I'm Mark Wunderlich, the acting director of the University
of Arizona Poetry Center, and I want
to thank you all for coming out this evening.
First, I would like to thank Shane House for providing
a venue for tonight's reading and effectively
opening their home to us.
We really do appreciate that.
And I'd especially like to thank Ashley Hatcher, Gretchen McPhee,
Brendan McBride, Courtney Hamilton, and Karen Falkenstrom
for their vigilance and superior organization
skills, which made this reading and residency possible.
Thank you very much.
I'd also like to thank those readers who juried this year's
competition, for their time and commitment to this program.
The Summer Residency Program of the Poetry Center
offers a one-month residency to a writer selected
from a national competition of poets, fiction,
and creative nonfiction.
In its second year, the residency
is an opportunity for an emerging artist
to enjoy the resources the Poetry Center's
library and archives and introduces them
to Tucson's vibrant writing community.
The residency provides accommodations
in the Poetry Center's guest house and, hopefully, the time
and quietude to produce new work, revise old work,
read, or, if he or she chooses, to do absolutely nothing.
It is, as the poet William Matthews once
called it, art jail.
But in a world whose velocity seems to be increasing,
we hope to be a point of respite,
a slow spot on the road, where a writer can perhaps
find some solitude and presence of mind
to do what it is they do best.
It's my great pleasure to introduce poet Kymberly
Taylor, this year's recipient of the University of Arizona Poetry
Center's Summer Residency.
Kymberly's poems have a grace and a fury
stemming from a poetic imagination I can only
call labyrinth.
Actively engaged with the natural world,
she is a natural descendant of Sylvia Plath and Amy Clampitt.
But their influences remain shadows on what is clearly
a singular imagination, with its home in some luminous
poet-created world of-- and I'm quoting Kymberly--
"late American promises spread out before her like a fan."
As a poet, Taylor pushes language
to its farthest, edgiest limits, whether that be its Germanic,
old English roots or to the fragmented musical notation
of birdsong.
The goal of this pushing to be the creation of a system
and a world or her extraordinary characters can thrive.
Kymberly received her MFA from Columbia University's School
of the Arts writing division, where she also
acted as the poetry editor of Columbia:
A Magazine of Poetry and Prose.
She has poems forthcoming in Inky Blue and Hawai'i Review,
and has worked as a journal editor
and comedian in Washington, DC.
She currently lives in New York City and South Bend, Indiana.
It's my pleasure to introduce Kymberly Taylor.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks very much, Mark.
I just want to begin by thanking the incredible, phenomenal staff
of the Poetry Center, who has just made my stay here the best
kind of art jail I would ever be in
and would never want to leave.
So, thanks to Mark, Karen, Brendan, Gretchen, and Courtney.
All of you, thank you, really.
I'm going to start with a poem that
is sort of a Southwest version of Maurice Sendak's Where
the Wild Things Are.
I don't know if you're familiar with the children's book,
but I thought it needed a little Southwest flavor.
And here I am in the Southwest, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
"Where the Wild Things Went"
"Just before the ocotillo began to recede from the bathroom
mirror, before saguaros permit the ceiling to descend and stars
fade back into bedspread, I will hunt the wildest,
chart the grasses flattened by their great hooves,
track their spore through the pecan grove
to the edge of the precipice far above the fiery fronds.
And in and out of years, beyond indolent, ancestral indigo,
I see the extravagant weavers and the wild things bellowing,
flexing their claws in furred and unsorrowed clefts.
I see the Archimedian point from which
a girl lifts the whole world, our instructions written
upon her immense tent.
She tells me that the being woven
is the nest that will catch me as I
fall beyond the certain words at certain times that I am.
Homesick for what I do not know, for what is not near."
I was diving with my mother in the Exumas,
and we came upon a large, mysterious creature
and her little baby that really scared the heck out of us.
But later, I found out the name of it.
It was a cownose ray.
And that's the title of this next poem.
"The obvious flume assembles into a giant ray,
hugging the in-reef, crushing mollusks in her tooth
plates, her body a gray-winged teapot,
pinches up into a pug nose.
Sub-rostral lobes extend from the midnight disk of her body.
The outer corners falcate, the posterior edges concave.
Behind her stiffens the venomous tail spine.
Her eyes are sensitive to exterior, to the pup just
visible beneath the wing.
A miniature spout of her, he is plump, wingless,
whittled for flight.
Tight, fraught, they are too tiny to contain the past.
Her vast, honed horizons have consumed it.
They bask in the circuitry of now,
their vigil fragile as they turn in tandem
beneath the minimal eulogy of a fossil tree.
She stares at me.
I am known.
For a moment, even think it possible to belong
to this pre-world joy.
Craving the greatness like a right,
I swim close as if we accelerate, vanish,
slow-motion hearts into the undergold lit by silver fins
and basket star."
This next piece is written about a girl
who reads the patterns of the bird as omens.
And she chooses not to speak and to become mute.
And I have some old English in the poem,
and I'll translate that for you now
so you won't be too surprised.
And the translation is strength, affliction, joy,
to know, bird, bird, all.
And the title of the poem is [INAUDIBLE].
Country-big girl reading the birds,
their sideways laticing, banking left,
lift, lift, into anvil, lunule, ell, strengou, broc, dream,
cnawan, brdd, brdd, eall.
To the dovecot, straight through the orchard, she with her bow,
past clocky colt, weir and sedge, the tundra swan smashing
willow and cress in the stream running bluely, brokely.
How she envied the white fiend, the wands
churring in its sloe-eyes roving beneath its webs.
She listens to the small church in the breast of a finch.
There is no other, for all the old gods
have gone, leaving instead red leaves, wisteria, and finch.
Through combe she wilds, unceasing, galloping, blown.
Not speaking, her silence curving
in rapt, out smooth, a vessel upon which
her life elides, each day in its papers dissolving.
At the dovecot, a wolf crunches the headbones of a bird.
The girl kills, tends to the rest,
feeding them white berries and seed.
Another day passing in which she is the greatest and the least.
She moves among the listeners, sets them free.
They do not fly but cluster on her shoulders, head, wrists.
Staying near, telling her every small thing.
What can't be named, the infinite
miscalculations of once upon.
When I got here, a friend from the Poetry Center
pointed out a century plant right around the corner from me.
I'm sure you all know about the century plant.
But I had never heard of them, and I just
thought they were phenomenal.
So I thought I would go out on a limb
and try to write a poem about it.
And this poem is called "Ancient Head."
Inside itself for 40 years, the century plant's
gargantuan flower stock spews 15 feet aloft
then topples whole torso from its presidio of dying quills.
Its ancient head, unsocratic, casts a single severe seed
that torques into fissure, soon to pluck up
between barrel bush and stones.
Tiny sabers, faithful, pointed.
Its first fatal blossom explains the lie
of giving almost everything fast, the lies of futility,
of beauty, [INAUDIBLE], corded and coiled
into cut spectacle craving.
Glory growing in, abandoned, postponed.
Observing acids, radiances, decades
of sun around a bare spool.
Articulating monsoon and moons into singular,
[? phatic ?] movie.
Century, witness us, the givers splayed legged, nipple-pierced,
[INAUDIBLE] grin, all out to everyone but those who love us.
This is the beginning of a small seduction series that
lasts for three poems or so.
The start of the first poem is called "Seduction."
Her bedroom looks out across the cay.
A house and I haunt the corner, angular and crude,
pruding upon each incident stare and stir of her.
I dissembled into the snow.
My breasts slice for her.
My instruments are confused.
My feathers purpling in the glossing.
And I will attack her.
Throat first, my beak [INAUDIBLE] lurch at her spine.
Her pain increasing, and with it myself, on this dread day,
that I am wild and spectacular.
Wound fragment.
[INAUDIBLE] abominable aunt.
Old and old.
I belong to her.
But first I will begin by spreading my cape so blue
upon the ground and begging a beauty to sit upon it.
Caution-- might be a [INAUDIBLE].
He kept her terrible on a small leash.
She belonged to the second son.
Him, dark, over her.
How she learned to perform, first unbelieving,
fingers halting at her phone buttons, then with abandon,
like a handful of thrown sea.
Arms around her often, unfastening, fastening
the chain hooked to her jewel collar, attached to the eyeballs
opposite the vault. Gradually, she
began to move only in relation to other things,
to her cages and rack.
The gallery and hook, the 36 steps to him.
She grew older, limbs made formal
by the variant postures craved.
Sometimes unseen series [INAUDIBLE]
would crack, heal badly, though not so noticeable.
She tried to escape once, crouched in the daylight
darkness of a cane hamper, shuttled to the middle.
She begged them to keep her, to give her work.
The problem never just the problem.
And when he found her, she did not resist.
For there was that in her that some reason and all things,
in the tongs that lift abreast the delirious freedom
after pain, and that this must be so.
She torn, but mostly whole, able to rest in the overlooked space
opening for those [INAUDIBLE] life.
Here, serenity, a private wind.
She tamed a bird, a small swift, essential to her.
She watches it across fields, desperately flowering.
At the appointed hour, she blindfolds herself,
brushes her body with oils.
His scent, him.
She is burning.
Never before had she felt so bright.
Won't be so bad after that, I promise.
This next poem I wrote when I was reading Virgil.
And he was sort of describing this ancient creature that was
lost in the modern world, and that described this next poem
entitled "Beloved."
And I'm experimenting with some rhymes in this poem.
Beloved.
One.
My unusual steps, rare spot and sound, I forage and fend
east headland down.
Sleep on the form, secretly into [? celandine ?].
I've taught bees to chronicle [INAUDIBLE] rooms of woodruff,
whatnot, wintergreen wound.
Now gone, my own.
Moons have thinned, archipelagos grown.
I let you see me, hunter, though you begin my death.
Come lay down your bow.
Night and again, I've thought of you,
considered I ought to mend you.
So sleep clear, cool in my lair.
Outside, bay, wood thrush, wild pear.
Yes, I'll drink what you're offering, thinking while.
Two.
Wait.
Slight.
Shatter.
Shock.
Entrap.
Trust.
Drop into all that is you, but that is not all.
For don't you know, I can ride if I choose.
Explode.
Shackle.
[INAUDIBLE] a final ruse.
But I will wait, thinning, old.
Patient, this love must be.
And it is then I will beg you to set me free in a sigh of green,
the death dew, just one of me left
to farther in the far stark, moving slowly flower to flower.
Just this next poem is written about the death of Actaeon, who,
as you may know, is from Ovid.
And the goddess Diana, when she was
bathing in a pool with her nymphs around her,
saw Actaeon spying on her, so she turned him into a stag.
And his own, unfortunately, his own hound killed him.
You hide, boy.
Mine shrewd on these breasts.
Kissed by the bear who bathed me.
As I rise from this soft pool, curtain by wild mint,
by [INAUDIBLE], pray now, for your eyes will soon be wounds.
Already your tame mouth goes wild,
your shadow crouches on four feet.
I Inhale the scent of your blood as your own hounds gorge you.
In apology, your antlers hang in the ash tree, their torn velvet
bleaching in the sun.
This next poem stems from sort of rebelling against having
to go to confession.
[LAUGHTER]
I grew up a Catholic, and I had to do that a lot.
As you know, once you close that little booth [? robe ?],
it's just you, and the screen, and this shadowy guy behind it.
I've created my own sort of version.
And there's somebody in here that I refer to as grandfa.
And I just hope that everyone has
a grandfa in their life, whatever that shape or form may
take.
What I most love.
Stripped of my escorts, my false tail coil behind.
Grandfa, I blush, you have caught me,
one, forging my prayers, two, tattooing a star print
on my ass, three, removing the starfish.
I admit you all of the above, and to rudely brooding
and rakishly roving through hip and shroud, despite christened
the [? Attican ?] nun to parading my pooky.
Becoming background music, a fat singer sings.
I have flowered a furnaced, mirth myself into over.
Broken I am.
[INAUDIBLE] my sunniness turns grim.
Give absolution and just a slight tap,
and I will come back to you.
Lucid limner, buoyant foyer, oh, Fa.
And then cleansed, I will continue to consume all that I
shouldn't.
[?
These salons ?], the late American promises I spread
before me like a fan, choosing first people aplenty, hero next,
then justice for.
Gnawing each fastidiously, knowing only [INAUDIBLE].
If I couldn't know you, let me finger
your strange, torn edges, your crucifix,
soothe your crooked unmanageable limbs.
Glittering cripple, dear Fa, I am
in a line moving timely and forward
toward an overstark hotel.
Inside it's just table adorned with skull and monk.
With forgivances, sandwiches.
How the lights judge!
Like we all do, not missing things small--
a pointy shoe, the cadence of sneeze, if one will eat roast.
What penance due?
Pay what you wish.
Should I give what I most love, the adequacies I covet
under my fern full of far?
My tiny flock of gain?
Or, what I know best, the comfort
of this distance between us, its impotence, its permanence.
This next poem is written for a friend of mine who I recently
visited.
The desert [INAUDIBLE].
And we just had a great time.
And we saw these mountain lions, and I dedicate this poem to him.
"The Lovers."
Facing each other.
The mountain lions sleep.
The far one's giant paws touch, flop forward at the wrists
to curl up against the buttery tundra of his chest fur.
Its taut power unwound into molten golden kitten,
whose mighty ear tips sadden against the trial of his head.
Lions rest, not like new lovers who turn away and sleep,
as if already mourning what they've given too soon,
but like ancient hearts who still, even in sleep, exchange.
The lions will die here, an exhibit of their former selves.
So exhale a heavy breath of the mountain from which they've
come, a mountain bloated open, its wounds stolen and divided
among the thieves, who are their children.
And their children-- sell their wounds, or wear them proudly.
Each glorious murder glittering upon breast, hands, throat.
The wounds of a father become their own.
And this poem is entitled "Grew."
And it's a hunting poem.
It's about sort of learning to aim, shoot.
"Grew."
Take my shoes.
I give them to you to walk in just up the hill.
They are smaller than yours, the laces studded with small violet
cakes.
In turn, I'll take your gun.
Smith Wesson, 12 gauge, bolt action.
Looking down this barrel, a life with the hard, oiled groove.
I studied it on you, strict against fields
stunted with pheasant.
The blue [? stem ?] half forgiving a weasel, looking
inside at the newborn's egg.
Jaw jammed against the site but flushed
to shoulder, just as you teach.
There is your heart, perpetually wavering.
First above, then below, the bull's eye.
The next poem I'm going to read begins
a series about a woman named Y. And she began her life
as bird songs.
And she leads a life as part woman and part flying creature.
And I found this really fabulous book called Born To Sing--
A World Interpretation of Bird Song.
And in the book, it talks about how life is rhythm,
and the rhythms of music constitute a universal language,
which can be translated into birdsong if only
we had the tools to decipher what they're saying.
And the book takes an anti-behavioral standpoint
towards birds.
And it's a completely scientific book,
it's not sort of one of these new age psychology books,
which makes it even the more fascinating that there are
people out there who are really beginning to look at birds
in this non--behavioral way.
And in the poem itself, I have notations of bird songs,
but because I would be terrible at, one, imitating them.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] try to translate.
I have taped the first stanza of bird songs for you to listen to.
And the poem is written in a biography form,
just to let you know.
And I would just like to read you one quote from the book,
and that is, "Birds learn to talk only when the human
or teacher becomes a love object."
And the title of the poem is "Bird By Bird Into This
And This."
[BIRDS SINGING]
"Bird By Bird Into This And This."
2008.
With unsuspicious disposition, Y begins first grade, occasionally
bursting into song, like the bird she once was,
in front of the startled nuns.
2010.
Y is given her first platypus, whose tiny fins and bill
provide her with an important but subtle connection
to her ancestral past.
2013.
Y, suffering from chronic insomnia, is taken by her mother
to a psychiatrist named Walda, who
tries to teach her meditation techniques with whale tapes.
2015.
Dropping Walda, Y begins to fly at night,
folding her wings carefully into her lunchbox before dawn.
2016.
Y receives her 96th platypus.
2017.
Y gets her first job in a grocery store wrapping
head lettuce in cellophane.
As her boss reprimands her for her addictive lateness,
they hear the cellophane uncrinkling from 250 heads.
Y is fired.
2022.
Y enters college, where she shows virtuosity in languages
and hypnotizes professors with her subtle vowel trills.
2023.
Y is flying during adolescence-- increases its velocity.
Sometimes she becomes a long-haired star
before touching down behind her parents' colonial.
2024.
Y moves into a group house.
Intolerant of her 300 platypuses, her roommates become
mean.
In retaliation, Y blows up Evelyn's StairMaster.
2026.
Y begins her first job as an administrative assistant.
She becomes skilled in stuffing her science fiction
novel into her top desk drawer.
2028.
Noticing that her boss, Bonnie, has inadvertently
spilled blusher on the tips of her shoes,
Y falls in love for the first time.
Y sets out to shock the office and seduces Bonnie.
They jet to Paris for a weekend getaway.
And in this illusory moment, strained
by excessive amounts of pastry, caffeine, and sex,
Y realizes that Bonnie is perfect for her.
Y breaks up with Bonnie.
Y is fired.
2030.
Ancient tragic motive reflected in the modern,
Y enters a period of obsessive flying.
Lonely for love she shuns, she hunts the night flywheels,
screaming above the trilevels and branches,
dropping her nature on expensive cars.
2031.
Heedless of her reputation, Y has now
taken to flying in the daytime.
Gaudy and black-necked, randomly and promiscuously
sparring with mockers [INAUDIBLE],
joining great swarms of waterfowl, shorebirds,
and other transients.
2036.
Y is dimly aware that she is trapped in finite grammars,
constrained by a century that cannot define her.
But she struggles toward alternative thoughts
and tactical realms, the post-verbal.
For her wings once lifted into a larger scheme, where
there were extra positions.
The band forms infinite sequences.
But she is here, or sometimes the birds are coarse and poor.
2036.
Increasingly, Y has great difficulty returning home,
and this is the beginning of sorrow.
She will fly until the word has shed its meanings.
And the next two poems sort of explain
a little what Y has been up to since we've met her.
And the title of this poem is, "God Was Too Busy."
Y, taking advantage of the fact that God was too busy watching
sparrows, moved dangerously higher and faster,
effortlessly attaining an escape velocity,
propelling her deep into the ionosphere.
And through the exosphere, Y burst a fine fluttering thing.
She was not sure she was free.
And there she met a girl who was no longer a bird.
Her heart no longer occupied with the thought
of wanting to fly.
Seeking such peace, Y-- on her magnificent wings,
before the light blue girl, folding provisions
into her primary feathers that emitted
faint prisms and space light.
The beauty hit Y's wings, and our Y was happy.
Then she began to die.
She missed blending into the evening's lightning, fields
of silver potatoes falling away like lesser guilts.
Everything she meant to be, taken from herself
and suspended between two scarred hands.
Y asked the beauty for her wings back, but learned that
never would she see them again, but a stronger, swifter pair
would be hers, if only she breathed deeply enough.
And the second Y poem is called "Slight Bondage."
Trapped in space, Y's thoughts narrowed
into a series of perceptions that
only bound her more intimately to the light blue girl.
[INAUDIBLE] chain, she did as commanded,
hurling dark pageants into the comet drop.
She has almost forgotten she could fly.
The idea of wings faded as the rosettes in her grandmother's
carpet, threadbare petals only visible to those
who remember their shapes.
And though far above the Earth, Y could distinguish the faint
sound of a 40-year-old man's body crashing on top of his
mother's dead one.
The man would continue to despise his mother,
and need his mother, like a bashed bit of moon
orbiting the universe that smashed it.
70 song sequences and Y, divided form of a human heart.
And this was the beginning of an immense crack beneath her feet,
underneath the grief that would not come.
And this final poem continues my bird obsession,
which had come over me when I was here.
And I read this while watching all the birds
upon the back patio of the Poetry Center's cottage.
It's just amazing the amount of birds that land there.
And that sort of led to this poem,
and it's called "Light Breathing."
It started with just a few crumbs
scattered on the patio, picked at by just a few thrashers.
Oval sonnets floriating in swags of sunlight
damasking the Southwest corner of the yard.
Came a cactus wren, the peaked tuft,
thistle threads [INAUDIBLE] scuttling forward a furnished
bolt with tail trucked up.
And here tips a mourning dove, her roan stipples,
tiny scapulas pushing through the torn tin wing hues.
She ticks, breast first, sorrow, sorrow.
And just then, the wood thrush barge in.
Bellies squared high, and miniature black bits
pinning a mingle of mottled browns.
Why, multitudes have alit.
Surely, the small circle of food is gone,
yet they are everywhere, much more than there ought to be.
Here's a veery, tawny jostle, boisterously bulleting
his faint honey bill.
A pivot dusts, head, then tail down in it all a fluff.
Chestnut families whirring.
They're feeding each other now, landing upon clotheslines,
prickly pear, lawn chairs.
And suddenly, as they come up, they all
rise, plunging and pitching in the goldenness.
Upblown and high, taking the yard and high,
far above the fluted fence, the adobes foreshortening as we lift
delicately into the sparkle.
And below is the cross that, because I could not carry,
I hung from.
And now it is a slim fur laden with cones, infinitely dividing.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]