Hulky & afloat on seas of parking
the old Plaza 
                         dated from the fifties—

sold Day Glo Ice & jelly shoes,
new Sweet Valley High & sour candy. 

Our flock would  flock to Woolworths,
buy 99-­cent Wet & Wild to line our lips. 

We wandered home between the glaze of windshields.
At McPhee’s, McPhee still measured feet

& ordered in our red saltwater sandals. 
Someone got shot: McPhee died: I went to college. 

Later I learned how it all was covered streambed,
The once-­site of the Castro Hacienda. 

Before that: Ohlone, bear habitat, and tule. 
In the same spot, they built a new bad Plaza. 

Cars inch by Bed Bath & Beyond.  
Sometimes I dream up the old ranchero, 

live oak, monarch, poppies, bears.
Sometimes I can hear the buried stream. 

Someone’s made a point of some remembrance: 
near the drive-­thru bank, there is one tiny plaque.

Shortly before the state of California ordered its citizens to retreat indoors, I met up with poet Tess Taylor for a hike on a steep hill near her home.

It was one of those perfect California days: warm; dappled sun; early spring flowers popping.

Everything looked and smelled tangy.

“There are so many smells to love here, like rosemary or Ponderosa pine needles in the sun,” said Taylor, as we hiked up the steep gravely trail to the summit. “All of these are very specific California smells.”

EL CERRITO — Local poet Tess Taylor has recently released her fourth book, had one of its poems published in the New York Times and wrote an opinion piece for CNN about the significance of reading literature during a global quarantine.

With hair salons shut down during the novel coronavirus shelter order, she also gave herself a haircut at home. The release of “Rift Zone,” a new collection that Taylor calls “poems for precarious times,” was at once timely and ominous.

“I planned a pandemic to go with the book launch,” she joked during an interview while sheltering in place at home in El Cerrito.

In a series, various writers share what have they been reading while sheltering in place. Today, NPR poetry reviewer Tess Taylor lists what is helping her to get through.

Poem: I Gave My Love a Story

Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

Here is the strange thing: I was already writing poems about the precariousness of California. I’d been writing them for ten years, since I moved back from New York and came back to the East Bay after two decades away. That was 2011. I had just had a baby. At first, it seemed like I was only trying to make sense of the difference between the California I’d grown up in and the California I came back to, but as I wrote, it seemed like I was also trying to make sense of the world, how it had abruptly shifted under our feet, how radically strange it was to be in a place that was at once so prosperous (some of us have clearly won the revolution for expensive cheese) and yet so broken (so many of us have clearly lost the revolution for equity, affordable housing, decent health care, excellent public schools).

Tess Taylor’s poetry is a literary collage: an assemblage of the poet’s words and the ontology of California itself. In two collections out this year, Rift Zone and Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, the poet juxtaposes her personal longing for security against the state’s complex geologic and human history. Rift Zone draws our attention to the “fragile real estate” Californians claim, as well as invisible lines within and around us. Last West puts the poet’s work in apposition to notes and photographs taken by famed WPA photographer Lange. Taylor travels the roads Lange traveled, drawing together the artist’s time and our own: “Different people,” Taylor writes, “the same problems.” 

Still, digital events aren’t for everyone. Poet Tess Taylor is publishing two collections this spring, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, due from Red Hen Press in April. Taylor was able to attend a reading for Last West at MoMA in February, but most of the subsequent events for that book, along with twenty-five more events planned for Rift Zone, have all been canceled.

The Millions Nick Ripatrazone lists Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone:

California: pastoral, urban, suburban—home to myth and magic. Taylor’s book is geologic in concept and theme, both panoramic and particular (her lines are ripe with texture, as in: “Blackberries choke the bike path; / schoolboys squall like gulls or pigeons.”). There’s a self-awareness of identity and place that enables Taylor to write odes that double as measured reflections, as with “Berkeley in the Nineties”: “Too late for hippie heyday / & too young to be yuppies / we wandered creeksides & used bookstores.” Later: “We could say systemic racism / but couldn’t name yet how our lives were implicated.” This youthful freedom and folly is juxtaposed with another California: “In every sale, a list of ways / your home could be destroyed. / Flood, earthquake, fire.” Disruption is inevitable here, and will be watched by the redwoods that “overlook / your fragile real estate.” “Train Through Colma” wonders about the future: “But will anyone teach / the new intelligence to miss / the apricot trees // that bloomed each spring / along these tracks?” Taylor hits the fine note of how nostalgia evolves into worry and lament: “When the robots have souls, / will they feel longing? / When they feel longing, // will they write poems?”

“She inspired me as a model of persistence.” 

So says Tess Taylor, a poet in the Bay Area, who undertook the journey once travelled by Dorothea Lange, the extraordinary woman photographer.

Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, is Taylor’s work in conjunction with the sweeping retrospective of Lange’s work Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  

Lange documented migrant people—some coming to California for jobs, some leaving farms that had failed in the big act of climate change we now call the Dust Bowl. She also photographed Japanese internment.