Cities Within Us

Sabyasachi Nag talks to Aurora, Ontario, poet, Peter Taylor about his new poetry collection, Cities Within Us (Guernica Editions, 2024)

Sabyasachi Nag: Huge congratulations on the publication of Cities Within Us (Guernica Editions, 2024). Can you explain how you settled on the title for the collection? 

Peter Taylor: The original title for this book was Cities of Ideas. My first book, Trainer, recreated my father’s wartime experience as a pilot in a very structured format. With this new book, I wanted to explore more diverse themes and experiment with different styles. I had the two lines of what eventually became the ending of the title poem, “The answer lies within us. / The cities lie within us.” for some time without knowing what I would do with them. As the manuscript neared its completion, I realized that it had a number of recurring themes – life, death, beauty, destruction, war, time, cities – and that many of the poems were about perception and memory, about how our different experiences create our different worlds. “Last Photograph” even goes so far as to conjecture that our memories, our lives, exist solely in the cumulative mind films, the lebenskamera, that we take of each other. I realized that the ethos of Cities Within Us had evolved from being about how art and creativity can be a “universal sanctuary” into which we escape, to being more about how perception and memory are indistinguishable from experience. We live within the cities we imagine and inhabit.

Sabyasachi Nag: The collection is divided into three sections: Glyphs and Biographies; Cities Within Us; and Birth Craquelure. Can you talk a bit about how you went about organizing the poems around these broad thematic sections, did you craft the poems around these themes or did you discover the threads later?

Peter Taylor: Because Cities Within Us encompasses so many different themes and styles, one of the greatest challenges I had was in how to organize the poems into a coherent collection. The process had several false starts. Grouping the poems by style and subject seemed a bit flat and contrived. I added a new sequence of poems written in the phonetic idiom of a Confederate soldier fighting in the battle of Antietam during the Civil War and this proved to be disastrous. One editor said he read a dozen lines and got a headache. I published these poems separately online as Antietam: A Verse Play in Massachusetts and they won an award. Eventually, I decided that the poems fell loosely into existential, historical and personal buckets. Glyphs & Biographies captures the existential voices of a piece of type, Franklin, a bee, an orangutang, a crow, a delusional Lear, even the mental doppelganger of an injured railway worker. Cities Within Us includes poems about cities and historical events, including the eponymous poem. Finally, the poems in Birth Craquelure trace my own personal life experiences.

Sabyasachi Nag:  When I first saw this collection it evoked Italo Calvion’s Invisible Cities, which of course is a conjuration of imagined cities and in prose. In this collection, several poems are about real cities – Angra do Heroismo, New York, Chicago, Harvard, Aurora etc. Could you talk a little bit about how cities have been generative for your craft in general and for poems in this collection?

Peter Taylor: Unlike Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the poems in Cities Within Us are about the cities I’ve visited and the experiences I’ve had. The tragic sights I witnessed in Angra do Heroismo after a devastating earthquake damaged parts of the city contrasted sharply with the natural beauty of the Azores and the resilience of the local population. “New York as an Element of Space & Time” captures America’s most iconic city in the abstract language of physics and was actually inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Racing in the Street.” I wrote “Chicago Picasso” after my aunt took me on a personal tour of the city’s famous sculptures and the immensity of Picasso’s vision overwhelmed me. I almost missed my flight home scurrying around looking for more information about it. Placing Miro’s ceramic sculpture across the street nestled between a temple and a bank seemed to reflect the modern irony between art and urban existence. I first learned about “The Glass Flowers at Harvard” from Marianne Moore’s poem, “Silence,” but seeing these exquisite flowers in person was utterly breathtaking. They personify the ineffable threshold between art and life. “At the Aurora Cenotaph” comes from an extraordinary Remembrance Day ceremony I attended during a torrential thunderstorm.

Sabyasachi Nag:  Poems like Equus and Anima, My Grandfather’s Hands, I, Iphigenia, Lineage etc. come across as expressions where the narrator’s self is the primary source of information and inspiration. How much of this collection is autobiographical?

Peter Taylor: All of the poems in the third section of the book, Birth Craquelure, are autobiographical, and there are also a number of personal poems scattered throughout the other two sections. “Lineage” sets the tone for the final section by balancing the joy of my daughter’s birth with the loss of my other birth family members. The four horsemen in my family are disease, drug dependence, bipolar disorder, and suicide. I wrote candidly about these experiences because I wanted to be faithful to the events. “Leitmotif” is written as the lyrics of a song, and “Electric Clouds” uses the cryptic language of a patient’s medical chart. In the other sections, I included biographical poems such as “Mary Agnes Taylor” (my paternal grandmother), “Postcards” and “My Grandfather’s Hands” (my maternal grandfather) because they both played a significant role in my life. “Icarus” captures my father’s wartime experience as a pilot training officer, and “Dialysis Ward” includes the fact that he underwent dialysis himself a generation before my sister. “I, Iphigenia” is not autobiographical; it re-tells the entire Agamemnon myth as a car accident.

 Sabyasachi Nag:  In “Aesthetics of Self” when the narrator says, “Against the horizon,/ you must always consider/ three skies: the one you see,/ the one you think about,/ and the one that’s really there” we get a sense of the poet’s process – what is seen is juxtaposed to what is thought and a third entity – invisible but palpable –  performing the acts of seeing and thinking – filters “our illusions” of what is seen and thought and reaches definitions beyond sight. Could you talk a bit more about this process?

Peter Taylor: “The Aesthetics of Self” is a touchstone poem for me because it expresses the multi-prismed nature of our perceptions in seeing experiencing and interpreting events on different levels and from different perspectives. Our aesthetics are not simply a conscious appreciation of art; they are as innate to us as they are learned and they shape the way in which each of us confronts reality, what Wallace Stevens called “things as they are.” “We live in the mind,” he wrote. But can the mind also see beyond “the mirrored apprehension / of its own idea” by imaging other minds with other perceptions? The different personae in “Glyphs & Biographies” are an attempt to explore some of those different perceptions. People conjecture about the fate of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition, but what might Franklin have to say? Bees are mysteriously disappearing, but has anyone asked one of them about it? When an orangutan stares back at you in the zoo, what might it be thinking? When you write a poem, you need to ask yourself not only what you want to say and how you want to say it, but who, or what, should be saying it. Imagination frees us from our monoscopic selves.

Sabyasachi Nag: What were your primary aesthetic goals in this collection?

Peter Taylor: My three goals for the book changed, or rather evolved and entwined, over time. First, I wanted to explore how our perceptions and memories define our individual realities. The root meaning of the word ecstasy is “to stand outside oneself,” and the biographies are meant to reach beyond my own predilections. Second, I wanted to understand what the word “idea” really encompasses, because, to me, it defines the threshold between reality and imagination. The ideal is impossible; the idea of the ideal is essential. Cities Within Us deliberately begins with “Hell-box” and the power of how a single piece of type is the beginning of language that creates the world. “New York as an Element of Space & Time” describes that world in a car crash that propels its victims into the human “entropy of things.” “City of Ideas” portrays art as a sanctuary in which its citizens share a creative consciousness. Finally, there are the deeply personal poems of joy and loss in the third section about the individuals and events in my life that have shaped me. I wanted to give witness to them.

Sabyasachi Nag: Do you remember any experience around learning to write that became formative for you in the later years?

Peter Taylor: My most formative experience in learning how to write poetry came from writing my first book, which very few people have ever read and I seldom mention. There’s a good reason for this. First Epistle to Dr. Torr grew out of an academic exercise into a 1,000-line mock-heroic poem in the style of the 18th Century satirist, Alexander Pope. There are classical gods, doomed heroes, and a protean monster threatening a brave city. I hand typeset, printed and hardcase bound 200 copies of the book, which limited its distribution, and I seldom mention it because, well, who reads archaic satire these days? Writing the book was a formative experience in my development as a poet because it taught me strict discipline, word economy, and an appreciation for the subtlety of language that only writing a classical story with 50 characters in 1,000 lines of rhymed couplets can do. Today, I seldom write in iambic pentameter, but learning how to fuse images and ideas with narrative in poetry, and understanding the importance of researching every mythological or historical detail, are skills that I apply to this day. First Epistle to Dr. Torr taught me how to make every word in a poem count.

Sabyasachi Nag:  Do you have a writing routine? Or writing rituals? Or patterns you must follow regularly? Or rituals that you practice say, when you are writing in certain forms, say a longer piece of work like a novel, as opposed to a shorter piece, say a poem?

Peter Taylor: I obsess over notebooks. I tried different formats in university and settled on Grumbacher spiral-bound sketchbooks. I don’t draw but the large blank pages and their ability to lay flat were ideal for my scribblings. And I do mean scribblings – I copy and re-copy poems until I get them right. Twenty notebooks and 3,600 pages later, I am still using this method. My notebooks are my creative diary, and I recently digitized the pages to make it easier to find unfinished work. I wish I could say that I have a disciplined writing routine, but I tend to write in short hypomanic bursts, which explains my limited output. These are two examples of how I write. “This is Stephen,” the poem about my brother’s suicide, took me twenty years to finish. It began as “Refuting the Easter Monument,” a morose imitation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” then morphed into a more philosophical “The Moment of Our Dying,” and was finally distilled into the raw “This is Stephen.” By comparison, I wrote “Cities Within Us,” the book’s eponymous poem, in three days. I already had the last two lines, but I needed to do extensive research on Canaletto’s painting, the bombers, the horror of the fire raids, the destruction and rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, and even Meissen porcelain, to get every detail right.

Sabyasachi Nag: Can you reflect on a specific performance, song, painting, film, or other non-written artwork that generated or strongly influenced any of your recent work?

Peter Taylor: Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” I don’t consider myself to be a great artist, but I do believe in “stealing” by which I mean adopting techniques and styles I admire and incorporating them into my own vision. I’m not talking about plagiarism; I’m talking about how an artist learns and grows by following the examples of better writers. No one writes in a vacuum. When I began writing many years ago, I learned by imitation. I would stay up all night reading Dylan Thomas and then get up the next morning and write a Dylan Thomas poem. My love for poetry first emerged after reading the work of W. B. Yeats and hidden somewhere in a drawer I have an old notebook filled with really dreadful poems about swans. That process evolved over time from imitation to inspiration. Ted Hughes’ poem, “The Thought-Fox,” imagines the creation of a poem as a fox timidly emerging from darkness. I chose a more modern context for “Insomnia” where the brain becomes a crucible and the poem “casts incandescent and cools / slowly in the ordinary cell.” “The Indifference of Stars” was inspired by Robert Lowell’s amazing sonnet, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” Great artists not only steal, they teach.

Sabyasachi Nag:  What stories do you have (perhaps generative, perhaps constraining) about yourself as a poet? (i.e., What you’re good at or bad at, where you are in your writing journey, etc.)? How have these stories changed or remained the same over time/across different experiences?

Peter Taylor: I have completed and published three books and four chapbooks and none of them is alike in either substance or style. The advantage of this is that every publication has been a unique writing experience for me; the disadvantage is that it’s difficult for me to sustain a recognizable poetic voice or build an appreciative audience. My poems have many voices. First Epistle to Dr. Torr was mythological and Trainer was historical. When I visited York Minster cathedral, I was so overwhelmed by its majesty that I felt compelled to write The Masons, a chapbook of four meditative sonnets on the themes of earth (Canterbury), air (York Minster), water (Saint  Paul’s), and fire (Coventry). As an admirer of Wallace Stevens, I was inspired by his “Adagia” writings in Opus Posthumous and wrote my own chapbook, Aphorisms. After hearing the urgent voice of its young narrator speaking in my head (seriously, I did), I wrote Antietam: A Verse Play. The voices I heard were not in English but in the phonetic idiom of a young Confederate soldier (not a popular subject these days). Finally, in my last chapbook Hell-box, and in the current collection, Cities Within Us, I’ve knit together everything else. It’s an odd collection but I’ve always thought of my books as a small constellation of different stars.

About the Author

His first collection, Trainer, a mosaic of poems capturing his father’s experience as a pilot during the Second World War, with an introductory poem by Raymond Souster, was called “a work of scholarship and imagination” by John Robert Colombo (The Globe and Mail). His experimental verse play, Antietam, won an honourable mention in the international War Poetry Contest in Northampton, Massachusetts. He holds a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Waterloo and has worked as a printer and bookbinder, medical publisher, institute director and non-profit executive. Born in Edmonton, he lives in Aurora, Ontario.