Part of what poetry does at some fundamental level is reroute our attention. Its body of sound, visual and rhythmic shapes, expose our senses to heightened pressure, while the charge of its associations are able to tell us how much to think and feel about whatever we think and feel about through its various imageries. Or, as Victor Shlovsky said with much greater economy, “to make the stone stony again.” What compels in Tess Taylor’s poetry inevitably points to her craft and artifice, here in her new book Work and Days as well as her first collection The Forage House. In the previous, she explored her ancestry to Thomas Jefferson, to Virginia, the legacy of being a white body in the context of slavery and much else. Her new book propels attention, seemingly, on a much more concentrated, “innocent,” lyrically gorgeous and formal level—preternatural lyrics about the cycle of the seasons, the metaphors of spirit and consciousness. But I stand amazed at how much the literal ‘soil’ these poems were written while cultivating and attending to, form a continuity not a break from her previous grandly historical American book of poems. Scholar Nancy Isenberg’s new book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, helps give focus to my thoughts on Taylor’s austere, resonant and sometimes terrifying subjects: “Jefferson, too, wanted Americans tied to the land, with deep roots to their offspring, to future generations. Agrarian perfection would germinate: a love of the soil, no less than a love of one’s heirs, instilled amor patriae, a love of country.”

The more one reads through these formal, darkling poems, the more one shudders to realize her project—the wages of war, labor, ecological violence—is revealing yet further urgent contexts for poetry in 2016. I had the honor to touch upon some of these considerations with her recently over email.—Adam Fitzgerald

Adam Fitzgerald: I’m wondering who was the person that began writing the poems of Work & Days and whether or not she was the same person that finished writing that book? How much in common she has with the author of The Forage House?

Tess Taylor: Well, that’s a big question. In fact, the books overlap quite a bit — perhaps in a subterranean way. I like to think of the books as being written in linked modes — epic and georgic. When I received the honor of going to the Clampitt House, in the Berkshires, I’d been working on The Forage House in Brooklyn, Boston, and Virginia for four years. The Forage House is ambitious on a lot of levels: it leaps through time and space; it deals with difficult historical material gathered from archives; it talks about my own legacy as the descendant of a slaveholding family; it moves through centuries and across 3,000 miles, asking what stories contain and what they leave out. When I came to the Clampitt House, it was mostly done. But it was not finished.

Still, the thought of spending an entire retreat year finishing that nearly finished book was daunting. I thought: OK, I have this gift of time. I need to break it up, get exercise, meet people, feel part of this new world. I have always been an avid gardener. I grew up in Berkeley and worked teaching youth gardening skills at a community garden plot that became the template for Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard. I helped coordinate a community garden in Brooklyn. So I called the people who run the Clampitt Fellowship and I said, “Can you put me in touch with a community garden?” And they said, “Well now, this is a rural area. We don’t have gardens, but we do have farms. Would you like us to connect you with a farm?” And it began.

So while I was finishing the epic that was The Forage House, I was starting the work that led to the quieter bounded georgic that is Work & Days. By luck and stumbling I was learning a new art form: the cultivation of food. By March, I was out on a cold field, moving stones and cleaning up a greenhouse that was more like a tent frame covered in plastic wrap than any glass thing you might think of. By April I was shoving little seed trays around and watching the temperatures each night to guess when we might be safe to put a new crop out. I spent days whole days planting leeks and kale. There was an urgency and physicality to it. We had to be in symbiosis with the earth. We live in a time when weather is increasingly unpredictable, when the season yoyos up and down. But in this work we had to entrust our livelihoods to vicissitudes of weather. This was radical: You can have thought about global warming all you want, but when you’re the one gambling your life on the soil — well, there was something profound in that.

AF: This is making me want to ask about your childhood and home life. What kind of relationship did it have to food, organic or processed, farmed or locally sourced, big chain supermarkets of suburbia? Tell me a little about the world you came from and of the Taylor dinner table.

TT: It’s a mixed bag! I was born in Madison and moved outside Berkeley as a six-year-old. It was the eighties: we ate tuna fish casseroles, Campbell’s soup, canned vegetables, boiled Brussels sprouts. Unfancy, but I am lucky in that my mom is a genius at putting something practical, fast, and nutritious on the table each night. We ate together: that was ritual. We had some interesting foodways, too: my mom spent years in India and can make a very mean dal — lentil soup, chapatis, Indian vegetarian food. That food is practical, inexpensive, sustainable, filling — a wise food to share. And my southern grandma, my mom’s mother, was nearby. She is from hardscrabble North Carolina mountains. She and I cooked a lot together in the afternoons when she watched me. She made mean cheese stars, she made pie. They were working cooks. They knew about not wasting food — how old bread becomes bread pudding, how every chicken gets boiled to make broth, how to stretch a grocery bill. It was more practical housekeeping than Martha Stewart; it had real everyday reverence to it.

But it was the eighties and early nineties. Alice Waters was nearby, becoming this kind of unavoidable Berkeley cult. We Berkeley kids were in passionate conversations about how mass-produced meat is bad for animals and for us; how mass-produced vegetables are destructive to the soil, to people’s bodies, to the workers who harvest them. How what’s trucked in for a million miles tastes less good than what you can grow nearby. I always loved that in food you can see, when you take care of it well, that it gives you more pleasure and sustains you better. I liked the radically obvious fact that doing what’s better for the soil and the earth and the plant rewards you with the delicious. I like that pleasure is part of the equation.

This was my emergent social ecosystem. My friends and I took permaculture classes. My friends and I volunteered at farmer’s markets. The climate in Northern California makes it laughably easy to eat locally: by February we have new greens and citruses. But this was joyful. We love our greens. We love our satsumas.

Early on, I got interested in food justice issues. I used to get food for free or half off at the end of farmer’s markets and lived that way a long time. I have always hated that fresh food should be a province of those who are better off. I would love to feel that there is nothing yuppie about being able to eat well. Because, ideally, it shouldn’t be so: Ideally, we would have good fruits and vegetables woven into the fabric of our lives. Ideally, we’d have time to cook food that sustains us. Ideally, we’d have time for sustaining ourselves. This remains a foundational dream for me. It would be brilliant if our cities had edible landscape and foodshed and all our traffic medians were planted with fruit trees. I mean, what better use of space is there, really?

AF: What you recount is endearing and profound. And yet, I’m looking at the opening poems of Work & Days, with their crisp, stern wink at A. E. Housman, and the taut, surgical strike of the lines and stanzas. This is hardly “nature” poetry or “eco-minded” as uplift, as harvest jubilee or liberal optimism. In fact, as recurring titles and images indicate, there’s an apocalyptic shadow clinging to the ultrasound of your imagination. Which is to say, I’m wondering how the very focused experience that ended up generating the book, this encountering of earth, brought you a kind of lyrical sobriety and melancholia rather than not. (Is Masaccio’s Expulsion too melodramatic a parallel?)

TT: Yes. We live in that shadow, you know. There’s a line in the book: “It’s just apple picking against the apocalypse.” To be clear: I believe in the apples and the picking. Because what is life for but to savor the apples?  I believe that the pleasure of attending — really attending — can itself be revolutionary.

But — It’s just that on the field as I reveled in, say, the second week of ripe tomatoes, I was also so often aware of the terrible margins of that beauty — the way in which, even as I worked I was hearing about pregnant fieldworkers being sprayed with pesticides; about ice sheets melting; about drone strikes on someone else’s children. I kept remembering that at the edge of the pastoral or georgic there are always wars, always people coming home from wars, people being shattered in wars. War — the subject of the epic — is a great destroyer of plenty.

I’d note that rather than being the “mere beautiful” the field actually was a place from which to care. I’d think about how that news threaded through fields everywhere. How hunger, after all, is perhaps the most ravaging force we face. What we call “terrorism” may simply be hunger of others that we do not name as such. The field made me feel more urgent, more present. It became a center from which to focus my attention.

AF: The book opens with Hesiod — a rhetorical challenge about lingering. Can you talk to me about the importance his work, and that concept in particular toward rethinking the lyric in our moment?

TT: That quote is from Hesiod’s Theogony — a very long poem that’s about the birth of the Greek gods. It says: “But why linger? Why stay in this world of oak and tree and rock?” What is the value of our attention — to food, to work, to our bodies, to pleasure, to nature, to the fragile world — in this wildly distracted time? What value tending? What value attending? These are questions that drive the book and fascinate me.

Hesiod: ancient Greek poet, the figurehead of farm poetry. “Hesiod” may or may not have existed, in the way “Homer” may or may not have existed — that is to say, that poetry is may or may not be the work of an individual but is certainly the distillation of a culture, the writing down of an ancient oral tradition. What’s interesting about both of those poets is that they emerge out of the Greek Isles about 700 BC.  While Homer is famous for distilling the Odyssey — a poem about the epic journey, war, and nation building, Hesiod’s Works and Days, which is more poem-as-instruction manual — how to turn soil, when to plow, what stars to watch, how to raise cows, how to raise bees. Think of that: poem as instruction manual. Poem as way-of-learning to see and feel.

I come back to that opening question: Of what use attending? These years have been full of escalating, painful public crises. I do believe in the lyric — that small rhythmic, sonic, attention that is often a provisional built space hovering somewhere outside “real” time — can be fortifying. I have this friend who is a therapist who works with activists. And he often tries to help them find and fortify that space from which they might most strongly act. All year on the field, I moved stones. I moved the rubbly stones that fill the fields of New England — classic farm labor, necessary labor because New England is glacial moraine. But I also remember that “poem” comes from the Greek poein: to build up, to pile. A poem is a kind of building-up. And what if a lyric poem is the kind of building-up that we need in order to continue to face the rest our lives?

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Time passed in three-minute intervals at the Stonewall, give or take a few seconds. Cue “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (3 minutes, 44 seconds). Maybe Diana Ross and the Supremes sang “Stop! In the Name of Love” (2 minutes, 52 seconds) . . . Ten cents bought one song; a quarter paid for three. Dancers weaved in and out of spotlight beams, performing for the crowd. Men danced with men, often for the first time in their lives.

—from Ann Bausum’s Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall . . .

—from President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, 2013

The dancing turned to defiance at New York City’s Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, when a routine police raid triggered the riots that are regarded as the beginning of the Gay Pride movement. Within days there were sympathetic demonstrations in other major American cities; over the next few weeks a number of important gay publications and organizations were formed to lobby for the cause, and on the first anniversary of Stonewall the first Gay Pride parades were held.

The Orlando tragedy and reactions to it emphasize that the battle for acceptance and equality continues, but the half century since Stonewall has brought significant change, as measured not only by Obama’s comments but by the School Library Journal, describing Bausum’s Stonewall, the first history of gay rights aimed at young readers, as “an essential purchase.”

David Carter’s Stonewall describes the legendary events of June 28th in the style of an oral history, with recollections from many of those present: “Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us.” Lillian Faderman’s history The Gay Revolution places Stonewall within a larger framework, chronicling the earlier decades of homophobic persecution that fueled it, and the later decades of civic and legal challenges it fueled in turn.

Faderman’s book ends with the Supreme Court judgment in United States v. Windsor, rendered three years ago this week, which ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was in violation of the rights of same-sex couples — in this case, that Edie Windsor was not only denied the right to marry her decades-long partner, the psychologist Thea Spyer, but denied the spousal status that would have exempted her from paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate tax upon Spyer’s death. In Then Comes Marriage, Diane Kaplan, the lawyer representing Windsor, tells the full story of that landmark case as a tale of two generations, and a very personal journey. This begins with the moment Kaplan, upon her first meeting with the seventy-nine-year-old Windsor at the New York apartment she had shared with Spyer, opens the door to her own past:

The doorman sent me up, and as I knocked, I was expecting to be greeted by a nerdy elderly lesbian in a flannel shirt and comfortable shoes. But when Edie opened the door, I stared at her, dumbfounded. She was a knockout — a slender, impeccably dressed woman with a blond bob, a string of pearls, and perfectly manicured nails. It took me a moment to compose myself, but after Edie’s “Come in,” I followed her into the apartment. And then I was dumbfounded all over again. The apartment looked exactly as I remembered it from the summer of 1991, the first time I had been there . . . And as I looked at the chair where Thea had sat while I, sitting across from her, had poured out my fears, my heart began to pound.

Kaplan’s therapy sessions with Spyer in 1991 were triggered by her own coming-out as a lesbian at age twenty-four — her anguished admission to her horrified mother made on June 28th, as the Gay Pride Parade wound through the New York streets.

 

 

 

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Few things feel as secure as tucking a letter into an envelope, affixing a stamp, and dropping it into a post box. Go ahead and laugh, but remember: Harry Winston put $2.44 in postage on a box that contained the Hope Diamond and sent it to the Smithsonian through the mail. Club-wielding vandals may feel the drive-by slaughter of your mailbox is great fun, until they learn it is a federal offense; that’ll be $250,000 and three years in the jug — for each mailbox. Take heart, you felons: in 1792 and for many years after, you got the death penalty for messing with the mail.

The U.S. mail may now be the butt of a thousand jokes — thanks to a fiscally suicidal Congress and its own myopic mismanagement, as Winifred Gallagher will get to in How the Post Office Created America, her learned, stirring story of the institution — though the jokes are of recent vintage. The post, as it came to be known in the United States, became the central nervous system of the body politic — and a wonderfully subversive force, in its way. It was radically, directly democratic; it encouraged the exchange of ideas. It did what it could to create an informed electorate, bind the states, spur a juddering economy. It was the national commons long before a central bank, a transportation network, and a civil service — and it helped to birth all three of them. If Gallagher is right, the grassroots of that commons lies dormant under the woes of today’s post.

Postal systems go back 4,000 years to China — China is always first with the good stuff, like the compass, fireworks, and special delivery — and the Middle East. Gallagher, via Herodotus, tells us that Darius I sent couriers with clay tablets along a 1,600-mile network some 2,500 years ago. Herodotus also tells us that these couriers “are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.” (We have the translation of a Harvard professor to thank for the poetic “gloom of night.”) Though the Holy Roman Empire accepted paying customers, and seventeenth-century England and France opened the royal mail to the public, few could afford the service. The same held true for the British colonies. The swells would wait at the docks for the mail packet to deliver “the latest consumer goods, and especially news from the distant center of the universe.” They would retire to the merchant’s exchange, read their letters to one another, and the tidings would gradually filter to the unnumbered and unwashed.

There is where Gallagher finds the great departure of the American postal system from all others. In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied taxes on the American colonies for their upkeep. We know the result of that misstep, but what Gallagher teases out are the implications the act had on the colonial postal service. It went underground, bypassing the Crown’s mail and its prying eyes. Voilà: the Committees of Correspondence, a crucial aspect of which would morph into the Constitutional Post, which the Continental Congress of 1775 would transform into the Post Office Department of the United States. Benjamin Franklin’s association with the Postal Service is well earned, but it is George Washington who really nailed the institution’s promise: “The importance of the post office and post roads on a plan sufficiently liberal and comprehensive . . . is increased by their instrumentality in diffusion knowledge of the laws and proceedings of the government.”

Gallagher makes this case; it easy to nod in agreement with her opinion that the spirited crux of the American post is that “if a people’s republic were to work, the people had to know what was going on,” especially in a “sprawling, diverse, and thinly populated United States.” This is not patriotic pap, she argues. It is fundamental to participatory democracy and a sense of trust in government. Accordingly, it had to be financially accessible to all. And the post’s task would be Herculean, building a system of offices and roads, while at every turn having to assuage parochial paranoia as its nation building rubbed raw against states’ rights. Here is a government office, through the encouragement of journalism and the agency of communication, whose purpose is the dissemination of information to be churned into knowledge to chart – and to check — the course of that government.

Every garden, including those sown for sociability and illumination, has its cold-blooded reptiles. It wasn’t long before Andrew Jackson turned the post, which employed three-quarters of the government’s civilian workforce, into an “exercise in bald-faced political patronage,” trumping the service’s tradition of protecting competent employees. With the spoils system, the post office lost a lot of its chrome; still, the office’s history is high with color. Gallagher doesn’t break out the Crayolas, but she knows a good story when it bites her. There is the forward-thinking quality of rural free delivery (“Some of the most poignant tributes to the service concerned its impact on long-isolated rural people’s mental health”); the postal savings system, a.k.a. the poor man’s bank; parcel post to light a fire under the Depression; the nurturing of the aviation industry. There is the hiring of women and African Americans on a significant scale. There is the dead-letter office, possibly our nation’s most poetic archive. There is grand architecture (New Orleans), medium grand (Carson City, Nevada), and just fine (small-town clapboard and flower boxes), as well as the WPA post office murals. The Post Office delivered both the morning and evening newspapers (once upon a time), mail to lonely soldiers, and brown-paper parcels (“a notable Victorian enthusiasm. Anthony Comstock, a governessy former dry-goods clerk . . . and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, convinced Congress that the post was being used to promote degeneracy”).

And there is the backward and/or narrow thinking, both in-house and outhouse. In-house, Gallagher will count, in particular, a lack of visionary thinking, and an utter dropping of the electronic ball, from faxes to email. But what would torpedo the post’s potential loftiness was when legislators turned away from “the broad historical understanding of the post as an almost open-ended public service and began to recast it as a business.” The post was not going to make a profit, or even break even, if it was going to service the underserviced. Although the institution’s approach-avoidance conflict — “a push-pull reaction to something that poses both risks and rewards” — at the dawn of the digital age was a monumental failure, a pro-business, profit-expectant reorientation promises to be death by a thousand cuts (by rate capping, for instance, and requiring the prefunding of retirement income) or just a return to letter carrying being a mark of privilege.

Despite self-destructive and congressional efforts, the post office isn’t about to die. “The $68.9-billion-per-year enterprise is the world’s most productive postal system, handles 40 percent of its mail, and charges the lowest rates,” Gallaher shouts out, and it comprises “the nation’s second-largest civilian workforce (after Walmart).” Letter carriers visit more than 154 million addresses daily — and if that doesn’t warm your heart, contemplate getting one — and post offices remain a social hub, if a somewhat tarnished one. Gallagher’s history is vital, disputatious, and cheering at once — like the early Republic’s newspapers that served to justify so insurgent an operation — tackling public service, private enterprise, federal power, states’ rights, the value of a national infrastructure, the fruits of bipartisanship, and the constipation of regional and political polarization. Those are big themes indeed: ones that have, for better and worse, created America.

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