Verse Wisconsin 105| Taylor Graham

Country Living

These Frisco boomers sold a modest flat
(5 rooms on stilts above garage w/ SUVs).
It fetched a cool 2 mil. Our hills shone gold,
our boondocks beckoned. 5 acre parcels, dust
in season. Mud. No sweat. In 4WD they trust
& malls where pioneering gear is sold
(no refunds w/o receipt). He speaks w/ ease
of god’s wild beasts in nature’s habitat.
She’s got Muir, Thoreau & Carson quote for quote.
They’re living Walden, want the 1-lane paved.
The road-dust turns their new split-level brown,
oppressing the gazebo. See her frown,
with doubt that any paradise is saved.
See their iron gate. She fingers the remote.

—Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

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Taylor Graham

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the California Sierra. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her latest book Walking with Elihu: poems on Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith is available on Amazon. Connection to Wisconsin: a cousin in Wonnewoc, and in 1989 she helped instruct at a SAR dog school in Osceola.

I write mostly free verse (I like to call it a structured free verse). Every now and then I’ll try a formal poem. It’s like rappelling in search and rescue—hanging off cliffs on ropes—just to see if I can still do it. It’s scary, but good for the spirit.

I think forms are a very useful discipline. The more I do forms, the better I like them. So it’s not just to prove I can do it. They take me down paths I hadn’t intended. And, just like rappelling, I get a shot of adrenalin when that sonnet or villanelle shows me vistas I never imagined.

I lead a weekly poetry workshop, just a half dozen of us, and we seem to thrive on forms. We’ve done sestinas, villanelles (probably my favorite), terzanelles, triolets, rondeaux, and many others; and we’ve invented variations on some forms that we thought we could improve.

Of course we’ve done sonnets of various configurations. “Country Living” came from one of those assignments. We were supposed to imitate another poet’s sonnet. I chose e.e. cummings and (sort of) transplanted his Cambridge Ladies to our Sierra foothills.

We’re pretty lax in our workshop. The idea is to write a poem. It doesn’t matter if you stick too close to the rules. If you like what you come up with, keep it. In our workshop, we can’t afford poetry police.

More work by Graham appears in the print issue of Verse Wisconsin.