An Interview with Sam Taylor
To excel in any one literary genre requires enormous effort, often years or even decades of fastidious work. So, when a book comes along in which poetry, memoir, essay, and art interact as seamlessly as in Sam Taylor’s new offering, The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability Press 2021), we must laud it not only for its massive vision but for the way it invites readers to immerse themselves in a journey as personal as it is universal.
Sam Taylor is the author of two previous poetry collections, Body of the World (Ausable Press 2005) and Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Press 2014), and an Associate Professor in and Director of Wichita State University’s MFA program. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, and The New Republic. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Sam to discuss the artistic process behind The Book of Fools, the influences and importance of place, making sense of the past, and faith and belief as guiding lights in times of need.
Esteban Rodriguez: Sam, it’s a pleasure. Your newest book, The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability Press, 2021), is a departure from your previous two poetry collections, at least in terms of form and structure. Although not strictly a poetry collection, the pieces here (from the essays on Orpheus to the fragmentary reflections of the past) are nevertheless highly poetic. What was the impetus behind this approach, and how do you hope this book interacts with your previous work?
Sam Taylor: So many readers tell me they are excited because they’ve never seen anything like this book. I still consider it a poetry collection, and more specifically, I think of it as a book-length poem. The subtitle is partly tongue-in-cheek but also points to the unusual nature of the work. In a sense, it is both a poem and an essay—and something else I don’t know a word for. I call it “a plastic Byzantium,” a phrase from the book, or an art object. As a poem, I think of it primarily as an elegy for the earth that uses a personal story of loss to dramatize our collective loss. As an essay, I think it is an investigation of how we make art, of different aesthetic constructions of reality, as well as a quest toward finding this elusive thing called “nonfiction.”
My second book, Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry, 2014), developed a very public lyrical voice engaged with politics, history, and our ecological crisis, particularly climate change. One of my teachers, the poet Gregory Orr, asked me one day, “Are you writing poems that break your heart?” And, I thought, first, wow, what a novel way of thinking about the objective of a poem! And then I thought, I’m not sure. I was writing poems moved by this collective grief, wonder, and exhortation, but while there was heartbreak in that, the poems were mostly so collective and public in their mode that there was a dimension of particular human story missing. That dimension of human story had been more present in my first book, Body of the World, but it rarely involved pieces of my story.
I think there can be a tendency within massive information access and endless crises for people to project their personal pain onto global events, which, disturbing and heartbreaking as they are, do not constitute the primary root of those emotions, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t doing that. And, at the same time, I think there is also a collective grief that is a unique aspect of contemporary experience. So, I wanted to tell a heartbreaking story, and I also wanted to write about planetary grief in a way that investigated its connection to personal grief and was extremely honest in its emotional accountability. Ultimately, the heartbreaking story I am trying to tell is a story about the loss of the earth that was our home, but I try to use a personal story to do it. At a certain point, I didn’t need to tell the personal story anymore, but I had to do it for the sake of the collective story, as an offering. Because we really aren’t built to consider the fate of our planet or species or time itself; we are built to live individual lives of love and loss in relationship with other people on earth.
I could also say that I had written a simple one-page poem called “First Taxi” that seemed to be a successful, classical lyric, but I felt unsatisfied with its easy closure. It seemed beautiful as a poem but didn’t quite carry the full emotional truth. There were so many footnotes and understories and other contexts that felt absent. I began to tell these other stories, and then I got the idea—this was in 2010—to do a “self-erasure” of the poem. At the time, as far as I knew, no one had erased their own poems. I liked this innovation conceptually, but it also established an underworld substrate of the poem that not only enacted haunting and loss and excavation but also created chords of alternative, simultaneous constructions of reality. Once I did this, it really propelled the poem forward, as a quest toward the truth of experience, as a playful exploration of alternative aesthetics, and as a journey into the underworld. So, the book was literally a one-page poem that kept growing until it was a 145-page poem composed of smaller poem-like (and not so poem-like) texts.
As far as how the book interacts with my previous work, there is the obvious thematic ecological connection, but mostly I consider each book a unique statement. I was on a certain quest that is over now, and I don’t expect to ever write in that way again. I got the answers I was looking for.
ER: Having grown up along the U.S- Mexican border, in deep south Texas, the narrative of the young speaker traveling with his ill mother to the California border so she could get treatment in Mexico really resonated with me. There are also narratives centered on the speaker taking his mother to the ocean (“[Exile and Detour on the Way to the Sea],” “[Nonfiction]”). The speaker therefore finds himself straddled between a place he likes to think he knows and one that remains a mystery to him (a foreign country, the sea).
How have the places you’ve inhabited—whether in the past or present—influenced what you put on page? Or at least the way you approach your more autobiographical work?
ST: I come from a thousand years of displaced and banished Jews moving from one place to another. I feel like that sense of displacement and migration has carried forward into my life, though I grew up safely in America as a third-generation immigrant partly subsumed into and cloaked by American whiteness. It is hard to create a rooted experience of home out of a deep inertial trajectory of rootlessness. I grew up in Miami in seven different houses, but my parents were born in other states, and they left Florida before I came of age. As an adult, I've lived in seven states, moved maybe 30 times, and traveled to more than two dozen countries. The result is that my experience of the world is a kind of global amalgam, in which places are grafted onto a trunk that is a hybrid of global citizenship and perennial displacement.
Within that, there are places that have been particularly important to me. Miami, and the Atlantic Ocean I grew up with, is one of them, and that connection to the ocean forms one basis of The Book of Fools. But, as you noted, the book is primarily set on the border of a different coast, a different ocean. To amend your statement slightly, the speaker in the time frame at the center of the book has never gone anywhere alone before, is already in an unfamiliar place on the American side of that border, and feels alienation on both sides, though the sense of disorientation and mystery is indeed greater across the border. That narrator's past naivete and vulnerability is far from my experience now. Now, I've been around the world—seen Iguazu Falls and the Alhambra, the old cities of Sicily, the factories and superhighways of Bangkok, the favelas of Rio, and places of atrocity from Auschwitz to Hiroshima. I feel I inhabit the end of history, and so I am no one and everyone. Every place I've ever seen is part of me. The Malecon of Havana, the Soviet apartment buildings outside Moscow, a broken window in the port of Baltimore. Not only memories but thoughts and feelings live in places for me. I sometimes must return to a spot to remember a thought—or the music of a thought—that I had in that place; sometimes that is just returning to a specific corner of a room.
Strangely, I don't think of this as an autobiographical book, though I'm sure it will be read that way, and it does contain versions of some experiences I had in my young life. But, the book’s purpose, as far as I am concerned, is not to tell my story, and I don't think it does tell my story. It's a poem. I hope it tells a story about being a person subject to circumstance and folly. I hope it tells a story about the underworld; I hope it tells a story about art. And I hope most of all that it tells a story about the earth.
This book begins and ends in the mountain wilderness where I was a winter caretaker and summer work-hand for several years in northern New Mexico. I lived snowed-in there, alone, without phone, electricity, or internet, often not seeing or speaking to another soul for weeks. That place permeated my being and changed my worldview. It will always be with me. The yellow aspen leaves like coins of light glittering in the wind. Lying on my back for hours in the night-snow of the fir forest. Walking across the frozen pond in the full moon. Sitting beside the roar of a flooding river of spring snowmelt. Face-to-face encounters with a bull elk, a startled beaver, a bobcat. The experiences from that time are a greater part of Nude Descending an Empire, but the place somehow found its way into the beginning and end of this book as well.
Many landscapes of the earth are dear to me. The Chiricahua Mountains of southern Arizona. Big Tesukee camping area outside Santa Fe. The land around Big Bend National Park. The book was largely written beside specific rivers and streams. I remember them all. I love the earth. But it's not my ambition to tell the truth of one place. Places are important to me, but I live in the place that contains all the places. I’m a citizen of the earth, without an experience of home.
I would like one day to grow the sense of home that I feel is ancestrally missing. I would like to grow into a place as a tree grows into even a barbed-wire fence. I stayed in southern Italy with a family who had lived there for a thousand years. I’m envious of that sense of home. But then, in the United States, we all live on stolen land in a nation founded on atrocity, genocide, and slavery. America is a nation of people who either abandoned or were stolen from their homes, as well as people whose homes were taken away. For now, I can only make home in the truth of this land, broadly, and the truth of our time.
I hope with time to be able to center that truth-home in a physical place that I have an intimate relationship with until I die and where I will try to preserve and resurrect paradise within the century of catastrophe we seem to have ahead. That is the work of spiritual transformation, which we must do in a world of violence and injustice, and it cannot be contingent upon achieving any outcome or change in the conditions of this world. To change the conditions of the world fundamentally, I believe we need a miracle—in the literal sense. I'm waiting for the miracle. I'm ready. We can do our part, but I don't think we can get anywhere, collectively, at this point, without a miracle.
ER: You’ve definitely seen the world and have had the opportunity to make many places home. When I read (and reread) The Book of Fools, I undoubtedly feel as though I am going on a journey, one that not only transports me to physical locations but into different time periods (the personal past, the environmental future) and even into a kind of crash course in Greek mythology with the “Fools’ Guide…” poems. In these sections in particular, the pages are black, and the text is white. The sections act as interludes of sorts, but even the speaker acknowledges how “Orpheus...began to insert himself into this book.” Can you speak more about the inclusion of these pieces and how they came “looking for [you]”?
ST: I’ve never had much poetic interest in mythology, and I tend to be skeptical of poems that invoke the classical world. Most aspects of this book are hyper-modern and develop a new kind of lyric for a time in which the self is populated by particulates of information. But, within that concrete, modern gyre, the figure of Orpheus kept popping up, against my will in a sense. There are actually only six poems (and two more titles) that include Orpheus in the main book, but it is a recurrent thread, and I didn’t know why.
You mentioned it feeling like a journey: the book was obviously, among other things, a journey into an underworld, as well as an investigation into the lyric–the art of song–so those parts I understood related to Orpheus. But the book was also about the ocean and ecological grief and global injustice, and it seemed to me like another kind of journey too, one more Odyssean, a journey to reach somewhere that was continually interrupted and delayed.
It was only when I researched the figure of Orpheus to write a note that I discovered how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know, for example, that the earliest depictions of Orpheus place him on the ocean. I didn’t know the extent to which he was a figure of the natural world, a virtual St. Francis, a figure of both the natural world and of the civilizing force upon it. I didn’t realize that he is a shaman archetype moving between worlds for centuries before Eurydice even shows up; he doesn’t strictly belong to a tragic romantic narrative. Nor did I realize how much the figure evolved and was reimagined by each era and culture (at the point when he comes to us, he’s not really a Greek figure at all), and thus he was also a figure for the plastic nature of myth and representation, which is also central to the book. And I learned that Orpheus was associated not only with the journey to the underworld but also with the Odysessian/Argonaut journey to the edge of the known world, and in the ancient world these two journeys were almost synonymous. Orpheus unified virtually all aspects of the book in ways I never imagined.
In any case, the rest of the book was done when I wrote the Fools’ Guide pieces as an accompaniment to illuminate some of the book’s underlying structures: the underworld, rivers and roads, the typographical lexicon, and Orpheus. “Fools’ Guide to Orpheus” became particularly long, and other pieces of the story continued to unfold; it became like a parallel climax of the book where all of its threads were woven together, but at the same time it also interrupted the book. So, you are right: it is both separate from the main body of the book and inseparable from it.
This was my final structural decision, in fact: where to place the Fools’ Guides. Even after I had decided to place them in between the book sections, I made one more last-minute decision. The “Fools’ Guide to Orpheus” was long—eleven pages of prose—and the fifth and final part was the longest and most challenging; it also incorporated parts of the main narrative that, chronologically speaking, hadn’t happened yet; and it ended, I thought, with particular resonance. The threads of the Mother and the Ocean—the mother earth death—all merge with Orpheus into a single chord that also holds hope and the innocence of childhood. So, I decided at the last minute to divide the piece and move part V of the “Fools’ Guide to Orpheus” to the end of the book, to serve as the final end after a series of ends. I hope that was the right decision. I still want “Fools’ Guide to Orpheus,” in its separate parts, to also be read as a single piece. But your question makes me wonder if, by dividing it, I might have made Orpheus too omnipresent or if, by delaying the more ecological passages, I obscured the centrality of that theme. Still, the thing about this book is that it can be read in many ways. I had to study structure a great deal to put it together, but ultimately every reader will read a slightly different book.
ER: I want to go back to Nude Descending An Empire, and in particular the poem “Confession.” Toward the end of the poem, the speaker says the following:
I know there is
always something we are forgetting and something else
we have remembered too long.
The lines resonated with me deeply because, as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have hit this stage, a space that occupies what I should be remembering and one where I continuously dwell on all the important things in my life. How do you view memory (of events, objects, people) in your work, and what role do you see it playing in contemporary poetry (or any genre for that matter)?
ST: When you ask about remembering and forgetting, the first thing I think of is hearing my father use those words in the mystical sense of remembrance of God, like the Sufis use it. I heard that before I had any sense of what was being remembered and before I had any notable life events to recall. When we remember God, we remember what we do not know and cannot fathom.
I realize that’s not the kind of memory you are asking about, but I think that background association was probably present in those lines, which, ironically, were never themselves memorable for me. The conventional sense of memory you are asking about is not something I’ve been directly interested in. I’ve been more interested in immediate presence. On the other hand, I am fascinated by the mystery of the self and consciousness, and I suppose, in a sense, all we have is memory; it’s hard to say what kind of self we have without it. Like, even if you are writing a poem in an imaginative or ecstatic vein, you are still firing a musical sequence of memory synapses to combine all the essences of the experienced world into something new. And, of course, without memory, there can be no story.
The world without memory is simply a miracle, a radiant God event, a burning bush. But I don’t know that we can understand that without coming through memory and story and separation.
I think I was interested in how memory haunts and lurks beneath us, how loss can need to be felt and exercised in order to be released, how trauma can be exorcised—or not. Perhaps I was investigating that which keeps us from immediate presence. I was also studying the nature of reality and how we construct it, and there is nothing to study without memory. I’m sure you are also asking the question because The Book of Fools is so laden with memory—which is unlike my previous work. I’ve generally wanted poems to enact rather than recall. But in this book I suppose I am trying to enact something at a book level that requires an engagement with recall along the way.
I remember the earth. I remember my bare feet as a kid walking beaches that were covered with shells, so many that walking the shore inflicted a textural alloy of pleasure and pain. I remember our windshield after a long drive thick with insects. Now, I walk beaches, and there are hardly any shells at all. I can drive sheer across the country, and my windshield stays completely clean. That’s the story we are living inside. That change is just in the span of my lifetime, and I’m only 45. It’s a nanosecond in geologic time. Of course, we also remember the people we have loved. And we remember childhood, that time when we had no memory. I’m trying to blend these things together, to make tangible this love and grief for the earth, this bewilderment.
ER: Beautiful. Thank you for that. For some reason, perhaps because I’ve been listening to the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I’m reminded of the song “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2” by Neutral Milk Hotel and the following lyrics:
And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
When we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.
You speak of God in your response above. What/who is God to you? How would you describe your relationship with God?
ST: The only answer I know to the first question is: I don’t know. I don’t understand anyone making any claim upon God. Words like the mystery and the unknown can be helpful signposts, but they can also become worn into meaninglessness. My father used the word Nothing. There are people who don’t like the word God because of its enormous historical baggage and its rampant delusions, and I’m sympathetic to that, but the word God also carries something no other words do.
The world is an impossibility. Or, let us say there are only two possibilities, both impossible: either something came from nothing, or something has always been here from beginning-less time without coming from anywhere. Either is, logically, completely impossible. Either way requires a miracle, a God event. So, that’s one place from which to begin to come to God.
I know firsthand that people can know things that they have no way to know. I know there are other dimensions, other senses. I have seen miracles. Quantum physics has empirically observed that the very essence of the physical universe defies logic, that something can be simultaneously a wave and a particle, that a particle can exist in two places at once, that the presence of an observer changes the observed world, and that particles can be joined across great distance, so-called spooky action at a distance. The Buddhists say form is emptiness and emptiness is form, and nothing has a nature of its own—and physics, more or less, agrees.
It seems to me that we do live in a moral universe, though not necessarily one whose arc always bends toward justice on the linear, historical horizon we look at. But I have no doubt that we are morally learning something here and that the thing we are morally learning is very intimate to the nature of God. I love the elaborate design and complexity of Islamic architecture. I love the words Jesus speaks in the Gospel, as clear as spring water. Nothing feels more true to me than Jesus saying the two most important commandments are to love your neighbor as yourself and to love your god with all your mind and heart and soul. I believe God is present in this world, perhaps most in our relationships. That our embodied earthly life may be the primary way of realizing God.
At the same time, I don’t understand people who don’t believe in hell. Hell is obvious. There are hells all over the earth, for starters. If there are hells such as these on earth alone, how can one think that, in all the cosmos, there are not hell realms [that are] unimaginably worse. I don’t believe they are eternal, but no hells? Are you kidding? Likewise, I don’t understand people who dismiss the notion of sin. If you don’t see the sin within us, then you must not see the divinity. To see the divinity within us is to be enormously humbled.
While I don’t know what God is, I do know exactly what the Holy Spirit is. It is as tangible as a tree or a doorknob—or a person. I don’t understand how that could even be up for debate. I have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, but I don’t know if I would say I have a personal relationship with God. At times, rarely, I have thought I had, but, I’ve always really struggled to believe in a benevolent, personally involved God. I struggle with the problem of evil and suffering—with atrocity in particular—and there is no theodicy that is fully satisfying, though I’ve tried most of them on. That this is a school, that God must allow free will to be known, that we are consecrated or blessed in suffering, and so on. But, when it comes to the Holocaust, American slavery and genocide, the gulags, and so on, I just can’t. I’ve also always related to the question Ivan asks Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov—you know, if you could create all the wonders of the cosmos, but one child would have to be abused, would you do it? And the immediate answer, of course, is no! But, I suppose, if you don’t do it, well, then there would be no such thing as a child either. A child would never exist. So, there should be an answer in that, but I still struggle. I just think the nature of God and suffering is unfathomably deep, and all religions are attempts to deal with that question of suffering. Nietzsche says that the only justification for the world is aesthetic. I agree there is a brutal, aesthetic justification, but I also think there’s another justification—yet I struggle with it. Bob Dylan says “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.” Damn right.
If we go to the Jewish mystics, we have a simpler explanation perhaps: God was lonely or bored and wanted to tell a story. And maybe that’s as good as any explanation, but oh, the pain in it! Which is why Jesus seems the perfect story to me, the story that contains all stories. And yet the inanity of most discourse on Christian radio—I live in Kansas right now most of the year, and it is the majority of radio stations—is enough to make you want to blow your brains out.
You mentioned miracles, and earlier I said I thought we needed a miracle. I shared that answer with someone close to me, the idea that it would take a miracle at this point, and she said “Whew, that’s rough.” Later, though, she said she thought I was right. But I think I was also wrong. I do think it will take a miracle. But if there is to be a miracle, the miracle will happen through us. Of course, right? We must accept that it is not in our control. It will take a miracle beyond our power. But it won’t happen without us. If there is to be a miracle, it will happen through us. We must be the miracle we want to see.
