Creating new bridges between memory and life

In "To Let the Sun," poet and UM-Dearborn Writing Center Coordinator John Taylor looks candidly at the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. But his first full-length poetry collection is not so much a book about trauma as it is a book that integrates trauma into its pages, in many ways mirroring Taylor's own process as he moves forward through his life. The power of Taylor's endeavor was recognized by his favorite poet, Patricia Smith, when she selected his manuscript as a finalist for the University of Arkansas' Miller Williams Poetry Prize, an award that includes publication. "To Let the Sun" was released last spring. Taylor spoke with Reporter about the book over the summer.

The University of Arkansas Press' Miller Williams Poetry Prize is a big deal! How did you feel when you found out you were a finalist and that the press would be publishing your book?

I felt, I guess, overwhelmed. I knew that it took some people a long time, and some people whose manuscripts I absolutely loved were not finding homes for their books. I knew that intellectually, so I tried to be patient, but I was sending the book out for five years. So I think the thing that I felt was relief, a little bit, because it had finally happened, and I had been wanting it to happen for so long.

I got a call from a number I didn't recognize, of course, and I was watching cat videos on my phone and ignored the call. I go to see what this person is trying to sell me in my voicemail and I realize it's Patricia Smith calling me, who is my favorite living poet. I called her right back, and she was so kind and generous, and it was very much talking to a hero. It was pretty phenomenal to get a call from her.

This feels like an incredibly true account, as I imagine it, of what progressing from a trauma like you endured looks like. There's not this idyllic "before" - you make that really clear - and there is a horrific "during," but that's not the only thing. And there isn't this triumphant "after," which is what you sometimes see in these types of stories. What I really took away from this book is that, step by step and moment by moment, you have found and are in the continuous process of finding ways to move forward. How does it feel to you?

The truth of the matter is that I would have had a different answer for that question maybe every year for the last 10 years that some of these poems were being written. I haven't always believed the same thing about what poetry is to trauma or to memory. It changes just like everything else changes. What I come back to a lot in writing and in thinking about the book now that it's finished, published and out into the world, is a real divide between myself and the speaker of the poems. The speaker of the poems is me, right? Obviously, there's a poem in the book called "Johnny." Drawing the speaker close to the author in that regard was important, rhetorically and poetically, oftentimes throughout the book.

More than that, the speaker of the poems - I often ask him to do things that I haven't yet done for myself. I've been asked before if writing is therapeutic. And my answer is, "Absolutely not. It's terrible." There are times when I know I can come to the poem and write it, and it's very rarely when I'm in a place of angst or anxiety. Those are not moments when poetry is therapeutic for me. I tend to come to poetry when I'm in a place of safety and of calm. Or, not necessarily safety, but I am in my own brain, and I'm not being pulled out of it.

One of the earliest poems in the book where I address something head on is the poem where the speaker is in bed with his partner and addresses the abuser and says, "Look where I am." That was not a memory. I wasn't writing that poem from the next morning, thinking, "Look how beautiful last night was." That was a poem where I was trying to put this speaker into a place where I wanted to be, and I would say that - and this is where perhaps we leave poetry and get into psychology and therapy and self - I did get there. My hope is that poetry helps others see themselves or write themselves into places where they haven't yet been but intend to go.

That is really interesting and important, this idea that the poem can be ahead of you.

I often feel that way. I write from memory a lot, of course, but the poem isahead of you. I really like how that sounds.

I've been searching for the right word, if there is one, for what I believe I'm witnessing happen in this book. I recognize words like "healing" and "recovery" may not be what you have in mind. What words ring true to you and what words don't?

There was certainly a time where I felt much pickier about the words people use to describe things. But the word itself isn't the issue. It's the context, right? So I'd love to imagine that these poems are about recovery, and I'd love to imagine that these poems are about healing, but I think both of those terms, contextually, have a lot of expectations of the poet and of the speaker. And it makes things like anger or a step back or a sadness or a grief feel like regression, feel like walking away from healing, whereas the language that I think about for myself now is something like "process integration."

Maybe "integration" is kind of a boring word, but because I was interested in transparent psychology and thinking about what I was doing in therapy and what I was doing in my poetics, I wanted to know: How do I address these things in the past that happened to me and that I want to write about and through and away from? What does that look like? What tools do I use, and what is available to me to recover or to get better or to have fewer of these symptoms? And the answer, for me anyway, was reintegrating the parts of your mind that have been fractured away from you by trauma. That was a very helpful way of thinking about what trauma can do to memory and to the mind, and why flashbacks function as they do. You have these neural pathways where you get these direct connections back to these untethered memories that are traumatic experiences.

For me, both in therapy and in poetry, it was really helpful to think about: How can I create new bridges between this memory and the rest of my life, where I am not out of control when I experience a so-called trigger? Sometimes folks will ask me why I used a certain image in the book. Like, "what does bread-making mean to trauma?" Or, "what does a hermit crab mean to trauma?" And the answer is, nothing, because there's only one or two instances in the book where there is a true, honest to God, real trigger of my own personal life that I actually transcribe into the text. Those are things that are painful for me and they are not useful to me. What is useful to me is creating new concrete images and new ideas and binding those memories and those feelings to new images and experiences.

So this is the type of progress we're witnessing, but what we're also witnessing is that it is happening incrementally over time. That seems important, because when you talk about students and other readers and other people who've had traumatic experiences, it's telling them that this is what it really looks like. You're not going to emerge as a superhero. It's going to happen slowly.

I think that's exactly right. Something that I am aware of right now, when I'm working with students who are writing through difficult subject matter, is it feels like a very particular moment in time with the way that positivity has been weaponized and made into a product on social media.I know the types of influencers, so to speak, that they are encountering on social media and that type of thinking, that all-or-nothing thinking, in these online environments.

I have my students write a form called the mosaic essay, and it essentially asks them to write in scenes with anecdotes and using different genres, different voices and resisting transition. I think those types of writing exercises can be really useful for students who are stuck in these ideas of simplicity and positivity, because those aren't real. And when students try to write them out, they end up getting through 300 words and feeling like, "I want to feel this way. I will feel this way. And if I don't, all is lost," and that's not how really anything works. And so when they get into it, and they start writing, and they bring in different voices and ideas, and they resist the urge to bridge concepts, to say, "This is happening because of this," and just put the two things next to each other without explanation, they're getting closer to what we actually experience in our lives, which is a lot of jumble. It's the writer's job to make sense of that.

Interview by Kristin Palm

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