University of Arizona Poetry Center

Two Local Poets with Recent Publications Share Their Process

Shelly Taylor

I write because I've never figured out any other way to be in the world. How very serious of me!—but it's quite true. I write to put the world—I guess I'm saying my world really—in order, to set things right almost in the same way I obsess over cleaning the house even when it doesn't need it, or anything that's second nature to a personality. Process is a weird thing to try to discuss. It took me like four-odd years to make a book I named Black-Eyed Heifer which is just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Relooking at the book now, I can tell you exactly what I was reading during the times of writing the poems, or where I was living, what sort of life ordeal played into the writing thereof. Everything around my body/my life is in the poems. Like “Keylight”: I was heavily obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway & had freshly moved to NYC in the middle of summer when the drummer Max Roach had just passed away setting radio stations ablaze—all that energy I felt from all those & many sources are in that poem. “In subtropic” was written during monsoon Tucson & huge life-changing stuff—& I think you get the feeling of that when reading the poem; the smells of the rain, at least, & life being cut off from old becoming new—the way the almost-never rain can make you feel.

I'm attempting to write a second book now & the process is much the same. I recently turned on the TV to VH1 where they were airing a 2010 Dirty South Hip Hop Awards show & a lot of the feel of that music (which is where I'm from) & the language got appropriated. Later on that day I was thinking about weight, which somehow made me think of Karen Carpenter which made me Google her, & then I found Todd Haynes' Barbie Doll reenactment (now something of a cult classic) of her life called “Superstar” which is so dern interesting, & from there I found out Carpenter sang that song “A Song for You” which I just love & have on a Willie Nelson “Honeysuckle Rose” record that I've played over & over the last couple months 'cause it's meaningful to my life right now, & yes, all of this is in one poem (which is not very long as you might think), which I have yet to finish, which I'm sure will pick up a million more things around me until I call it ready. Texture, layering, & density I do enjoy. You see this everywhere in other media as well—whether fashion or via painting, a thick layering of the unlike is best in my mind at this juncture in life, though I need a crispness as well—variation being most important. I am into religious text here lately, so a couple recent poems picked up language from the Bible (I don't relegate to just this Christian text—I use various sources), in order to integrate from it that which is pertinent to my life. A writer can steal, borrow, or use anything. That's it for me. It's second skin is what I guess I'm saying, & everything is fair game if it speaks to you.

Desert and Daughters in Bloom by Simmons Buntin

Of the many landscapes in which I've lived—from the scarps of the Colorado Front Range to the subtropical forests of central Florida, from the hardwood hills of Maryland to the dense greenery of Alabama—none has inspired me as much as the Sonoran Desert. I've lived in Tucson for the past decade. But I first fell for the harsh beauty of this prickly landscape as a boy, when I wandered the washes of the Catalina foothills off of River Road, then later explored the ruins of Fort Lowell Park when we moved "in town." It's a cliché but one worth its weight in gold to say that the desert gets in your blood, and I don't mean Valley Fever, though there's that dark side of the desert, too. In fact, the beautiful and often treacherous line between light and dark is what makes the desert most compelling for me.

The poems in my newest collection of poetry, Bloom, are both set in and inspired by the light and dark moods of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. They are likewise inspired by community and family—mostly my two daughters, Ann-Elise and Juliet, who despite their occasional complaints play starring roles. I find myself most intrigued by the intersection between desert and daughters—the interaction of wildlife and arroyo, neighborhood and mountain, and how we move through and so are moved by these elements. For example, the poem "Shine" traces an evening with my daughters at the Arizona/Sonora Desert Museum tracking scorpions with an ultraviolet light. We return home to find a dead coral snake on the dimly lit street next to our house. We find "eyes open and shining, jaw heavy / with venom, the coral snake's body / is bent upon itself, rolled tight from the quick black / wheels of the day." The realization is that even the sharpest and most venomous of creatures is exposed in one way or another in this harsh landscape. Indeed, aren't we all?

But exposure is not the role, at least not the sole role, of poetry. Beyond revealing, there's the revelation, and what I strive for in the 37 poems of Bloom is what Alison Hawthorne Deming praises in the book as a "celebration of nature, family, and the healing power of beauty." As the editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, I've come to find that our built and natural worlds are not separate, just as an individual person is never truly separate from community. Nature informs family, family informs community, community informs nature. In the end, when we are lucky or perhaps of a higher grace, we find (from the poem "Shower") what my daughter discovered when she released an afternoon's gathering of ladybugs into our house: the open room of your heart, too, will be filled with the bloom of "pure red joy."