How We’re Here Now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’
What does it mean “to be”? Philosophers often ask this, but when proposals are shrouded in jargon, the inquiry may cloud more than it reveals.
We already know in our bones what being is — because we are. “To be” is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to what has come before and what is still to come.
Both sensory and intellectual, poetry awakens our personal cores to new ideas, or to old ideas perceived from new angles. It brings immediacy to the question of Being.
‘Rift Zone’
Tess Taylor’s poetry collection Rift Zone is titled after California’s geological fault lines. “Continents are milk skin / floating on cocoa,” she writes. (“Preface: Pocket Geology”) Next, she homes in on “a radiolarian outcrop / of Jurassic limestone” near where the Golden Gate Bridge is today, where one may find “Hidden in a cave, Ohlone petroglyphs,” the site of a town eventually populated with a “bowling alley, Wild West Gun Shop.” (“Song with Schist & County Line”)
Taylor remembers girls who, in high school,
Decorated each other in white reindeer lichen.
Recited the Tao Te Ching. Had sex on a cliff.
Reindeer lichen was the revolution.
Our new…
