by Lauren K. Alleyne
In describing the poetry of Mervyn Taylor, Nobel Laureate and fellow Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, pointed to the “quiet quality” and the subtlety of his voice.” Any reader of Taylor’s work would have to agree. The poems are quietly wise, quietly funny, quietly devastating. His is a poetry that invites the reader to lean in and listen to the stories it has to tell; and like the best stories, its meaning is both in the spoken and the silences. Consider this excerpt from “Corona City,” in News of the Living: Corona Poems:
Your buildings stand tall and empty,
wind blowing through windows,
down corridors into deserted rooms.
In your parks where couples used to
sprawl, waiting for musicians to play,
ducks and geese fill the rotundas, not
a jogger or black boys who once stood
accused, rounding any of the bends.
Here, Taylor describes and embodies the ghostly presence of the city, evoking the absence of “normal” life and mourning its quiet aftermath. However, attention to the poem also reveals a critique of “before” as an imperfect, differently unsafe space in which “black boys” are “accused,” thus challenging the nostalgia the poem itself evokes.
Images are Taylor’s trademark, creating a poetry of gesture and portraiture both. His work diligently enacts its poetic, word-building labor, bringing readers with him to verandahs and beaches, kitchens and bedrooms, Brooklyn and Trinidad. Taylor’s keenly-crafted lines make us admire or mourn people we have met for the first time in his poems. In Taylor’s work, we experience the poem as an exercise in openness and empathy. The poems also stage both the extraordinary flashes that punctuate ordinary life, as well as the heroic nature of our ordinary existences. Whether showing the determined care of a 71-year-old cousin hoisting his 91-year-old mother on his back to bathe her (“Both Blind”); or the transformative desperation of a woman frustrated with the lockdown who pounds on her window screaming “virus be gone!” (“Signs of the Pandemic”); or the poet’s granddaughter about to win her big race, “her braid behind her like a bird in the current of air” (A Blur), Taylor bridges the mythic and the quotidian through his quietly attentive, but keenly calibrated language.
Mervyn Taylor visited Furious Flower, and spoke with Executive Director, Lauren K. Alleyne at James Madison’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Welcome to Harrisonburg, James Madison University, and Furious Flower! Tell me a little bit about your history, yourself, and how you wound up being in Brooklyn, and that journey from Trinidad to Brooklyn, New York.
Well, it started out with a love of just writing from my school days, always scribbling some little story or something. And my big dream was for the short story or the novel. But then, just a quick jump from working at the Treasury in Trinidad to coming away to Howard University. I landed at Howard just when the Black Power movement was in full bloom, Stokely [Carmichael] had just left, so the campus was just right for poetry. And the language of the Black Power movement was poetry. I didn’t throw away my love for the novel or the short story, but I started fooling around with some really awful poetry.
I had really good influences. I had classes with Sterling Brown, the old folktale master, and just watching him and his life as a poet unfold during the time of that revolution. A lot of the young students involved in the Black Power movement didn’t understand that Sterling was one of the forerunners in terms of that whole piece of action. He was caught between these young students rebelling, who didn’t even want to come to class, and the sort of middle class conservative people who ran the school. But Sterling Brown really gave me something–he made you understand that poetry could be easy. I don’t mean easy in the sense of throw away, but I mean easy in the sense of you could come to it naturally. I remember the first line he gave: “You can’t hardly tell how far a frog can jump when you see him sitting on his big broad rump.” That stayed in my head for some reason. And Sterling had a habit of taking students to his house, we’d spend the whole night talking and he’d wake his wife, Daisy, at four in the morning and say, “Could you get some tea for the boys?” I didn’t know professors could be like that. Maybe it was the poet in him.
And also, I had a class with a guy named John Lavelle, who taught a class in Walt Whitman. I don’t know if it was the class in Whitman itself, or an experience that I had during that period. His wife passed away during the course and I remember the story being told of him going home and trying to open his door and she had collapsed just inside. What amazed me was that the very next day, he came to class. And I couldn’t believe that a man could have an experience like that, and come to class the next day to teach poetry. And I said, it must be something about poetry that can make you do that. So I think that’s where I first started pushing this thing with the poems.
I got to New York after that, thinking that I would get some kind of writing job somewhere. And I asked someone, “I really want to get into a writing workshop or something.” And the person said, “Why don’t you call Nikki?” Nikki Giovanni. I said “Just call Nikki Giovanni? How do you do that?” And the person said, “No, here, I’ll give you the contact, just call her.” I said, “I don’t think she–” “Just call.” And I called, and she said, “Well, you know, John Killens has a workshop at Columbia every Tuesday night. Not just students enroll, but anybody can come.” And so I started going to John Killens’ workshop, and that’s where I met a lot of people, for example, Wesley Brown, who now writes plays and novels. And we ended up from there branching off and going to–Sonia Sanchez had her workshop at County Library. On any given Tuesday night, about 75 people in a workshop. Many marriages came out of that workshop.
Seriously! A lot of people got married! But Wesley and I went there until after a while we said, “This is too big to handle, we need something smaller.” And out of that relationship grew a group that I became part of called Bud Jones poets, which included a fabulous poet Fatisha who could recite all her long three-page poems by heart. And who insisted “no applause, please, until the end.” She brought in a guy named Dennis Reed, who was only 18 at the time, but who was writing these incredible poems, about maybe five or six of us.
And what happened is that Wesley Brown was a really committed young man. And so when they were drafting people to go to Vietnam, he said, no, he was not going and when they asked him to step out, he said the only army he would join would be an army for Black people. And that led to him being sentenced to four years at Lewisburg Penitentiary. It made us closer. We at Bud Jones spent that whole four years doing fundraising, doing readings, just to get some money to buy records for him–in those days you had records–and books. We would go visit him up in Lewisburg. Because [Wesley Brown] was not part of the group anymore–Doc Long, Doughtry Long, became one of our members during that period. And it really put us close together.
So this is how it went, and this is how I came along through poetry. I got a job working at a small publishing house, translating Russian math and science journals of all things, proofreading. But because of my relationship with John Killens’ workshop, there’s a guy named George Davis, a novelist, and George called me one day and he said, “You wanna teach?” And I said, “I’ve never taught before.” He said, “I’ve heard you in the workshop, you can teach! Come on.” And I went for an interview and the professor–I forget his name, but he said, “Come on, when can you start?” And I taught at Bronx Community College for seven years. And then something said, I need to go back to school. I need to get this Masters. I had a collection–not a lot, but I had some poems, so I’m thinking City College. The next thing you know, I got something in the mail, it was an application form for Colombia. To this day, I have no idea who sent it. I have a suspicion, but I have no idea. And I got this application and I said, “Well, maybe I’ll fill it out.” Of course, I can’t afford Colombia, but I filled it out anyway. And one summer night, I’ll never forget that, I was talking to some friends and the phone rings and it was somebody calling from Colombia and they said, “We’re just looking at your poems and we love them. Come on, you want to come or not?” I said, “Miss, I can’t afford it.” She said “We’re not asking if you can afford it, we are saying we have a space for you. We’ll work out the details later.” I said “Well, okay, sure!” You know, with no idea how I was gonna do this. So anyway, it worked out, they ended up giving me a part scholarship and I borrowed the rest of the money, which I paid off for 20 years. So that was my exposure to poetry on a graduate level. And bless them, because of Columbia, I got to study with people like Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky. [Amiri] Baraka came on, I remember. Jane Alexander. Good people. And Lucie Brock-Broido, we were classmates at the time. It was quite a hang!
It sounds like the community was so much a part of the process of being a writer for you. The illusion of writers, often, is this solitary creature pumping out words, but it sounds like you became a poet through working with others…
But of course, when you left them and went home, then that was the solitary time. Trying to get those words down on paper. But being part of the group means that you always have a sounding board. You have people who would say, “Well, that’s not really happening.” And to this day, I still kind of work like that, I have formed a kind of a relation with people up at Slapering Hol Press, Susana Case and these people. We put our work in front of each other all the time and say, “What do you think?” Even at this late stage in the game, we’re still bouncing stuff off of each other.
There’s always the “New York versus MFA” or “MFA versus no MFA,” debate, so I’m curious about the community and that informal but committed feedback, versus the Columbia, Ivy League formal feedback? What was the experience of both of those? How did they differ?
I think they kind of worked side by side. I met people at Columbia who were committed to the real discipline of it. On the outside of that, you had people for whom poetry was a kind of vehicle for the revolution. There was the poem that came out of just recital, just out of intuitive power. And then there was, “How are we going to shape this? Do we understand what makes this work? What is it that creates the sound that we’re looking for?” It can happen, but it’s like music. I was talking to Dennis yesterday, and he said for the longest while he played the saxophone. He said it was beautiful, just intuitive. He said that once he got to a certain level, he understood that you have to go back and learn something about what makes these chords work. What’s the structure? You have to understand something about structure.
I’m curious about just your process in general, how does moving to a poem emerge? A tickle, a jolt, a compulsion?
Sometimes a line will just come, where it’s just a simple line. I wrote a poem about leaving home again. The thing about going back home to Trinidad, another leaving, another leaving… and it begins, “The dogs are strangely silent tonight.” And it almost sounds cliché, it almost sounds like something you heard before. But I take a chance on it and I say well, “Let’s see where it will go and let it lead from there.” And I got away with it. Sometimes it’s a trick, right? Sometimes it’s just a word–a word can come–or an image, something you happen to see. For example, in my latest book, The Last Train, there is a poem called “Pack of Gum.” And I just noticed, it’s something you see and something that takes you back. I noticed that the policemen very often are chewing, and it took me back to a childhood memory with soldiers always giving out sticks of gum to the kids to show that they were well intentioned. But it also struck me as a kind of a way of always seeming calm. That even though you’re involved in bloodshed and all of that, you’re chewing gum means that everything is okay. I sort of connected all of that from childhood experience, watching war movies, with the idea of these policemen and what they were involved in and that chewing gum, it just seemed like an insult to the person that was being harmed or hurt, it didn’t seem right. So yeah, sometimes that’s how a poem comes.
Sometimes it comes with a dream and sometimes it comes from wishing. I remember one time I hadn’t written in a while and I kept trying and nothing was happening, one of those things. I remember basically saying — begging, saying a prayer. I said, “Give me a poem. Please, give me a poem.” And I thought about Rilke, because Rilke had that long drought, I think must have been about 10 or 12 years, and then he wrote the Duino Elegies, which begins with “Who among the archangels would hear if I cried out?” Not that I’m Rilke, but I remember praying like that one night, begging and waking up at four in the morning with a poem. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened often enough to make me kind of believe that it can work that way. I think the poem that I was wishing about was a poem called “The Wall” and something about people jogging. It just struck me that it was a strange habit of people that are always running, running, running. Not going anywhere! Just kind of running. Also, the experience of reading feeds into what you do. I remember it took me back to Steven Vincent Benét. He has a poem, and I have it on an LP, called “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone.” And he says, “This is for you, who are to come.” He is writing a poem for people to read in the future. And he’s describing the days we live in now, and what happened to us. So he calls it “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone.” Somebody in the ruin of this world, of our world, will find this poem, and it will tell them what happened during this time. And he talks about “the woman with the hair,”and how “they’re gone like tokens put into the… just gone.” This beautiful, beautiful poem. And I said maybe I’ll write a poem about this habit of running for people in the future to read and say, “Once we ran every day,” really writing it for a reader in the future.
Sometimes it’s complicated. My other big wish poem was, again, wanting a poem to come and saying, “Just give me one, give me one.” And I remember waking up at four o’clock–four o’clock seems to be the hour–waking up at four and saying, “Where should one start writing? If you don’t have a poem, why don’t you write from what you can see where you are?” I imagined myself at my window. I live on an intersection. A big intersection at Prospect Park and Parkside. So my windows face–one face here, one face there, it’s a three way thing. And I imagined myself, I thought, “What do you see from this window?” And it’s in one of those books you have there, No Back Door. It’s called “The Center of the World.” And it talks about from here, I can see all the people going down Flatbush Avenue into stores, the immigrants wearing too much clothes. And under the awning of The Green Grocer, the policeman from Long Island. And I talk about the nail shop where Koreans can give you the flag of any country you want. And that poem stretched out… what’s curious about that poem is I wrote it all on Post-its because I didn’t trust myself getting up from the bed to go over to the computer. So I pulled the drawer with some Post-its and I wrote that, scribbled that whole thing, almost in the dark really, on Post-its. So when I was done in the morning, I said, “Okay, let’s type that stuff up.”
I love the idea of writing where you’re from, and I feel like place has such a powerful presence in your work–Brooklyn, Flatbush, Bergen, Trinidad, the beach. Talk to me a little bit about that relationship to place.
Someone said once, I think it was Wesley, said, “Wherever you are, you’re on something–you’re not floating.” And sometimes I think if you think too much or overthink, you just have these ideas–it just seems like you’re spinning them out in the air. But you’ve got to be somewhere. You’re always somewhere. And even if you’re not there physically, at the moment, you remember being there, you remember being in that place. I think, too, about what Jean Toomer said in Cane, “When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, almost anything can come to you.” And he’s talking here but the red clay of Georgia, which is where he was from. He says, “When you’re on that ground, anything can come to you.” It’s a little bit sentimental, but if you believe it enough, it will work.
When I was in Trinidad during the pandemic for a year and a half, and when people say, “You were locked down!” I didn’t consider myself locked down. I was just there. And it was good because I had been meaning to spend more time at home, but each year I’d go, and I’d spend maybe a month or two months, but this time I spent a year and a half. And it’s interesting that for a period of time, almost every day, I was writing something. And those poems eventually became The Corona Poems. And they kept coming. And I was literally sleeping in the same room where my father had passed away. And just being in the house, and feeling all of those things, I wrote–there’s a poem about my father that’s named “Country of Warm Snow.” All of that came to me and I think it had to do with being in Trinidad at the time and place.
I’m interested in this magical–I don’t know if you would call it a double life or a divided life– of being in both the US and Trinidad. Talk to me about that as an experience but also an aesthetic.
But remember that where I live in Brooklyn, I might as well be in Trinidad. But all the smells, everything on a Sunday, you walk through that part of Brooklyn, there’s just callaloo. It’s there, all the smells. I’ll give you an example. I have a friend, he’s since moved back to Trinidad. His nickname is “Snake,” I can’t even remember his Brooklyn name. But he worked at the airport. So he used to have to go to work very early in the morning. And his route to work took him right past my building. He knew exactly where I lived and he would come to that intersection. And he would put on the loudest Calypso. So I’m laying, at four o’clock every morning, I’d say “Here you go again!” And he’d turn it up real loud, and he knew what I liked. I’d say “Boy, this is better than home.” Just playing Calypso. And he’d say, “You hear me this morning?”
I listen to the stories that people tell. And I try not to steal them but try to sculpt poems out of them. I remember him playing mass in Brooklyn, putting on costumes. And you know there’s a… not a legend, but there’s a fear in Trinidad–they tell people don’t play Egyptian mas. Don’t ever dress up in Egyptian costume. There’s sort of a curse that anybody who plays Egyptian mas, something happens. It happened to so many people after George Bailey played Relics of Egypt that people started believing that it’s a dangerous thing. But this same Snake played a pharaoh on Eastern Parkway in the carnival. And he told me the story about walking–Let’s say the Carnival is over at seven or eight o’clock. He walked until four in the morning and couldn’t find his house, and he lived right in the area. He said he kept walking and walking. He said he knew something was the matter when he passed, for about the sixth time, some guys playing dominos sitting there, like some Jamaican guys. And he said one of them said, “That man that just passed, the man is in trouble. The man in real trouble.” Because he had seen him walk by there so many times. He said he finally got home about four o’clock in the morning. And he lived right near Snyder, near the cemetery. And his wife said, “Where you been all night?” But he had on that Egyptian costume…
So anyway, I’m tying all of this together to say that you pay attention to all the stories and you begin to create myth in the poem. Because myths came from someplace. We’re producing myth every day. I think that’s what happens in some of these poems. I begin to listen to them, almost as if they were not just ordinary stories, that ordinary people create myth and legend.
There’s an intimacy in all of your work that is almost a whisper sometimes, that you have to lean in for, At the same time, I feel like you also speak to big things, like the pandemic. I’m interested in how you, as the poet, think about that intimate private sense in relation to that larger social, political, or whatever you want to call it. How do you navigate or negotiate it?
The title poem in News of the Living is about a woman named Lita. And Lita, I’ve known her in Brooklyn for many, many years, and she’s one of those outstanding people who didn’t have much beyond a sixth grade or seventh grade education. But one of those immigrant people who come here and manage to, through some kind of magic, make things happen. She worked at the hospital as a maid. And she never earned a lot but she knew something about how to run a sousou; she knew something about how to take a dollar and stretch it, and so over the years, she was able to accumulate. Then she would buy goods, take home, sell some goods. She knew how to manage and make it work. Eventually, that woman ended up owning so much property. And she’s unassuming. But somehow, that’s heroic. That’s bright! She wasn’t a Wall Streeter or anything like that. But there are people who are doing marvelous, incredible things every day. And it may not be consistent, but there are moments in their lives… There’s a guy around the corner from me, a bunch of guys who hang out, some on drugs, some not on drugs, but they hang out, that’s their place. And somebody pointed him out one day and I said, “That guy, he’s the greatest six bass player in the steel band.” He used to play with Tokyo, one of the old steel bands in Trinidad, and I said, “He’s the greatest.” And each day I would go by and look at him and think, How could you have that and not be still playing? And I thought to ask him one day and he just shook his head. I mean, that’s part of the mystery. You never know what makes a person stop doing this or not do that. But you know that there was some glorious thing in there and it needs looking at! And if he won’t tell me, I’ll make it up. He won’t tell me the story, but I’ll try to make something that is as close as I can interpret that would let him know how much I admire his skill.
So anyway, I’m tying all of this together to say that you pay attention to all the stories and you begin to create myth in the poem. Because myths came from someplace. We’re producing myth every day. I think that’s what happens in some of these poems. I begin to listen to them, almost as if they were not just ordinary stories, that ordinary people create myth and legend.
You were a teacher for so long, talk to me a little bit about the teaching of poetry. What do you try to give your students?
That’s a good one. I’ll give you an example. I taught college and then I taught high school, and I taught at the toughest schools in Brooklyn. It used to be Eastern District High School in Williamsburg and they actually closed it down it was so bad. It was a huge school, and took up a whole block. And somebody had the bright idea to separate it into four small schools, one on each floor. I won’t bore you with the whole story of how I ended up there, but while I was teaching there, I was trying to do poetry with some of these young people and a bunch of tough kids. I’ll tell you how tough that school is, the lockers in the hallway were all soldered shut. The police soldered them shut because that’s where they used to keep the weapons.
But when I went there, it was a brand new start. There were two really bright young men. You ever notice, sometimes among all the kids, everybody here they were all children, you can usually find two or three youngsters who are thinking beyond their years, who have dreams of becoming helicopter pilots and stuff? Things that are beyond anything but that they are very serious about. And there were a couple of them I had there. I had one named Jonathan, and I’m teaching them this poetry stuff and they tell me, “Yeah, man, but–Jay Z.” Because a lot of the kids I had came out of the Marcy Projects. So these two boys, I’m trying to teach them this and they say, “Yeah, Mr. T, I know you like that stuff but have you ever listened to Jay Z?” I said, “Come on, man. We’re not talking rap stuff. We’re talking–” And they say, “No, no, no, no.” Jay Z has this thing about the boys today, the days they wear hard shoes. And they say, “What do you think that means?” Now they become the teacher. I say, “Hard shoes? You mean like to go to a wedding or something?” “No,” they said, “to a funeral.” I got new respect for these boys. Hard shoes. So the image is there. The whole thing, that’s the only time because all these kids just wear sneakers. They don’t wear anything else.
So these boys taught me this, that you can find that image that you want almost anywhere, and that they can pick up on it if it’s real, if you’ve got something solid.
I want to ask you about Carnival, because I know you’re a Carnival man. And masquerade is important to make costumes. Just fill that in for me as to the aesthetic of poetry.
That’s good. That’s a good one. I like art, first of all, just creating stuff, just making stuff happen. And I think when I was 14, that was my first foray into the world of mas. But I think it also had to do with community. There were some guys in the neighborhood, they say, “Come on, we got to do something.” Carnival was never about going to a whole lot of parties and all-inclusive [parties] and stuff. First of all, we wouldn’t spend that kind of money. Carnival was about a bunch of us in some little shack, just painting something or printing something. It was all just one solid effort. The only time we would go to some party was Carnival Sunday night at Belmont Intermediate school yard. And we wouldn’t pay to go in, we’d jump the wall. So that was part of a kind of creative thing. In New York, I think sticking with costumes was a way of holding on to Trinidad all the time. My good friend, Roy, we had a band that we played 25 years consecutively in the J’Ouvert in Brooklyn with 18 victories.
You produced the costumes for that band?
Yeah! And also, we managed to get people who understood what it meant to create something. So very often, with a band like that, you just tell so and so, “We’re doing Barbarian.” And you didn’t have to worry about that person because when that person show up… it’s there. It’s there. Yeah.
How does that translate to the poem? I feel like Carnival is the idea of masquerade, the idea of making for sure is in the poems. So I’m just curious if you think that there’s a correlation.
Well, let’s go back to the Derek Walcott poem. I think the title of the poem is “The Masked Man.” But Derek, in this poem, described himself, the poet, looking on at the Carnival. And he says, “Behind a lion’s mask, a bank clerk growls,” which is something, a bank clerk, he’s growling in there! But there’s a line later on in the poem when he says, “What happen, man? You can’t jump?” Somebody from in the Carnival asked Derek, “You write and write and write and scribing…What happened to you? You can’t jump?” and Derek says “Someone must squat down in the dust and write your poems.” In other words, [he says] I can’t do both. I elect to try to do both. Much to a lot of pain, sometimes. I think that’s part of it, trying to be in the mask, and to speak of it at the same time. And it’s not always easy. It’s not always an easy thing.
So you have seven books?
No, I have eight now. Eight and a chapbook and the CD. Yeah, myself and David Williams. A CD called “Road Clear.”
I’m curious about the learning over the course of what has been such a long career. You’ve been writing for such a long time: What have these books taught you? What has poetry taught you? What’s still fresh? What’s surprising? What’s comfortable?
I think if I look back, like for example, a book like The Goat. The Goat has moments in it, but a lot of it is almost flat and you know some of the poems in there like that. And I think there’s always more to be said, or there’s always more to revisit. There are some things you have tried to talk about. For example, I’ve been writing about my father for a long time. In The Goat, I think there are two poems about the conductor, the first book, actually. And I’m still writing about him in the Country of Warm Snow. And the idea for The Last Train comes from that. I don’t think he ever stopped.
Sportsmen, for example. They only have a few years and then they can’t do it anymore. The wonderful thing about poetry is that supposedly you will get better as you keep going. Hopefully, you’ll get better as you keep going. Somebody said it, that we don’t write for so much for awards as we write for the award of the poem, that if we find a line… one line next month can make me happy for the whole year. If the line comes, as it should, or if it’s correct, and you can know when it’s correct. If you get that, then you okay. And I think that’s what keeps me going.
What is the best writing advice you ever received that you would want to pass on?
Two things. I remember [Joseph] Brodsky saying this one day, “Take courses other than courses in poetry. Take a class in geography, a class in science or something, that way you have something to write about.” I remember Derek saying, “You won’t make a hit every time you sit down and write something. All of your poems that won’t be hits. Nobody gets a hit every time.” So what do you do when you don’t have a hit coming? What do musicians do when they don’t have hits? They practice scales. You sit down, you practice rhyming, practice whatever you need to do, but don’t constantly try to be a star. Because those poems will come if you keep at it. They find a way.
Thank you so much. This was just wonderful.
Great talking to you.
Read more in this issue: Poems | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), Honeyfish (New Issues Press April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh