There Are Always Weeds To Pull In The Garden
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with poet and teacher John Allen Taylor
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John Allen Taylor lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of To Let the Sun, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize at the University of Arkansas Press, selected by Patricia Smith. His work has appeared in Booth, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He directs the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and coordinates the Writing Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn.
What are you reading now?
I’m writing this as my wife and I wait for our first child to be born, and the stack of books on my nightstand betrays the anxiety, excitement, and anticipation: guides on being a good non-birthing partner; guides on breastfeeding; guides on baby sleep; notebooks of birth plans, hospital resources, and list after list of to-dos. I am nothing if not a serial hobbyist, and this feels like preparation and research for the most significant hobby to date. While I am memorizing pie-in-the-sky sleep schedules and supposed monthly milestones, I am also adding to a little pile of poetry and nonfiction I am eager to return to during these coming months of parenthood. They’re books I’ve always thought of as, a little reductively and with admiration, dad books. Li-Young Lee’s Rose. Oliver de la Paz’s Names Above Houses. Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child. Galway Kinnel’s The Book of Nightmares. Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers.
The last three lines from Lee’s “The Gift” have come back to me over the past 40 weeks: “I did what a child does / when he’s given something to keep. / I kissed my father.”
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
The earliest book I remember loving, and perhaps one of the first I tried to read myself, was the children’s book Blueberries for Salby Robert McCloskey. My mother read this to me more times than either of us could count. I always saw myself in Sal, a child who goes out with her mother to hunt for blueberries in the hills of Maine. Pronouns were clearly lost on me as a child because I was astonished to realize, as I shelved the book in our new nursery this summer, that Sal was a little girl. My mother and I seemed so obviously mirrored in the book; my kid-brain glossed over anything that didn’t fit our perfect replication in the story.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break is the first book of poetry that took the top of my head off, as Dickinson says. I have returned to this book so many times I have to be careful the pages don’t fall away from the spine. The magic in these poems is no less than the first time I read them. From “Beginning,” “I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe / Or move. / I listen. / The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, / And I lean toward mine.”
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
My grandmother gave me a pair of elbow-length, thorn-proof, deerskin rose pruning gloves the spring after I successfully propagated my first Old Garden Rose from her collection. It’s called “Souvenir de la Malmaison” and was released in France in 1843. My cutting is now doing quite well in 2025 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and I feel like a real gardening superhero whenever I have my rose gloves pulled all the way up to my elbows.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
On gardening, Ruth Stout once said, “I never do anything I don't want to do, so I don't do it.”
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
Certainly, this would be my cat Sabriel, named after a beloved character from a fantasy series by Garth Nix. She has been my companion and friend for thirteen years. We found one another on the side of the road in Spokane, Washington. We moved to Los Angeles and then to Boston. We met Marie, who became my wife, and Birdie, who became Sabriel’s sister, and then we moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is, as Franz Wright said of his cat, my “…little // milk fang, whiskered / night / friend.”
What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
When Patricia Smith selected my book for the Miller Williams Poetry series, it was the third year I had sent my manuscript to the same press. It was also the year my manuscript found the right first-round reader and made its way to the series editor.
I feel relieved, and happy, that my book has come out during a period of my life when I am feeling most at ease and even a little distant from the text. The poems were often painful to write and painful to revisit. I am sure if the book had come out when I first hoped it would, I would have been much less prepared to weather the shock of it coming into the world.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
Here, again, I return to the garden. One of the reasons winters in Michigan can feel so oppressive is because I can’t go outside to pull weeds. Somehow, my least favorite part of gardening has become the surest way to reconnect with my body, slow my mind, and leave (for a time) the feelings of productive versus avoidant work. There are always weeds, thank God, to pull in the garden.
What are your hopes for yourself?
I hope I am patient. I hope I become more patient and keep the patience I’ve earned.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
My first time attending AWP conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) was in 2013. I traveled to Boston from Spokane, WA with my poetry professor Thom Caraway to represent Rock & Sling, a literary magazine housed at Whitworth University. I trailed after him through the bookfair and did my best to draw no attention. We stopped to talk to Kevin Goodan, a poet I loved and love and whose book we had just read in class (Winter Tenor). Thom introduced me as his colleague. He said, “This is John Taylor, my colleague from Whitworth.” I was an undergraduate student in a corduroy blazer two sizes too big that I imagined was suitable for a writing conference. My hands were sweaty.
I think of this moment a lot in my work as a teacher and an administrator who works with undergrads and high schoolers. Thom’s pedagogy, or perhaps his common sense, was pretty simple and quite rare: student writers are writers. I see this as a kindness, but I know Thom would see this as a necessity as a writer and teacher. And, in my work with students, I do, too.
What’s a guiding force in your life?
I want to be of use. Marge Piercy, in her poem “To be of use,” says: “The work of the world is common as mud. / Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. / But the thing worth doing well done / has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. / Greek amphoras for wine or oil, / Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums / but you know they were made to be used. / The pitcher cries for water to carry /and a person for work that is real.”
If you enjoyed John’s questionnaire, you may also enjoy this one with
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This is my favorite Beyond interview in ages. James Wright changed my life as a college student, but I rarely hear his work mentioned anymore, and it made my day to read the opening lines of The Branch Will Not Break. My copy of that book, as well as Wright's collected poems, is also crumbling from overuse, now from my older kids readings, as well, and I hope that fifteen, twenty years from now John will perhaps be saying the same thing...
What tenderness in John’s responses to the interview questions ❤️. My heart was touched by so much of what John said. John also has now “introduced” me not only to his own poetry, but that of other poets, too. Thank you for all of this, Jane and John.