The familiar face and voice of Richard Taylor, Kentucky's new poet laureate
BY MARCIA HURLOW

"As poet laureate I want to promote literary art, including poetry, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I want to work with others, especially young people, to exercise their creative intelligence," Richard Taylor explained, as he drank coffee in the new Kentucky Coffeetree Café next to Poor Richard's Books, the bookstore he and his wife Liz own in downtown Frankfort. He greets architects and teachers, musicians and carpenters, historians and antique dealers who drop by, people he knows from being professor of English at Kentucky State University, having run the Governor's Scholars Program, speaking on historical and literary subjects throughout the state, or simply through renovating an old farmhouse outside Frankfort where he and Liz and their three children have lived for the past 20 years.

Taylor's work includes the recently published In the Country of Morning Calm; an historical novel; a book for new adult readers; and, with photographer Adam Jones, a book on the Kentucky River Pallisades. However, his qualifications to be Kentucky Poet Laureate rest on more than his writing. His experience with arts education and his passion for the state's history and landscape drive his vision for the position.

Getting writers, artists and musicians into the classrooms of Kentucky children is crucial according to Taylor. He was one of Kentucky's early Poets-in-the-Schools and for four years was on a panel of the National Endowment for the Arts relating to arts education in the schools. Taylor states, "I've seen the effects it's had on generations of school kids. The problem is that despite its successes, it's never had the kind of funding it should. Arts in education is basic, but when funding is cut, music teachers and art teachers are the first to go. The literary arts as taught by most English teachers, although well-intentioned, is just not the same experience that students get from practicing writers. Few of the students we work with will become practicing poets. What they all have is an opportunity to explore their consciousness and creativity, and secondarily, they become greater appreciators of art.

Taylor said that he wants to continue to go into the schools himself, because of the growth and excitement students showed as they developed their creativity. "The kids come up with some great poems and some great metaphors. And it wasn't always just the brightest kids who did well, but it was a chance for some of the kids who don't always get the limelight to feel empowered and share what they did."

Taylor's own childhood start as a writer came from his uncle. "My mother's brother lived with us when I was growing up in Louisville. My father was a lawyer but not a big talker. My uncle was a talker. He was an art director with a newspaper and pretty much self-educated. He loved language and would challenge me to learn new words in high school. I would copy down words and memorize them. I continued to keep lists of words through college. I was in love with language."

In high school his friends urged him to read poetry, especially the poems of Dylan Thomas, in the Louis Untermeyer anthology. He wrote poetry himself "terrible, terrible stuff," but didn't have much encouragement until he majored in English at the University of Kentucky. "At UK I found an outlet in the campus literary magazine, called the Stylus at that time. I was very proud to have some poems published there. Later being one of the editors also did a lot to encourage me."

After receiving a law degree from University of Louisville, Taylor went back to graduate school in English at UK. "I got out of the law in the public interest," he joked. "I got seriously interested in writing again in graduate school in the late 60s and 70s, when there were a lot of writers on campus. We set up a free university writing class. That's where I met Gray Zeitz [publisher of Larkspur Press.]"

Arts education should not stop with the schools, he explained. "Lorca said, 'In every big man there is a little man trying to get out, a poet. Every man over 40 carries a dead poet in his breast.' Too often that is the case. What poetry gives us is some engagement with life and art.

"As poet laureate I'd like to act as an advocate for the arts and for the role of the creative imagination as an integral part of each of our lives. I want to help find practical ways and venues for people to explore these possibilities. Even in this café we will have monthly readings."

His own process for writing suggests a need for concentration and openness to the possibilities of experience and language. "Poetry I like to read and aspire to write is poetry that utilizes the vocabulary of images and relationships and associations, exploring and exploiting the language. I think most people who sit down and write poems have no idea what they're going to write about, short of an image or an incident or a phrase. Yet, once they begin to put words on paper, the poem takes on a life of its own and becomes self-determined."

Taylor would like to help all Kentuckians develop their "creative intelligence." He explains, "Our minds work on three or four different planes. Usually our minds work on a congested level-bombarded by everything from a call to take home your child who fell at school to "What do I have to take to the departmental meeting today?" We get so distracted that it's very difficult to reserve a little reservoir of concentration to devote to any project. Most of us are simply too diffused. One of the functions of poetry is to use language to interpret the conditions in which we live."

Taylor uses poetry to interpret where he-walking outside on his farm and roaming through the countryside of Kentucky. "Most of my work grows out of observations of where I live. A. R. Ammons wrote, 'In my backyard is more wordage than I can read.' What I think he meant is that in any limited locus, the more one becomes familiar with that locus, the richer and more resonating that locus becomes. It can literally become an ever-renewing, endlessly possible environment for writing.

"If you imagine a year in that place as a series of time-lapsed photographs, you can see from season to season changes, subtle and not so subtle. There are ways the changes relate to one another. The more familiar you are with the landscape, the more resonances there are. I enjoy reading nature poetry and would like to write poetry that embodies those phenomena and suggests the inexplicable mysteries of life in which we are all participants and witnesses. All good writing in some way is witnessing, as in its root, 'the wit is knowing,'-a state of knowing and perceiving things not necessarily as they are but as your sensibility tells you they are."

Taylor's appreciation of the landscape is heightened by his knowledge of its history. "I've been very interested all my life in the history of the state. If I were to go back to school, I would take more classes in history. Most of what I read now is history, especially local history.

"One measure of how educated people are is their ability to name everything they see, to name plants, trees, the varieties of grass-the names that things should go by and how they function in the greater scheme of things. The same is true in the dimension of history. A place has a history through the courthouse, but also through the memories of the people who have been associated with it. I still encounter people who lived where I live or worked on the farm, who worked on the eleven or so miles of fences on it, who knew the previous owners."

The history and landscape of Kentucky make it an especially fertile place for writers. Taylor explained, "Part of the function of people who write about places is to recreate a sense of what the past was and that we are not the first to be here, or the last, unless we don't clean up our acts, to abide here. Kentucky still has a lot of its visual history intact, unlike a lot of places that have had more development. Any place you go in the Bluegrass, you can bore down to sedimentary rock, which is evidence of the ancient sea that covered most of eastern North America. It gives you a sense of your smallness in the face of the geological time under us. The state was a crossroads for westward movement, a frontier. You see a lot of frontier history all over the state. I've been looking for ways to incorporate that into my writing. We are blessed to live in such a rich state." n

Richard Taylor will read from his recently published book of poetry, "In the Country of Morning Calm," in room 304, Morrison Hall, Asbury College, in Wilmore, on Friday, January 22  at 3 p.m.  Admission is free and open to the public.

In the Country of Morning Calm.
by Richard Taylor

Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur Press, 1998. Hardback, $25.

The poems in a book have a lot to live up to if its type was hand-set, then its dampened biblio paper printed on a hand-fed C&P press. Their craftsmanship must be impeccable, as careful and clear as the line-drawing of a live oak on the cover. And, they must be honest and full of heart to earn the labor of designing the pages. Richard Taylor's latest collection of poems, In the Country of Morning Calm, is worthy of its artistic treatment from Larkspur Press.

The majority of the poems are set in the Bluegrass. In the opening poem, we see Taylor's farm in winter: "Humped with snow, the dwarf magnolia/dissolves miraculously into the ridgeline." When the stone speaks in his poem "Upward Mobility," it is unmistakably in a Kentucky field:

"Admitting that much is beyond/my grasp, still I know God's face/at the head of the hollow/is a craggy wonder."

Although the poems are plump with diurnal objects like Toyotas, Nintendos, and Juicy Fruit gum, the lines never sacrifice their music, as in this stanza from "Winter Freeze," in which we watch the poet rescue his frozen farm house:

Chinks in the stonework

we plug with plastic bags.

We dangle a sunlamp

over the vulnerable pump,

snake a dryer hose

into the crawlspace

for a kiss of the tropics.

The action is so clear and engaging, we don't notice at first the rhyme and alliteration that make the common language so lovely.

Of all the fine qualities of these poems, perhaps most striking is their hard-won spiritual optimism. They are alert to the challenges of living. Taylor finds their parallels even in his work around his farm, as in the poem "Taking Inventory," in which he checks the fields and finds the "brittle crown" of a buckeye has fallen into an elm. After he prunes the elm, he observes:

Limber as wands,

its branchtips spray back,

reassemble, triggered by some inner spring, some yen for light, that reassembles us.