William Taylor Jr.: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

William Taylor Jr.

Three Poems

A Photograph I Want to Paint

The end times have found us

on a Sunday afternoon in September

as we loll about these afterthought days

simply because they're the devil

we know.

I wander the Tenderloin

and end up at Emperor Norton's

where I sit at the bar with a quiet kinship

between myself and the handful of others

staring down their drinks

as the hours slink off to die.

It's as good a church as any,

a temporary haven from the meaner things

the world would show us.

I like the big windows looking out onto Larkin St.

where men fight with bottles and knives

and nod off in sidewalk tents.

There's a pretty junkie girl and she

stumbles a bit, leaning

on a wall laughing a pretty

junkie laugh

like a photograph I want to paint

as everything slides into whatever.

A Pretty Scandinavian Girl was Playing the Piano

There was a party in the alley outside the North Beach bar.

A pretty Scandinavian girl was playing the piano

and singing, she was quite something.

Everybody sat at tables and drank and watched.

One by one people got up to dance -

the lady poet with the flowing scarves

the lady painter with the swirling skirts

the dude poet with the beret and some kind of little flute

and the tourists who were just passing by,

all of them up there dancing and laughing,

swinging each other around with abandon

like something from a film.

I sat there annoyed with the fact of them

being so easy with their joy,

oblivious to their imperfect bodies

as they flailed them about,

bitter that my own joy

was broken and wouldn't

let me dance in broad daylight

as the pretty Scandinavian girl banged the keys.

The Broken Hearts of Larkin St.

It's all just drinking wine and waiting

for the next terrible thing to arrive,

harboring visions of something like mercy

despite the universe having no history of such.

The slow and tedious decay of things

hums along in time with the tune

of how it is we became this way.

Shuffling through the hours

along the path of least resistance

with eyes like children

in old photographs,

hearts of lukewarm ash,

desperate for something to cram in our blood

stronger than religion or drugs.

It's the future now and driverless cars

drift like ghost machines in the night

and for $12.99 a month

the chatbots will send us nudes

and tell us that our poems are pretty

but there's nothing for the broken hearts of Larkin St.

where the driverless wheelchairs

lay on their sides where they fell.

Still I like to imagine there's a chance

that the lost and the dead and the forgotten

will some day rise up with the fury

of every wasted year

and tear down the world and everything,

stoke the loneliness at the heart of it

into a fire so great that god might see

and finally be ashamed.

Fight Them

Honey there's no shame

in joy

what with death

and all her henchmen

forever at our heels

lying in wait

at every corner

honey break the rotten

world in two

scrape out

whatever's left

that could still

be any good

it's yours as much

as anyone's

fight them for it.

The Girl at the Record Store Counter

Despite what the inspirational memes would suggest

it's more than likely things will not be okay

anytime soon.

As we wait for the eternal silence to restore its mercy

you and me and everyone we love

will be burdened with more than we can bear.

Our nightmares will come true as often as not

and we will look as old in photographs as we imagine we do.

The loneliness that haunts our bones will find no other home.

Beauty is expendable and will be first on the chopping block

when it all comes down.

The poets and the artists have not saved us,

the pretty bartender will not read your book

and the girl at the record store counter

is unimpressed with your choices.

Death will arrive as pointless and as certain

as an ad for something you never wanted

and couldn't afford if you did.

But music exists,

and the fire and noise of our blood.

If you're lucky enough and you work it right

you can choose a bit how your heart is broken

and that's as good a deal as anyone's gonna give you.

Interview

April 6th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

William Taylor Jr., Poet, Painter, Writer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s start with your visual art. You’ve done work in black and white but have also employed color very well. When did you start painting and did you receive formal training?

WT: I’ve enjoyed drawing ever since I can remember. I was a comic book geek as a kid, and spent a lot of time drawing superheroes, so I learned to draw anatomy that way. That led to figure drawing and portraits in general. I’ve had no formal training other than a figure drawing class in college. I started painting in my late teens. My first painting was an oil painting of Pat Benatar, who I had a big crush on at the time. I set visual art aside for many years and concentrated on writing, but eventually went back to it some years ago, and feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. I tend to stick with black and white because I enjoy just working with the simple contrast of the two colors, but also because it is a comfort zone. When I dabble in color I tend to fuck things up, because I still have no idea what I’m doing.

DG: You have a deep connection to the Tenderloin in San Francisco. What are the challenges and rewards the environment poses for an artist?

WT: Well, as a writer, the neighborhood certainly gives you a lot to work with. Colorful people, constant human drama, pathos, comedy, absurdity, despair, often all at once. You can just walk around for a while on any given day, and in a short time you’ll have plenty of ideas and images for stories, poems, whatever. Homelessness, poverty, and addiction are prevalent, but at the same time it can be close-knit neighborhood, and there are still a lot of artists and writers there, because it’s still among the cheapest places to live in the city. It wears you down eventually, though, hardens you. You’re stepping over prone figures on the sidewalk to get to work, and after a while you only vaguely wonder if they are sleeping, nodded out, or dead, and you figure it doesn’t really matter much either way. At that point, maybe it’s time to get out of there, if you have the means. After being there for 20 years, we were able to move to a nicer place in Lower Pacific Heights when rents went down during the height of the pandemic. I’m still a ten minute walk from the Tenderloin, so I still hit the bars there ...

DG: In addition to visual art and poetry, you’ve also written stories. You’ve placed paintings alongside poems, but do you think there’s a different effect when placing images alongside stories?

WT: When I published my short story collection An Age of Monsters some years back, I worked with a photographer friend, Julie Michele, and the book featured a full page photograph on the title page of each story. She just gave me a lot of images to work with, some from around the Tenderloin, others not, and I picked the ones that I thought best fit the mood of each story. It was an interesting exercise, as some of the images were obvious connections to the story, like an image of the neighborhood for a story that takes place in the Tenderloin, but others were more abstract. So yeah, I’ve enjoyed pairing images with stories, when the chance presents itself.

DG: Do you write in the same space that you paint or do you prefer for the creative space to be different?

WT: I do visual art at a desk in front of a big window looking out over Franklin St. I do a fair amount of writing there as well, but mostly in the editing stages. When I write, I tend to take my laptop and a notebook out to a bar or café and work there. Having stuff going on around me tends to give me ideas as I go, and the random energy of things tends to help keep me working.

DG: You love collecting and cataloging rare books. Do you only collect books you’ve read or does cultural significance also play a role? Indeed, it’s impossible to read everything.

WT: Pretty much every book I buy is either something I genuinely plan to read, or it’s a cool edition of a book I love. I’ve probably read at least 90% of the stuff on my shelves right now, which I think is a pretty good ratio if you have a decent sized library. I don’t collect books for potential resale value at all, I just enjoy having nice editions of books that I enjoy. I like having first editions of my favorite books, when I can afford them. When I can’t, I just keep an eye out for affordable “upgrades.” I do the same with records, and to a lesser extent, films. I’m a physical media guy. I like being surrounded by physical copies of books and albums that have meant something to me over the years. It makes me feel better about things in general.

DG: I’d like to ask you about a poem you’ve written called “Art.” In it, there’s a line about the difficulty of painting hands—is that a biographical statement or only something the poem’s speaker experiences?

WT: That piece is 100 percent autobiographical. I think I started writing the poem because I needed a break from trying to get the hands right in the painting I was working on. It became a poem about art as a refuge or escape from the horrors of the world...outside my window the world is on fire, and I wonder if I should be out there protesting, or trying to “help” somehow, but I choose to continue working at my hands. We all have our part to play. Maybe painting decent hands is a protest of sorts.

DG: San Francisco must have no shortage of opportunities to showcase your art and read your poetry. Do you prefer going to art shows or poetry readings, and if you could only go to one, which would you choose?

WT: If I had to choose between a GOOD art show or poetry reading, I’m not sure I’d pick one over the other. I find them both edifying. If the choice were between an average or bad art or poetry event, I’d definitely take the art show every time. I go to a lot of poetry readings, you know, because you want to show support to your friends, and you want to maintain a physical presence in the “scene,” whatever, but, if we’re honest, most poetry readings can be a slog to sit through. They’re often overlong, and the poetry is mediocre at best. So you’re like a prisoner there, for an hour or two, listening to stuff that bores you. I’m not very good with it. I wanna sigh and roll my eyes, I get fidgety like a kid in a long car ride...are we there yet? And almost everyone else in the room always seems to be perfectly fine with it all, which I find maddening. At an art show, even if the art is bad, you get to mill about, and there’s usually free wine and snacks, and you can sneak out whenever you want. So, the art show wins out nine times outta ten.

DG: What’s your favorite non-literary place in San Francisco and why?

WT: Probably a sidewalk table outside of Murio’s Trophy Room bar on Haight St. Once or twice a month I like to go record shopping on Haight, and I have a ritual where I’ll have a beer or two at Murio’s, which is right next to Amoeba Records. I’ll get a little buzz, and then go buy some records and stuff, and then go back to Murio’s for another beer as I look over my spoils. The Haight/Ashbury neighborhood is still one I enjoy, it’s great for people watching. You sit at your little plastic table with your beer and there’s old hippies and street kids and tourists and sidewalk art vendors, and it still feels like old San Francisco, a little bubble of timelessness in which things still feel okay, and you imagine there’s still a chance for things.

DG: You’ve written poetry about art and the question of is how art influences one’s writing, but to what extent do you see the written word as having an effect on the things you paint?

WT: I don’t think the written word generally affects the subject matter of my visual art, with the exception of the fact that I enjoy doing portraits of writers whose work I enjoy. Richard Brautigan, Baudelaire, and Bukowski are subjects I’ve visited multiple times. One of my favorites paintings I’ve done is a portrait of Samuel Beckett I did as a commission for a friend.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

WT: I just finished reading the first half of Swann’s Way, my first delving into Proust. I’m enjoying it, but taking a break before tackling part two. I just started in on Carl Watson’s The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts. I definitely recommend checking out Carl’s work, as I don’t think it gets nearly the attention it deserves, particularly here in the U.S. He’s so good. I’m in the editing stages of a new collection of poetry, and still trying to paint better hands.

Author Bio:

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His latest poetry collection, A Room Above a Convenience Store, is available from Roadside Press.