Keith Taylor’s poems “The Last Roost” and “Running Down from the Hills” appear in the November 2009 issue of The Collagist. His most recent book is If the World Becomes So Bright, out this year from Wayne State University Press.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “The Last Roost”? How about “Running Down from the Hills”? What was on your mind while you were writing these poems?

I don’t think I am the first writer to be struck by the combination of a project and a form, and how that combination can really help us get things written. For several years I have imagined a chapbook of poems moving around some things I’ve learned about the natural world. I had a title for this collection—Marginalia for a Natural History. I even knew I was going to dedicate it to the fabulous nature writer from northern Michigan, Jerry Dennis. I just didn’t have the poems yet.

While writing a piece for my last book, I wanted to have a little moment of verse inside a prose passage. To organize that verse, I simply counted syllables—a trick I will often use to help me form lines. I counted nine syllables a line, just to make sure I didn’t fall into any easy iambic rhythms. The poem ended up 8 lines long.  Then a couple of years later, a scientist I work with during the summers at the University of Michigan Biological Station (where I teach a course on Environmental Writing and Great Lakes Literature), told me about research he was doing about the movement northward of the white-footed mouse–probably a sign of climate change, although he won’t make that leap in print. It seemed an appropriate bit of information for these poems I had imagined. When I wrote it, it was 8 lines long and had 9 syllables a line. A couple of days later, I learned the name of a beautiful flying insect from another scientist there—ebony jewel-winged damsel fly. Count the syllables. Nine. I mean, when the universe starts giving you these things, you really shouldn’t refuse them.

The two poems in your issue came from a flurry of these little things that was generated by this form. The information in “The Last Roost” came from material I had found in old magazines—popular and ornithological—about the last major roost of the passenger pigeon, where millions of birds nested together in a forest. This happened outside Petoskey, Michigan, in the late 1870s. It’s not hidden information. There’s even an historical marker up there about it. From the time of that roost until the bird’s final extinction in 1919, when a lone female died in the Cincinnati zoo, was a very short period of time. Lots of people were alive after the bird was extinct, people who as kids had seen the birds fly in clouds that blocked the sun. A few wrote records of them. One brilliant native woman named Etta Wilson (I know of her only from an article she wrote in the prestigious ornithological journal, The Auk, in 1933) described the birds drowning themselves in Lake Michigan after the last slaughter. That was a deeply moving image to me, and needed a poem. It seemed to fit this tight little form—although I still think it might deserve something bigger. I’ve even toyed with writing a whole book about the passenger pigeon.

“Running Down from the Hills” is mostly a very literal record of a hike I did three years ago, where I got myself into a situation that might have been a bit dangerous (mostly from hypothermia, rather than mountain lions).  I’m pretty comfortable in wild areas and take necessary precautions. Still, as I get older and further out of shape I find I still imagine myself able to do things I did with comfort 30 years ago. That’s kind of stupid. But to be alone on a dry hill with night coming on, only forty miles from Los Angeles, and to hear the call of a mountain lion . . . well, it needs something, don’t you think? Sure, these moments are frightening, but I persist in feeling there is some vague honor in them too.

2. The voice of “Running Down From The Hills” comes from a place which seems to be caught between the physical world and a figurative one. The lines “I limped too close to night and too far/ into that dry south CA valley” give us both a temporal and physical reference to the orientation of the character in this poem. These details, as well as the aspect of travel, give this character a transient feel. When writing poetry, how does one strike that balance between real and imagined, concrete and literal?

So it was a real moment. This did happen. But I think many of us keep looking for those moments in the physical world that carry weight in our imaginative lives. There is the famous dictum from Ezra Pound—THE NATURAL OBJECT IS ALWAYS THE ADEQUATE SYMBOL.  That idea shaped things for lots of different writers. Think of the young Hemingway writing those Nick Adams stories after he came home from beating Pound at tennis on the public courts in Paris. Or someone as different from Hemingway as you can imagine: apparently the late Jane Kenyon kept that phrase from Pound taped above the desk where she wrote all those wonderful poems in the years before her death in 1995. As Hemingway might have written—If we truly see the world and write about it as well as we can, then it will live. It is my hope that I’ve approached that in a few of these little poems, but only time will tell.

3. The incident you refer to in “The Last Roost” is embedded in Michigan history. What kind of connection do you have with the event, and what motivated you to write a poem about it?

I’ve probably answered this at greater length than I should have above. But it seems important that even those of us who spend most of our time writing should think a bit about the effect our comfortable lives are having on the natural world. We live in an age of extinction, and we are the cause of it. Of course those of us who don’t want to write polemics (or not only polemics) have to wait until we find the moment when these images or narratives enter our imaginative life. That can take some time.

Also, for those of us who live in Michigan, it is very interesting to understand the historical position that this region holds in the conflict between history, industrialism and the environment. We are, in some ways,  the poster child of this conflict, and if we understand things here, that understanding might be important. Might be of help. I guess that sounds like an act of faith. Maybe it is.

4. Your most recent book, If the World Becomes So Bright, came out this year from Wayne State University Press’s “Made in Michigan” series, more than twenty years after your first book, Learning to Dance. A lot of writers struggle with putting together their first collection, because they’ve never been asked to assemble their work in any way. How is the second book different? The fifth? The tenth? What have you learned about how you put together a manuscript that you wished you knew for the first one?

That first little book was done by a tiny press here in Ann Arbor that published three or four books and then stopped publishing. Yet it lingers. People tell me often they’ve run across it somewhere or other—and half of it is pretty embarrassing now. Folks should understand that even small press publication of something as marginal as poetry has a way of lingering out there in the world. But perhaps it is a good thing to make our mistakes in public. That way it is harder to forget what we’ve learned from them.

But it is also important to remember that even though these things remain once they’ve been published, we won’t be judged or understood only by them. Unless we drop over dead or do a Salinger-esque disappearing act after a publication, there will be something else, something different.

I did try to make that little book a unified whole,  and I still think that is important. I’ve tried to do that with each of my book. A short story writer told me a couple of weeks ago, that no one reads collections of short stories as if they were one unified book. Well, I do, damn it! And my favorite collections of stories read that way—In Our Time, Winesburg, Ohio, Dubliners. And some recent books, like Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed with Magellan or Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, get billed as novels but are really unified collections of short stories. I love books like that!

But things do change over time. That book from Wayne State was my 11^th book, if I get to count chapbooks and co-edited or co-translated book. It has become clear to me now that I am one of those writers who is figuring things out over the long haul. Sure, I wish I’d written one perfect masterpiece, even a little one, but I think it’s more likely that I see all of this now as a process that might never finish, never come to a recognizable conclusion. I sure hope I get another 25 or 30 years to keep at it, though. I’m also one of those writers who simply enjoys it. A lot.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I have recently put together around 30 of the little poems for Marginalia for a Natural History, and just sent that manuscript out. Fingers crossed. I’m also working on several prose projects—a bigger book about my dirt poor ancestors who pioneered in Alberta about 100 years ago; a collection of short prose pieces that remember adolescence in 1968, and those moments when the personal was noticeably touched by history; a novella very loosely based on my own childhood in western Canada where region and a very conservative religion shaped things. One very obscure little magazine recently asked for submissions that were only 100 words long—no more, no less. You already know I like to count, so this intrigued me, and I really like the one I wrote to submit to them. I’ve started several more, but so far they all suck. Think of it—little prose pieces 100 words long, where you try to get a narrative or an image or even a moment of startling language. I’m thinking that may be the next chapbook. But I have to figure it out first, learn its parameters. And I am just finishing up co-editing a collection of Michigan ghost stories with Laura Kasischke. That book will be published in 2010 or 2011 by Wayne State. It’s been fun to do.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I wrote two big review/essays earlier this year on fabulous books. The current Boston Review has a big piece I wrote on the two volume translation of all of Cavafy that Daniel Mendelsohn published this year. This was an enormous undertaking that brings Cavafy back into the conversation in this country. You can get lost in those books—their mix of history and the deeply erotic—for a couple of lifetimes. In the Winter issue of Michigan Quarterly I have another big essay on John Felstiner’s book of eco-criticism, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. No, it probably can’t, but the book is a great reminder of how “so much depends” upon our recognition of tiny, usually overlooked images. And you get to spend time with 45 wonderful old poems. I’m just blown away by the two books of poems Copper Canyon just published by the Dickman twins, Michael and Matthew. The books are so different, such different sensibilities, yet the brothers clearly have a close and supportive relationship. They make a good story, but the books are better than that story. I just read the posthumous Nabakov, The Original of Laura, which is no where near to being done, and I expect the man is doing back flips in his grave about his son’s decision to publish, but for those of us who love him, it is really cool to see something so early in the process of his writing.

New stuff coming—my good friend Tom Lynch, known for his poems and essays, has a book of short stories coming out from Norton in January. That’s going to be fun, although from what I’ve seen the stories are kind of dark.  Jim Hynes’s new novel will be out in January. Have you ever read him? If not, you must. All of his four previous books are in print, and they are smart, funny, often wicked, wonderfully crafted novels. Another friend, Elizabeth Kostova, is following up the enormous success of her first book with something new. It’s going to be fun to read, and to see how the world reacts to this book. Will it suffer the curse of the second novel? I find that I’ve gotten interested in the current Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan, who I never thought I liked. I was wrong. And she has a whole career of books I have to catch up on. Keith Waldrop just won the National Book Award for a new collection of poems I haven’t read yet but will soon. I was happy to see that he got that recognition after a long life in the art. And, then, of course, there will be dozen books by new poets and short story writers I don’t even know about yet. They will enliven the new year.

[Interview by Marie Scutt]