Is Music

John Taggart

Is Music—a major retrospective of an American original—gathers the best poems from John Taggart’s fourteen volumes, ranging from early objectivist experiments and jazz-influenced improvisational pieces to longer, breathtaking compositions regarded as underground masterpieces. There is a prayerful quality to Taggart’s poetry, rooted in music—from medieval Christian traditions to soul to American punk rock. He is heavily influenced by the visual arts, most notably in his classic “Slow Song for Mark Rothko,” in which he does with words what transcendent painter Rothko did with paint and dye.

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ISBN: 9781556593048

Format: Paperback

The Drum Thing

When you listen to hear
they say
what did you see?

I saw
Egypt smothered.

She died, that entire place
stiffly in the old manner.

Drums.

In the morning stumbles her ghost
the skin off the muscles
and in moving has the skull and horns of a deer.

From the suburbs
out of an old Ford
others come with her, animal shapes in walking.

A fly-covered horse hangs from
a tree in the sun, heaved
there from a swing chain, its belly ripped out, wind now.

The grey tongue of the horse has only flies.

About the Author

John Taggart was born in Perry, Iowa, on October 5, 1942. He studied at Earlham College, the University of Chicago, and Syracuse University. As an undergraduate he began editing the poetry magazine Maps, continuing until the mid-1970s. From 1969 to 2001 he taught in the English Department and directed the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Shippensburg University. He has received the Commonwealth Award for Academic Service, the Chicago Review poetry prize, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among others. He …

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Reviews

“John Taggart has long been a master of accumulating complexly layered patterns of sound and sense.” —Robert Creeley

“A fearsome intelligence wedded to a kind of craftsmanship that happens once or twice a generation.” —Stop Press

“In the lovely sonnet ‘Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves,’ Taggart seems to look at nature himself, rather than through another artist’s eyes: ‘Darkened not completely dark let us walk in the darkened field/trees in the field outlined against that which is less dark.’ Is Music contains many such pieces, a wealth of sublime and quiet poems; they are unlike anything being written today, and like good music they stay in the mind.” —Antioch Review