“We were new to the burgeoning wounds, new to the word when perfect was not in a book.”

I wonder if writers in earlier centuries ever wondered whether future readers would be interested in what they wrote? If a writer considers this as they write, does it stymie their writing? Or is it more: “ready for what we might guess but cannot surely see.” A degree of ignoring self-consciousness and the idea of audience, is one way of writing, whilst the reverse is highly aware of audience. Wilderness of Mind by Charles Taylor is an odd shift from self to unself. As a previous publisher of note, Taylor is well aware of his audience, just as he permits himself the breath of speaking frankly, even if nobody listens. It is that indulgence that has often created the most moving works, perhaps despite themselves.

But what of

the chair inside the chair, what of the woman inside the girl and

the murmur of sparks inside all variations?

In a myriad of directions: “Whenever I go in my effort to explore the four directions I go digging,” Taylor’s book is divided into sections, not poem titles: The Book Of Nostalgia / In The Soil Of Dreams / The Book Of Condensed Secrets / The Text Of You And I / God Asks, “Do I Exist?”/ Answering Life/ The Heaven of Atheists/ A Condensed Bible/ God In Prose: An Apology. Each section bleeding into the next, asking questions in prosetry:

You don’t get stuck in the full meal of laughter or see the blue ivories of the distance. Words needing medical attention, weak in the endless speakeasy of the media. Cholesterolized.  You! They say. Raid the fridge. Work. Take a pill. Fall asleep. Die.

As a writer, how can you stay relevant if you are not in the miniscule chosen cache? When the days of reading others lives appear to be reducing? Perhaps that’s exactly when we should write our honest appraisal of life from our vantage point, where: “we will speak what deep inside you yearn for us to say,” before AI and other non-realities tell us what we’ve felt and when you do, make sure it’s like climbing into paintings and listening to them speak to you:

I’m writing knowing you are a living skin moving to the sink to wash an apple. How much of us busy ourselves weeping for the dead? How much of us sing our inevitable fate? Do you grow guilty in your lack of grieving?

We find Taylor’s faith and purpose most clearly in this line: “Though words be forced into faces, I am in the woods with the simple tool.” Where he recognizes the simplicity within truth and reveals that meaning isn’t always complex: “you work for the sparks that move in their sacred dreams.” In his poem The Heaven of Atheists, Taylor recalls his Atheist grandfather, and manages to reconcile the idea of believing/not believing succinctly in a way we wish the rest of the world had:

I’m / Not as self-sacrificing, he who raised

Two daughters on his own with a

Postman’s salary and never got

Bitter at being alone. I hope however

To ride the bus every day from

My zone of non-theistic believers

To his, the heaven of atheists…

In his poem Answering Life, Taylor asks: “Did I demand too much of answers?” Some of the questions in this collection are unfashionably long and would require a dedicated reader such as the poem God Asks, “Do I Exist?” which at seven pages, stretches patience’s bounds, but the underlying message is fascinating, a God who needs our doubts. It’s a clever double helix of considerations, concluding God needs humanity as much as vice-versa:

As long as you continue to think on

me, I can’t conclude I don’t exist.

Strong beliefs in god or gods appear

wherever humans hang on the globe,

in every culture that’s been found.

All in all, it must be good for folks.

I’d venture to say it’s good for me.

The indulgence in length, humor and detail, is earned through a life time of publishing and the right to speak ones truth, audience or no, recognizing the winking out of: “few places of height where the eye can see the pure distance to make the soul starry and gregarious,” Taylor turns the ordinary consideration back on us, encouraging us to consider his considerations through ourselves:

I read the Christian Bible, I read Augustine’s City of God and all of Milton, much Buber and Tillich and Kierkegaard and Bonheoffer and Simone Weil. I read the Vedas and the Buddhist sutras and returned to church after marriage, convinced that if my boss saw me every Sunday he’d decide I was normal enough not to fire.

It’s wildly unacceptable in some poetry circles, people would burst into flames before submitting this level of unvarnished self examination to large publishing houses, which means we no longer read work(s) like this, that ask the eternal question; “Why be other than you?” It doesn’t matter that this collection might be dismissed for those reasons. Truism abounds in the forms of observations we know are true:

We live in the bricks and steel and it’s gotten inside our minds. Maybe all we do is boogie a rustic greedy music from of the belly of want, just striving and striving, to richly grab and richly do?

There’s also a vulnerability, something turned inside out and still willing to engage, hopeful yet of putting the pieces of the universe together, it weaves through Taylor’s poems almost as separate entity, with a voice of questions and insights that are starkly necessary:

We wish you to sing. Please. Are you on our side? Are you listening inside for the sparks of the forgotten powers?

Less poetic than philosophic without the need to genuflect, Wilderness of the Mind lives up to its title, in this kaleidoscopic journey to; “the gate to the root of the world.” From a man who has lived poetry for decades and refuses to ascribe to fashionable dictate. These words have taken on a life of their own:

I was so alone in the words when I wrote them. They wore the

autumn’s color, they wore a change of underwear, they wore

the potential reversal of elemental winds, they wore a bright

despair they were afraid would eat them up,

Consider then, words outside of their creator, the message unadulterated in that way. When Taylor writes: “it doesn’t matter when the real matter rides / fathoms down inside.” He refers to what’s going on outside of conscious language, where words aren’t confined or controlled, but in running free, speak a genuine truth:

You’re alive in the exquisite body’s yearning, no? Alive in the face turned to the distance. Alive even in the meeting and greeting of pedestrian official talk, ready to type and file the bloody sheets of artificial arrangement.

By the juxtaposition of questions that do not ask to be answered, an unfettered landscape emerges and it is one that is intensely poetic, in the way that counts the most:

Go stand in the trees and you are the promontory that

summons dreams out of the wind, you are a sky that knows how

truth is glancing off the dust,

BIO: Charles Taylor found solace in the arts growing up in a family struggling with alcoholism and mental illness. Like his sister, he was an unwanted child and spent his days reading, watching television, and wandering the nearby piney woods. Taylor has lived an itinerate life, moving from city to city working various jobs. He spent time as a hospital laundry worker, as a secretary, as a janitor, as a maintenance worker, and as a bookstore clerk. He says running a bookstore was like working in a bar without alcohol. He often worked as a college teacher at various universities in Texas. Today he lives on the edge of the Texas hill country with his Beloved and his dog Coco.