Mark Trainer

Recently I went to the Washington Arts Club to hear a reading given in honor of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, a brand new collection from LSU Press of the poems of Eleanor Ross Taylor.  After a day of writing and child wrangling, it can be hard to downshift into poetry-reading mode.  (And let's face it, sometimes you wish you hadn't.)  But this one was well worth the effort. 

I first met Eleanor Taylor in the early '90s when I worked for her husband Peter Taylor.  I was such a fan of his work, that I gave little attention at the time to hers.  And certainly she never asked for it.  An esteemed poet in her younger years (Randall Jarrell, in accepting The National Book Award for poetry, suggested it ought to have gone to Eleanor Taylor's book instead) she put aside writing to raise her children so as not to have the one compete with the other.  Let's leave the question of that decision's wisdom to future dissertation authors.  But it was not the decision of a great artistic ego, to be sure.  She eventually resumed her slow and steady output in her quiet way.

At the Washington Arts Club, poets Jean Valentine and Dave Smith read from the new collection.  I picked up a copy and have been dipping into in the couple of weeks since the event.  I've thought more than once about how Dave Smith (who acquired Eleanor Taylor's books for LSU Press) described her work.  He said that when he played tennis, his standing rule--no matter the opponent--was "No quarter given, none asked for."  Eleanor Taylor, he said, wrote poetry by the same rule.  Introductions at readings can be pretty over-the-top, but there was truth to this one.  Here's one of the new poems in Captive Voices.

Disappearing Act

No, soul doesn't leave the body.

My body is leaving my soul.
Tired of turning fried chicken and
coffee to muscle and excrement,
tired of secreting tears, wiping them,
tired of opening eyes on another day,
tired especially of that fleshy heart,
pumping, pumping.  More,
that brain spinning nightmares.
Body prepares:
disconnect, unplug, erase.

But here, I think, a smallish altercation
arises.
Soul seems to shake its fist.
Wants brain?  Claims dreams and nightmares?
Maintains a codicil bequeaths it shares?

There'll be a fight.  A deadly struggle.
We know, of course, who'll win...

But who's this, watching?