Storyteller of the Week

 Marilyn L. Taylor

  

MARILYN L. TAYLOR, Ph.D., former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and of the city of Milwaukee, is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems, published by Kelsay Books in December, 2021. 

Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Able Muse, Measure, Light, Rhino, Aesthetica, Mezzo Cammin, and the Potcake Chapbook poetry series. She has been awarded First Place in a number of national and international poetry contests, including the Margaret Reid Award for verse in forms from Winning Writers. Her own widely-read “Poet to Poet” column on craft appeared bi-monthly for five years in The Writer magazine. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Third Wednesday and Verse-Virtual poetry journals.

Marilyn was raised in Whitefish Bay, went to West High School in Madison, but lived for 40 years in Milwaukee, where she taught poetry for the English Department and the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Following the death of her husband Allen in 2012, she moved to Madison, where she continues to  write, teach, and spend time hobnobbing with some of the extraordinary poets who also call Wisconsin home.

She lives with her poet-husband Dave Scheler, and is fortunate enough to have a brilliant son (Reed), an equally brilliant daughter-in-law (Jessica), and two splendid grandsons: Max, age 9, and Finn, 6.  They live in Pittsburgh.

She facilitates independent poetry workshops, readings, and presentations locally, statewide, and elsewhere.  These have included programs sponsored by Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden Seminar Center in Baileys Harbor, WI, Poetry by the Sea in Madison, Connecticut, Western Colorado University (Gunnison, CO); West Chester University Poetry Center; UW-Madison’s Writers Institute; Road Scholars at  Green Lake, Wisconsin; and the recently discontinued Write by the Lake summer conference sponsored by the UW Division of Continuing Studies.  She is currently leading Zoom workshops for the Wisconsin Writers Association. 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Marilyn L. Taylor has been one of my idols since I first read her poems on Verse-Virtual almost a decade ago. Her many publications are listed in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Taylor

I found her poems in Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry and AllPoetry.

I know nothing about writing sonnets and tercets and all the forms Marilyn writes in so effortlessly and skillfully, but I do know that the stories she tells either make me laugh or cry and sometimes in the same sentence. She has a quick wit and is an astute observer of the human condition. She has her own signature style and yet, each poem is one of a kind.  Her stories are so clever, creative, authentic and relatable that I feel like I have lived them.

I am happy to publish some of my favorite Marilyn L. Taylor poems which shows her incredible range in writing autobiographical, fiction, free verse and formal verse.

Reading the Obituaries

Now the Barbaras have begun to die,
trailing their older sisters to the grave,
the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye
just days ago, it seems, taking their leave
a step or two behind the hooded girls
who bloomed and withered with the century—
the Dorotheas, Eleanors and Pearls
now swaying on the edge of memory.
Soon, soon, the scythe will sweep for Jeanne
and Angela, Patricia and Diane—
pause, and return for Karen and Christine
while Nancy spends a sleepless night again.
     Ah, Debra, how can you be growing old?
     Jennifer, Michelle, your hands are cold.



Home Again, Home Again

The children are back, the children are back—
They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack;
The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad,
Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.

The city apartment is leaky and cold,
The landlord lascivious, greedy and old—
The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted,
The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.

The company caved, the boss went broke,
The job and the love-affair, all up in smoke.
The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock—
O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.

And so they return with their piles of possessions,
Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions,
Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens,
Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.

Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother
Don’t say a word, but they look at each other
As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.
The children are back.  The children are back.


Cecelia and Bobby: a Tale of Love Gone Wrong

At twenty years of age, Cecelia fled
her cozy bedroom in her father’s house,
became her bashful boyfriend Bobby’s spouse,
and plopped her body next to his in bed.

Ham-hocks in one hand, cupcakes in the other
she overdosed her Bobbykins with edible
delights—until he threw her out. Incredible?
He said it felt like bingeing with his mother.

The town’s still talking after all these years
about the way Cecelia dried her tears,
and drove her little Subaru to Sears
to buy a set of barbecuing spears--

and how proficiently she did the job
of turning Bobby into Shish-ka-Bob.


First Day in London
                    
Notice how my voice has changed!
My vowels have broadened overnight;
Comes forth my syntax re-arranged
And all my r’s are out of sight.
 
I’ll chat you up, I’ll mind the gap,
I’ll not forget my bumbershoot;
I’d love to stay till Boxing Day—
My haversack is in the boot!
 
Let’s find a pub in Leicester Square;
We’ll down a pint, or maybe two,
Then toss a busker half a quid
And lose it on the Bakerloo.
 
I know. I know.  It’s jolly clear
You’ll never take me for a Brit—
My accent?  Just a tribute band
That’s longing for a cover hit.

Tercets from the Train
    Human dramas implode without trace.  —Marge Piercy

Gorgeous, they are gorgeous, these two women getting
    on the train, one in lime green silk, black hair
        a mile wide, the other slim as a whip, coiled

in red linen. Their two small boys, grinning,
    have squirmed into facing seats, bubbling with spare
        energy, the cuffs of their designer jeanlets rolled

at the ankles, their studded shirts glinting.
    I overhear the women talking over what to wear
        to some convention (should it be the gold

Armani or the St. Laurent?) while the boys are gazing
    through the rain-spattered window, practicing their
        locomotive lingo in shrill, five-year-old

voices, demanding information: are we going
    faster than a plane, where is the engineer,
        does this train have electricity or coal?

But the women’s eyes are fierce, they are grumbling
    over Lord & Taylor, which was once a store
        to be reckoned with, although the one with wild

hair points out that even Bloomingdale’s is growing
    more K-Martish than it ever was before.
        Don’t you interrupt me, child,

she hisses to the boy who wonders why the train is grinding
    so slowly through the towns, and where
        the bathroom is and what the ticket-man is called

until she bends over him, glaring
    from beneath her shadowed eyes, a crimson flare
        on either cheek. You’re interrupting me, she growls.

Now you’ll be sorry. His mouth is gaping
    as the flat of her hand splits the air,
        annihilating two long rows of smiles.

I warned you, didn’t I, darling?
    Now don’t you dare cry. Don’t you dare.
        Up and down the aisle, the silence howls.
                        

How Aunt Eudora Became a Post-Modern Poet

A girl is not supposed to write that way
(the teachers told her in the seventh grade)--
you ought to find more proper things to say.

For instance, there’s no reason to portray
your daddy sucking gin like lemonade—
young girls are not supposed to write that way.

And we don’t care to read an exposé
of how your mama gets the grocer paid;
there ought to be more proper things to say.

Why not write about a nice bouquet
of flowers, or a waterfall, instead?
You cannot be allowed to write the way

you did, for instance, when your Uncle Ray
was entertaining strangers in his bed,
and what the county sheriff had to say.

Why put such vulgar passions on display?
You’re going to regret it, I’m afraid—
remember, you’re a girl.  So write that way!
Go find yourself some proper things to say.


“Reading the Obituaries” originally appeared in The Formalist; “Home Again, Home Again” in Ars Poetica,  “Tercets from the Train” in the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, York University (Toronto, CA),  “First Day in London” in Light Poetry Magazine, Summer/Fall 2016, “Cecelia and Bobby: a Tale of Love Gone Wrong,” and “How Aunt Eudora Became a Post-Modern Poet,” in Verse-Virtual.
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