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Josh McNey (joshmcney.com)
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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). His essay "Joan Larkin and the Politics of Lesbian Inclusion" appears in the Summer 2009 issue of Pleiades. In this essay, Tayson asks "to what degree queer poets—both female and male—traffic in tactics of exclusion in our work? Is there, as many lesbians avow, a disparity between the inclusion of gay men in lesbian poetry and a lack of images of lesbians in gay male poetry? What can the state of our poetry tell us about gays and lesbians in relation to each other? Are these two groups as separate as a cursory view of the landscape implies?. . . .Edited by Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell, and published in 2000, The World In Us includes an equal number of female and male poets (twenty-three of each), some of whom are among the best poets writing today. But what I discovered is that of the 103 poems by men there are a paltry five references to lesbians. The first appears on page five in Mark Bibbins’ “Mud”; but you have to wait 181 pages to find the second, in Timothy Liu’s “Strange Fruit,” a poem concerning a hate crime perpetrated against a lesbian couple. Of the three other poems which include lesbians, only one, David Trinidad’s “Moonstones”—dedicated to Joan Larkin—focuses on lesbian lives. More often than not, women are presented as family figures (with “mother” garnering twenty-two citations, “grandmother” four, and “aunt” two), or as camp / cult icons, Jackie Onassis, Marlo Thomas, Ann Landers, Connie Stevens, Susan Hayward among them. The names of these camp / cult figures appear ten times, twice the number of times one finds lesbians in these pages. Perhaps the most disturbing observation is that this trend extends across all demographics—race, age, state of residence—indicating how entrenched and pervasive is the exclusion of lesbians in the poetry by gay men."
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"In an age when confessional poetry and the lyric are under greater pressure to submit to the disjunctive, it is ever more pleasing to return to a voice such as Richard Tayson's. . . .There is a golden relief just at the edges of these poems. Figuratively, Tayson frames them with the image of gold. Like Giotto, these scenes of human struggle take on spiritual dimensions. Tayson is sqarely a Humanist, with compassion for those just born and those yet to come."
Walter Holland, Pleiades, Summer 2009 "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
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READING SCHEDULE
New York
Friday, October 16
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
Graduate Center, English Program
(entrance on 5th Avenue, between 34th & 35th)
Room 4409, 4-6 PM
Michael Montlack (on Stevie Nicks), Wayne
Koestenbaum (on Anna Moffo),
Mark Doty (on Grace Paley), Jason Schneiderman
(on Liza Minnelli)
and Richard Tayson (on Helen Reddy).
Q/A and Reception to follow.
Friday, October 30, 7pm
New York University
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
Scott Hightower, Paul Lisicky, Michael Montlack,
Michael Schiavi, and Richard Tayson
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
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
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
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
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