For today’s blog, I wanted to highlight a writer that I have learned much from and am still learning from. Sean Taylor, an award winner, is a comic writer, short fiction writer, poet, songwriter, pulp fiction writer, novelist among other ventures. Most of all, he has been a friend and mentor since I was in high school.
My first lessons from Sean were in songwriting, but many of those lessons still apply to poetry today. I remember a note he wrote on a lyric about a little girl dancing on the street: “I am interested. Tell me more.” That concept has always stuck with me: paint a picture. It is something that I can see in my published poem “Jekyll Island,” where I mention the tide coming in, the beach disappearing, the rocky sea wall and the sea birds.
When I wanted to be a short story writer, he helped me understand character and story. To me story is the most important thing, whether it is a song, novel, short story or poem. See my earlier blog about how Disney taught me to use story to read more about how humans need story. In my poetry, whether it is stated or not, there is always a story driving it with characters and scene. I will go back to “Jekyll Island”. The speaker is mourning his first trip back to the island with his infant son without his wife. A simple but effective story.
As I started writing poetry, I reached out to him, and he shared work from his recent poetry book Tracks for the Troubadours and Other Poems so that I could study technique, word choice and enjambment. There were several things I picked up from him: accessible language is an asset, don’t be afraid of association, let the scene flow naturally and create a unique turn that is memorable.
One of the things I admire most about Sean’s poetry is that it is easy to read. That does not mean the poems are simple or have nothing beneath the surface. It means the language invites me in. I sometimes read contemporary poetry and feel like I need a decoder ring before I can even begin to understand what the poet is trying to do. Sean reminds me that accessible language can still carry complicated ideas.
“First Star I See Tonight” is a good example (and one of my favorites in the book). The poem begins with the speaker asking for a “pocketful of starlight” and moves through driving between Atlanta and Chattanooga, pollution, darkness, touch and eventually love. The associations move naturally. One thought leads to another. The poem travels a long way, but I never feel lost.
That is something I am trying to learn in my own work. I have spent a lot of time studying associative leaps because I want my poems to move beyond a simple retelling of an event. But I have also learned that an associative leap does not have to feel random or intentionally obscure. One image can simply open the door to the next one.
Sean also reminds me that repetition can do more than repeat. In “Vacation Story (A Very Simple Poem),” the speaker repeats that he loved and kissed someone in city after city during a trip. The pattern is simple, but the final turn changes what the repetition has been building toward: after all those places, the speaker discovers that he loves her somehow more.
I think there is an important lesson there for me. Sometimes I worry that a poem needs another image, another metaphor or another clever line. Sometimes the structure is already doing the work. If the repetition has created the emotional pressure, I do not need to decorate it.
Maybe that is the biggest thing I continue to learn from Sean. Poetry does not have to stop sounding like me in order to become better poetry.
I can use plain language, tell stories and make jokes. I can use things people recognize from everyday life. But underneath those things, I can pay closer attention to how the poem moves: how one image leads to another, how repetition builds meaning, how a word can turn in an unexpected direction and how the ending can make us reconsider everything that came before it.
Years ago, Sean wrote on that song lyric, “I am interested. Tell me more.”
I am still trying to do that.
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