and was going to join a conservatory to study to be an opera singer- and I feel that I drive towards a certain sense of music I feel in the language. Not sing-songy, but certainly clear. I also want things to be strange and I want them generally to leave us all unsettled— there should be a sense of mystery. Poems don’t tie things down- they should bring us closer to the sense of being on the cusp of our own questions. Ideally there should be a twist, a deftness, a good bafflement.
Howl: From where do you get your inspiration and do you have any strategies or quirks to get the muses speaking to you?
Taylor: I would say that when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer, you have to begin to ask “what can I say that noone else can say”- that’s part of it. But then you also have to think: how can what I have to say put me in conversation with art and writing and music— not only of my time but of before. It’s not about being “original” in the sense of changing everything that was, but finding a new way to lean into the great conversation. Be interested in things. Read a lot, everything— poetry, books on evolutionary theory, books about music. Be alive to ideas and strangeness. Talk about art with your friends. Care about art. Read about the lives of artists. Believe that art matters. I think that these are foundational gestures and when you do them earnestly the world opens up to you.
Howl: When do you know a poem you’re writing is finished?
Taylor: There’s a sense of it having settled into itself. It reads well, it sounds good, it is strange enough, it doesn’t feel like it has too many extraneous parts.
Howl: What advice would you give to budding writers?
Taylor: Just keep going. Write a poem, write another one; read books you like and make notes on them; find friends who like poetry; memorize poems. Don’t just read what’s current. Read outside your country and outside this century. Read Keats, and Czelaw Milosz, and Elizabeth Bishop and Nadine Gordimer and John Donne. Read James Baldwin. Read, read, read, read, read. Then just get up a head of steam and try your hand at something. Rinse and repeat. That’s all it is, the whole life of “being a writer.” Might as well just start now.
Howl: Whose work are you currently reading that you’re excited about and would recommend and why?
Taylor: I love Tyehimba Jess’s OLIO, which is wildly formally inventive and a wonderful poetic history of African American music. I loved Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital— he’s so fast and light on his feet with sound. Robert Hass’s new book on form in poetry is good. It seems I’m only talking about poetry but I guess that is what I am reading and writing a lot of these days. I like pretty much anything by Eula Biss. I thought Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth was pretty nice as a good smart fast novel. I’ve got a project of rereading the collected Keats. Some of Keats’s early poems feel pretty terrible to me but I like watching the moment when they go from being sort of 19th century overblown to pure genius. I almost like reading it because it’s sometimes bad. I mean, it’s great to remember that even Shakespeare had a few bad days, right?
Taylor: I write in all different kinds of ways— definitely, I begin by being the kind of person for whom it is vitally important to carry a notebook. When I don’t have one handy I am nervous. I put all kinds of things in my notebook. Right now I have notes about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen which I taught yesterday and a memory of something that happened in Spain a few years ago which I mean to work into a poem. These notebooks are critical to me, even though they are often full of indecipherable fragments. For me they are a first map of what is rattling around in my head. Sometimes it’s pure discharge, or silly nonsense, but sometimes as I write my mind will snag on something, an image or set of sounds, and I write into it. Then, later, I get disciplined about going back and finding those snagged things and trying to start arranging them into a file or pattern. This is sometimes a loose process or sometimes tighter. Sometimes I know what will go in or what’s next and sometimes I don’t. It all happens in spurts, and sometimes I get caught up in work or my kids get sick or we just get busy and the writing part goes to the side until I can get back to it. What I do think is important is to cultivate a watchfulness and an alertness- both of what is happening in the world and what is happening in the mind. And it’s also really important to read a lot. Reading is what gives you a sense of what you do and don’t like, whats possible to do in language, what you might want to imitate or steal. The best writing is enabling and it nourishes your own thinking. It helps you find a way to whatever you might want to say.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Taylor: I edit in spurts— sometimes it’s just like weeding a garden. I really like a clean line and I also value and weigh the sound of things. I was trained as a choral singer and was going to join a conservatory to study to be an opera singer- and I feel that I drive towards a certain sense of music I feel in the language. Not sing-songy, but certainly clear. I also want things to be strange and I want them generally to leave us all unsettled— there should be a sense of mystery. Poems don’t tie things down- they should bring us closer to the sense of being on the cusp of our own questions. Ideally there should be a twist, a deftness, a good bafflement.
Howl: From where do you get your inspiration and do you have any strategies or quirks to get the muses speaking to you?
Taylor: I would say that when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer, you have to begin to ask “what can I say that noone else can say”- that’s part of it. But then you also have to think: how can what I have to say put me in conversation with art and writing and music— not only of my time but of before. It’s not about being “original” in the sense of changing everything that was, but finding a new way to lean into the great conversation. Be interested in things. Read a lot, everything— poetry, books on evolutionary theory, books about music. Be alive to ideas and strangeness. Talk about art with your friends. Care about art. Read about the lives of artists. Believe that art matters. I think that these are foundational gestures and when you do them earnestly the world opens up to you.
Howl: When do you know a poem you’re writing is finished?
Taylor: There’s a sense of it having settled into itself. It reads well, it sounds good, it is strange enough, it doesn’t feel like it has too many extraneous parts.
Howl: What advice would you give to budding writers?
Taylor: Just keep going. Write a poem, write another one; read books you like and make notes on them; find friends who like poetry; memorize poems. Don’t just read what’s current. Read outside your country and outside this century. Read Keats, and Czelaw Milosz, and Elizabeth Bishop and Nadine Gordimer and John Donne. Read James Baldwin. Read, read, read, read, read. Then just get up a head of steam and try your hand at something. Rinse and repeat. That’s all it is, the whole life of “being a writer.” Might as well just start now.
Howl: Whose work are you currently reading that you’re excited about and would recommend and why?
Taylor: I love Tyehimba Jess’s OLIO, which is wildly formally inventive and a wonderful poetic history of African American music. I loved Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital— he’s so fast and light on his feet with sound. Robert Hass’s new book on form in poetry is good. It seems I’m only talking about poetry but I guess that is what I am reading and writing a lot of these days. I like pretty much anything by Eula Biss. I thought Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth was pretty nice as a good smart fast novel. I’ve got a project of rereading the collected Keats. Some of Keats’s early poems feel pretty terrible to me but I like watching the moment when they go from being sort of 19th century overblown to pure genius. I almost like reading it because it’s sometimes bad. I mean, it’s great to remember that even Shakespeare had a few bad days, right?