A Spotlight On...

Ellen Taylor

An interview with The Aroostook Review's Editor-in-Chief,
Geraldine Cannon Becker

AR: Thank you for talking with us, Ellen. Would you tell readers about your connections to Maine?

Taylor: My maternal grandmother comes from Owl’s Head, outside of Rockland. “Irish Mary,” as she was known as a school girl, moved to Framingham MA as a young child, but she always told great stories about her family home on Ash Point, “the first house with a picture window.” Her grandparents had emigrated from Ireland and ended up in Maine via Nova Scotia.

I grew up in New Hampshire, and my nautical parents have spent much of their retired lives sailing around Penobscot Maine, so I don’t feel too much “from away.” That said, when I go back to visit my siblings (all six of them live within 20 miles in the Portsmouth area,) I’m overwhelmed by the traffic, the congestion, the noise of it all.

One of my favorite things about living where I do in Maine (Appleton), is the quiet . . . this morning the bobolinks woke me up, in the night I can hear peepers and owls. It’s quiet enough in the winter to hear the snow fall. This air, uncluttered with humanity’s noise, is a precious resource much of the world doesn’t enjoy.

AR: Indeed…

Taylor: I love the space, the wild landscapes. The farm where I live rises up to the blueberry barrens, and the view there is relatively unchanged since the mid 19 th century. Many people still heat with wood, and on a cold spring morning we can see the smoke from the chimneys rising into the air. It’s a very simple pleasure.

My least favorite thing about Maine is a partner of my most favorite – the yin and yang of preferences – the geography here makes travel out of state difficult. To get to any event in New England requires a few days away, unless one is willing to be in the car for eight hours, which I am not. [but people in Aroostook country really know what this means. . . ]

AR: Oh, yes! I can certainly attest to that, especially having just returned from the Terry Plunkett Poetry Festival at the University of Maine at Augusta.

Taylor: Every April UMA hosts the Terry Plunkett Maine Poetry Festival, named for a beloved UMA professor and poet. We have a wonderful planning committee that spends nine months of the year on this – We typically have readings on Friday evening, with an opening reception, and then all day on Saturday. We try and include a number of voices, of both new and established poets; open microphone; UMA’s vocal quartet; our jazz ensemble. It’s really a celebration of language and the community.

AR: My daughters, my husband and I really enjoyed ourselves and we certainly felt welcomed. One topic that kept coming up was “Poetry and the Economy.” What are your thoughts on this, Ellen?

Taylor: We had a panel discussion on this, which was very provocative, at the festival this year. In the United States there is this accepted notion that poets are poor, perfectly happy living in cold water apartments, with limited heat, drinking cheap wine and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Or that they are tragic suicidal figures who dress in black and write about pain. The reality is we have a number of very happy, funny poets, who live healthy lives and raise children and have never worn a beret.

We just don’t see our poets. They are not part of our cultural landscape. They aren’t in People magazine, next to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They aren’t guest judges on American Idol. Who is our Poet Laureate these days? Who knows? Who cares? In parts of Central and South America, poets are like rock stars . . . they fill soccer stadiums when they read; they are quoted in local papers with their thoughts on current events. Here we simply don’t value our poets.

That said, no one I know writes because he or she wants to be famous. Most of us write because we find the craft gives us pleasure, like some people whittle, and because we have something to say. We’re happy when an editor agrees, and publishes something; we’re joyous when we get a book out. We don’t write for the money, but it would be wonderful if poetry were valued more culturally, so people would buy a book as often as they go see a movie.

AR: I agree! Speaking of cultural landscapes… What are your thoughts on electronic publishing?

Taylor: This seems to be the direction of much print material. Personally, I prefer to have paper in my hand, to carry with me while I wait for my snow tires to come off, or for a doctor’s appointment. And there is the issue of quality control – though the same could be said for print – there are some very good electronic publications out there – TriVia, a celebration of women’s voices, is one of them.

AR: Yes. That may have been a bit of a tricky question, since we are an online journal. When we first started we had hopes of a “best of” print issue, too, but the economy has not allowed for that, so far. What of writing poetry and teaching?

Taylor: We poets who teach are very lucky. We actually get paid to spend time surrounded by words and students interesting in learning about them. I find many students enjoy the writing process, but many don’t do enough reading of others’ work, and haven’t yet discovered the pleasure of revision. Both activities are so important. To see what others are doing in our current culture, to keep language living and breathing. And once revision is embraced as part of what makes a poem sing, one’s writing improves enormously.

My best poetry teachers were the ones who encouraged; the worst were the ones who were overly critical. I try to strike a balance. I had a poetry professor in college who would come in the seminar room, take someone’s work out of his leather binder, drop it on the floor, and step on it like someone putting out a cigarette, “This is not a poem.” Horrible! We want to encourage one another, to be honest but hopeful, to give each other useful advice so we want to run right home and get back to our poems.

AR: Wonderful, Ellen! I usually ask about best and worst advice that writers have been given, and you’ve beaten me to it in your response.

Taylor: Read, Write, Revise. Most people just do the second. The best advice I was ever given was by my friend and neighbor, the lovely poet Kate Barnes. She always recommends reading poems out loud – and I do that now, because a poem does one thing on the page, and something else when you make it stand up and talk. The best poems live twice: they are interesting to look at, but also have a strong voice out loud.

Worse advice. Raw unrevised work has the best energy. Not.

AR: Workshops with you must be exciting. What are you currently working on, in terms of your own poems?

Taylor: Last fall after my new book was published I felt the need to do something a little different, and a friend of mine, Marie Harris, turned me on to the prose poem, and I am currently enamored with it. Because much of my poetry is narrative, this form seems to fit really well. And I also like the look of it – I’m not writing margin to margin prose poems, but shaping them into little boxes, like gift cards. I’ll include a few here at the end.

AR: Excellent. What are you reading? What might I find on your nightstand?

Neruda is always there – I love his Odes to Common Things - Ode to Table

                                                                                               —Pablo Neruda translated by Ken Krabbenhoft

AR: What will you read next?

This summer I want to get back to the work of Eduardo Galeano – because he writes these little prose pieces and now that I’m in my prose period - Picasso had a blue period, a rose period – I’m in my prose period.

An example from Galeano:

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

– Eduardo Galeano, "The Nobodies"^[8]

AR: I know what I’ll be reading next. I’m sure our readers will also appreciate your recent prose poems. Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts and poems with us. Click the links below to read two examples of Ellen Taylor’s recent prose poems. (A PDF reader is required to view the documents. The latest version of Adobe Reader® may be found here. Alternate PDF readers may be found via your favorite Internet search engine.)

Letter Nostalgia

My Father's Hands