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Josh McNey (joshmcney.com)
Richard Tayson's books are The World Underneath, The Apprentice of Fever , which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Look Up for Yes, memoir of the inimitable and intrepid Julia Tavalaro. A New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Tayson has received a Pushcart Prize and is currently a Chancellors Fellow in the PhD program in English at City University of New York's Graduate Center where he is writing about William Blake's influence on American avant-garde culture.

His essay "Before Anarchy" appears in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (U. Wisconsin Press 2009). In the April 30 issue of Time Out New York magazine, he was asked "How are you most like your diva." After considering that in her acceptance speech for her 1972 Grammy Award Helen Reddy said, "I would like to thank God because She makes everything possible," he responds: "Helen Reddy embodies one reality I see in myself: bipolarity! She projected both a fortitude beneath the frailty, as well as a power lurking under the chiffon and eye shadow. I always thought she'd either dissolve into water or burgeon into a sudden roar.... Like when I wake up and wonder who I'll be on any given day."


"Reading Richard Tayson's The World Underneath rejoices my heart and gives me a little hope for both humanity and poetry. I read with awe the sequence in which this gay poet attends his sister-in-law's home delivery of a son, after flying "over one of the nineteen states/ that still puts people like me/in prison. O Texas, O Tennessee,/ sweet Georgia with your one-to-twenty/ years felony." Tayson's language is fast-moving, passionate, compassionate--alive with physical, spiritual and political detail that makes him heir to Muriel Rukeyser."
Alicia Suskin Ostriker

"Richard Tayson sees the world through the eyes of a man dedicated to love. His poems walk the walk of a poet willing to open that world and look at it for what it is, its joys and terrors, even when he must look at his own dark insides. I especially rejoice for his poems of intimacy and friendship with women, women who he sees not as 'other,' but as people struggling with the same concerns that he has. This sensibility is a rare contribution to our literature! In The World Underneath, the poems are all love poems whose beauty and authority convince me of the depth of the poet's journey. His poems are easy to enter--you may feel that you are talking to a best friend--so easy to enter you might not notice the twin knives of truth and lyricism they have been held up to."
Toi Derricotte"

"Richard Tayson's The World Underneath is a series of passionate visions, stunning in their directness and emotional power. They bear witness to birth and the body's miracles, to homophobic violence and unspeakable losses, and to the tensile strength of love and loyalty that connects us against the odds. Awe and fierce anger sing in these poems, as the questing spirit in them seeks to grow large enough to include us all."
Joan Larkin


"It's a rare treat when a poet achieves such mature work as these gritty poems, celebrating his epiphanic moments, among them the miracles of childbirth and his life with his lover. Even his dark rage against the injustice of homophobic violence comes not out of weakness but from strength. What makes The World Underneath satisfying is how the poems burst into flame, into verbal explosions, scattering a glitter of magic."
Edward Field

"Tayson takes us inside the mind of one character, then moves us toward the actions and responses of other characters, and finally into a sort of beatific world-mind. . . .While moving through bodies and time and space, while exploring the world underneath facile surfaces, the reader is brought face-to-face with mortality, hate, and complacency, but also with compassion, understanding, and the higher self."
Lambda Book Report

READING SCHEDULE

New York
July 14
Word for Word Poetry Series
Bryant Park, New York City

June 16
Jackson Heights Library
35-51 81st Street, Queens, 6:30

May 13
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
with Michael Montlack, Mark Wunderlich, Michael Broder, and Tim Liu
LGBT Center, New York City
http://www.outprofessionals.org/op/248

RECENT PAST READINGS, 2008-09
Ohio
Kent State University
Wick Poetry Center 25th Anniversary Celebration
November 17-18, 2008

Illinois
Chicago
AWP Conference
Feb. 13, 2009
Kent State U. Press & Wick Poetry Center
Encouraging New Voices

New Jersey
November 6, 2008
Highland Park Public Library

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
U.S.1 Reading Series
Princeton Public Library
with Alicia Ostriker

New York
February 15, 20084pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY

February 20, 2008
Radio show: The Moe Green Poetry Hour
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3

February 25
New School University

March 15
The Ear Inn

June 12
Briarwood Library of the Queens Public Library

July 12
Interview: NPR's "Poetry Off the Shelf"
Whitman's sexuality causes East Village bar-room brawl
http://podcastdownload.npr.org

July 28, 8pm
Living Theater
21 Clinton Street
with Jan Clausen, Steve Turtell, Wanda Phipps

Colorado
April 21
University of Colorado, Denver

April 22
University of Northern Colorado
Earth Day Celebration
With Colorado Poet Laureate, Mary Crow

April 24
Colorado State University, Fort Collins
MFA Writing Series
NY Times Review 1997
Queens Chronicle Profile 2008
NY Times Profile 1997
Queens Tribune Profile 2008
Whitman Bar Fight: NPR 2007
Moe Green Poetry Hour 2008
Time Out New York 4.30.09
First Night (poem)
The Casualties of Walt Whitman
Back Down to Earth (essay)
Arms (poem)
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