ABOUT Chuck Taylor
Chuck Taylor CHUCK TAYLOR, a Texas Yankee reared in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, and North Carolina, won the Austin Book Award for his collection, What Do You Want, Blood? He has worked in the Poets- in-the-Schools program, been a CETA poet in Salt Lake City, operated a used bookstore, worked in the laundry of a hospital, labored for the Terrill State Mental Hospital and the Texas School for the Deaf, owned a small press, and is the former Coordinator of Creative Writing at Texas A&M University. Conversations with the poet Lucien Stryk in 1967 stimulated his interest in Asian culture and he was able to work and study in Japan from 1991-94. Married three times, he has three children, three stepchildren, and six grandchildren. Vincent, Chuck Taylor dreams, has red hair and he embraces him as his alter ego.”
“Chuck Taylor’s Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon presents a fusion of eastern and western sensibilities in a series of image-filled meditations, some long, some short, on a life rich with a variety of experiences. Two characters dominate— Vincent, the impressionistic visionary, and Li-Po himself, who is reinvented as Vincent’s mirror or foil. Nature is infused with light and human relationships are shot through with darkness in these bold, exploratory poems.”
—Janet McCann, author of Emily’s Dress
“Chuck Taylor brazenly borrows the clear, wise, and consistently wry voice of the ancient poet Li-Po to speak of life, love, and fatherhood in the 21st Century. Using the synonymous name and voice of another character, Vincent, Taylor brings the reader the angst of guilt and regret of a failed relationship with a daughter poignantly reminiscent, in tone to W. D. Snodgrass’s iconic, Hearts Needle. The honesty that embodies these poems touching the many aspects of one man’s reflections on the many mistakes and successes that a fully lived life always brings will resonate with any reader. This book, like the “box of jewels” in the ending verse of his poem, Li-Po’s, appears to hold, “copies of every poem / he floated / all those years /down river.”
—Dave Parsons, author of Editing Sky, and Color of Mourning
A few poems from
Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon
by Chuck Taylor
Li-Po’s Fin
Fresh from the waters she rose, all
lambent and dewy, and he leaped from
his boat, tipsy in love, hoping to
hold her, to get her to promise never
to go again to the heavens, but hang
by his garden with the squash and the
melons where she and he could sign
drunken poems and laugh at the stars.
It was no moon, you fools, in the slow
waters of the Yangtze. It was my first
love, the teasing girl from up the road
whose hand a summer’s day I clutched
behind my fathers’ shed in a moment forever…
Tanka
As the wind stirs dark
post oak leaves bathing in the
sad November rain
in the dying light of dusk,
so leaves of love dark will stir
Tanka for Clair
A bright ardent moon
I just can’t be, pushing through
Night clouds, confident
As ships plowing calm waters
Heading for ports of profit.
Copyright © Pecan
Grove Press,
1997-2003
For further information contact
H. Palmer
Hall.
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Internet Navigating
Most recent revision
November 11, 2003
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