A Simple Country Girl
By Taylor Mead
Bowery Poetry Series #
1
Throwaway Genius: A new book punctuates
Taylor Mead—the “human poem” 24/7
By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
As Gary Indiana notes in his wonderfully anecdotal
intro, if Taylor Mead moved to Paris, they’d build a monument for him.
Famous for his animated roles in Andy Warhol’s films and staged plays,
Taylor turns one and two liners into bullion here—sublime quips—that say
it all. With breathless rapier wit, the poems remain fulsome and to the
point.
“Philosophy of Cats
A minimum of effort
A maximum
of error
In the poem “Damn” Taylor complains, “Life is so
fucking complicated/for a simple country girl,” The poet invokes a
spiritual nerve in his plaint at our mutual plight, yet seasons it with
humor. This high voltage tension crackles throughout the brief entries.
At this
point, Taylor Mead is an eminence gris. His mincing, fey delivery is
singularly impish and infectious. You can hear the author’s voice and
remember his complicit expressions when you read these wicked little poems.
Composing an artifice of dialogue, some of the poems are snippets of
conversations while others are compressed equations of social interaction.
Mead chronicles a madcap mise en scene,
making sense of drama and investing his persona with a ritualistic savoir-faire.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say anything
But”
Luckily Taylor does say some things. And typical of
much New York School poetry, he writes like he talks—spontaneous, incisive
and epigrammatic. “Throwaway
genius is something we should all aspire to,” concludes Indiana, referring
to the author’s generous outpourings of droll aphorisms and apercus.
It’s been decades since Mead has been in print but
the new poems share the open field feeling and brevity of his two early
books, especially “Taylor Mead on Amphetamine and in Europe.”
The picture that builds up is of an immortal bon
vivant: a champagne swilling swish who goes through life like a royal yacht,
leaving a party in his wake. Behind the smutty stage trappings, we detect a
crown of laurel. Mead has created a classic persona that transcends the page
and the age. “As long as there is one person starving/you can’t have
more than a three-car garage.”
Here is the spirit of Catullus with his lusty barbs.
Here is John Skelton, the court jester, with his bawdy brio. Mead hits the
bull’s eye with these bullet billets.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, 2005
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