Taylor Mead: A Simple Country Girl

In his brief introduction to Taylor Mead's congenial companionable new book, Gary Indiana writes:

Taylor Mead is living proof that brevity is the soul of wit, and usually the proof of wisdom, too. He can sum up an evening, a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime in five or six words. He paints complete portraits of people in one or two line poems. He packs encyclopedic understanding of life and its joys and deflating ironies into the smallest conceivable number of words. Some of Taylor's apercus are only true of certain moments, but others strike me as always true, especially when I'd prefer that they weren't.

I'll admit that it was Gary Indiana's introduction, and hence, presumably, endorsement, that compelled me scoop up this volume on impulse. In general my responsiveness to poetry is a sometime thing, spotty, not particularly reliable. And so, I tend to be nervous and unsure around it, the way I am around friends with dogs. I'll take up Ginsberg, cummings, and Stevie Smith, only occasionally, and with equal pleasure. Neither Auden nor Wallace Stevens red-light the control board the way I feel they're supposed to. It's not, you know, exactly an educated palate. But loving Gary Indiana's work as I do, I was happy to give this volume a go, and I am very glad to have done. It's marvellous and hilarious stuff. A few examples, and then go buy the book for yourself:

Look

You're famous!
Shut up!!

No Use
Looking
Back

It's not there.

The Story of My Life

You're too handsome to argue with
I'll just turn over

I don't understand the attraction
between women and men
but I am not going to have you arrested

I am very pessimistic
but I have a good time anyway

It can't just be me, aren't these exactly the thing you need to be reading right now?

It's funny, now that I have the book I realize that the author Taylor Mead is also an actor who has one of the better moments in the Jim Jarmusch filmic-essaylet anthology Coffee and Cigarettes, a somewhat miss or hit project for which I have real fondness anyway. (My very favorite moment in that film, by the way, is not in Mead's essaylet, and involves a Tesla Coil.) But it's odd to realize that I've gone from being a Taylor Mead ignoramus, to being a fan with some of his work ready to hand and a real itch to find more. Suggestions about where to turn next from any fans out there?