where Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue meet. It’s a sprawling intersection on the Southeast corner of the park, and features a pavilion with tables and chairs and umbrellas, which hosts Brooklynites who are coming and going toward and away from the Parkside Avenue stop along the Q train. From his apartment, Taylor has written many poems, including the three-hundred and sixty-two that appear in his six books.

When I asked him what he enjoys about teaching poetry, he spoke of the lines that poets cannot think or plan their way towards; but those that find them, in the middle of a thought, or in the middle of composing, when their minds are quiet, and their hearts are ready, and their egos are no longer standing in the way.

He laughs often. And when he welcomed me and Adrian into his place on the last Sunday of November, he was cooking pelau, a one-off cookup of rice, pigeon peas and meat. A radio was playing jazz from the 1950s. Whenever a new song would start, he’d ask us whether we knew who was singing. Usually we’d look at each other, and then look at Mervyn, who would be standing and smiling. Most often we didn’t know, and so we would ask Mervyn, “Who?” “That’s Sarah Vaughn!” he would say, and we would all laugh.

Next September will mark his Thirty-seventh year in the apartment. At one point in the ‘90s, he thought of moving into a place on Carlton Avenue, in Fort Greene, where he would have had a view of the Empire State Building. He thought it might help his work, to live in a neighborhood with more bookstores, and more poets and writers. Ultimately he said he decided to stay on Ocean Avenue because the rent on Carlton would have been two-hundred-and-fifty dollars a month, which he thought was too steep at the time.

Maybe it was the two-hundred-and-fifty dollars per month that kept him away. But maybe it was his intuition calling forth a line for his life in Brooklyn that he hadn’t thought of, or planned for. His building’s supers have changed; and he’s seen three come and go through the years. Old neighbors have moved out and new neighbors have moved in, but Taylor’s place on Ocean Avenue doesn’t just feel like a home. If you spend any time there, you’ll feel welcome and comforted, and after just long enough, you’ll begin to see and feel, how the apartment is an island all of his own.

-Isaac Myers III

Photography: Adrian Moens

Redbook. And first of all they never gave me any expense money. They never called me back, nothing, nothing at all. So anyway, so after that, not getting that job, I was here and kind of jobless for a while, for months and I said, you know, this isn’t going to work. So finally I looked at a newspaper and I found this job in the Garment District. I think they were paying something like ninety dollars a week. And I talked to my brother at that time and said, “What do you think?” And he said, “Well you have nothing right now, so ninety a week is pretty good.” So I took the job, and it was okay. Town Talk Coat Company was the name of the place.

Isaac: What were you doing in the Garment District?

Mervyn: I was a charge clerk, and they had these big machines and reams of paper. And so as the guys would pull out the coats that were ordered, like thirty coats to go to Macy’s, fifty coats going to Saks or somewhere, I had to write up the bills, because we would be charging all day long. And the boss was a guy named Mr. Becker. Gangsters ran them places, and Mr. Becker would say, “Don’t worry about nobody, just keep charging, keep charging Merwin!” Merwin, he couldn’t say Mervyn. “You just keep charging, you keep charging.” So when that guy told me that I wish I was like him, I said, I’m not going back to that job. So I went home and I started to look in the paper and I saw this job at the publishing company, which I didn’t know what kind of business they were doing. I just saw publishing and I knew it had something to do with writing. So I went in and I had an interview and I got the job. So that’s how I came to work there. So at Plenum, they didn’t have any computers, but they had what they called a “typing pool” which is about twenty young women, I think there were a couple of guys too, in a big office, all typing on word processors. And there was an art department, and the art department, what they would do is cut and paste. In other words, somebody would type all the stuff up, we would proofread it, and then it would go over to the art department for them to set it in pages. You have to cut each line, strip it in ––– tedious and hard stuff.

Isaac: But there wasn’t an easier way to do it, right?

Mervyn: At that time, no. It was how it had to be done, right? So I’m working there, and so the reading with Fatisha was a Sunday, and then Tuesday morning I was in my little cubby there, proofreading and stuff, it was me and another guy, and I heard this voice come over the partition. And I say, I know that voice, man. And when I looked, it was Fatisha, who had come to apply for a job. And she was in there talking to our boss, and I made him a sign, to come over, and he did, and he said “What?” And I said, “You have to hire that woman, man!” I said, “I was at a reading . . .” And he was writing poetry too, my boss. And I said, “Man, she’s incredible, man.” He said, “Yeah, I looked at her resume, she looked pretty smart.” I said, “Hire her, man! What are you talking about? Just hire her!” So he hired her.

Isaac: Nice.

Mervyn: And it was a great arrangement then because what we would do - well, I don’t know how great it was for the company, but at lunchtime, we would leave there, go down to a playground right down the street with a big stone turtle in the middle of the play area, and we would hang out at that stone turtle, man, smoke a joint, and just be reading poems and talking poetry. We were supposed to go back to work at one o’clock, man, but it would be like two or two-thirty, and we’d say, “Oh shit, we have to get back to work.” And the thing is, when the elevator opened up on the floor where we worked, the vice president – his name was Mark, I forget his last name, Mark something with a “Z.” His office was right opposite the elevator, and we would come off the elevator stoned, man, and we would be like, “Oh Jesus Christ.” So Fatisha, she was kind of a tough cookie, boy, she’d sit there, she type real fast and – so after she got her work out of the way she’d start typing poems like crazy, and the woman, Sylvia, who was in charge of our department, she came to me one day and she said, “Mervyn, I want you to have a talk with your friend because she can’t be sitting here typing poems all day, man. She has to do the work.” So I went to Fatisha and I said, “You know, they’re complaining about you not doing the work,” and she said, “Oh fuck ‘em,” and she just kept doing what she was doing. And they let her go eventually. She was a girl like that. I’ll tell you more about her later.

Isaac: But that was where the Bud Jones group started?

Mervyn: Yeah.

Isaac: Just between you two, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, between us two, and me and Wesley. And I met Wesley actually at Sonia Sanchez’s workshop up at Countee Cullen Library. You know Sonia Sanchez?

Isaac: I don’t.

Mervyn: She’s very popular now, she has actually come more into her own now more than ever. She’s a very interesting-looking woman with some dreads, she’s got gray dreads. They actually honored here at Medgar Evers this year. But she’s an amazing poet. And it’s funny how sometimes…there are great poets but more than great poets there are great poems. You may not like all the poets, but you can like a lot of poems. You can like individual poems. So when I first started getting into the New York City poetry scene, she had a poem that just stayed in your head. She was married to or together with a man named Etheridge Knight, and they had two kids. And he had written a book called Poems from Prison. He had been locked up a lot, and was on drugs, Heroin and stuff. And she had a poem that she wrote to him with the longest title: “In Answer to Your Question, Would I Still Be Your Woman Even if You Went on Shit Again.” That’s the title. And the first line of the poem says, “And I say to you, no.” So Sonia had this workshop at Countee Cullen Library. And she also had a poem called “Poem at Thirty,” and I guess she was writing about lost love and so on, and in the poem she says, “At thirty, I wrap myself in my brown blanket and refused to move,” something like that. So like a poem of depression or something, because of a breakup. So Wesley and I were in her workshop at Countee Cullen Library, which met on Tuesday nights, I think. It was the biggest workshop you can imagine. It was more like just a gathering because I don’t know how much you could get out of that. There were like sixty people in this workshop.

Isaac: Wow.

Mervyn: Because it was popular, right? And a lot of people got married out of that workshop, guys met their future wives there, and so on. So Wesley and I, we were doing that, but we agreed that there wasn’t much you could really get out of a workshop like that, it was too big.

Isaac: I’m sorry, did you mention how you met Wesley again, Wesley Brown?

Mervyn: Yes, Wesley Brown. How I met Wes was at Sonia Sanchez’s workshop at Countee Cullen Library. So the thing is, Wes and I agreed that it’s hard to get anything much out of a workshop like that. It’s just too big, although we enjoyed it. So at the time I was going to John Killens’ workshop at Columbia. He was doing a workshop in fiction, poetry, everything. So when I first got to New York from Howard, I called a friend and I said “I need to get into some kind of writing group or something,” and my friend said, “Call Nikki Giovanni. She’ll steer you right.” And Nikki was famous at the time, she’d already gotten her name out there. So I said, “How am I going to call Nikki Giovanni?” She said, “I’ll give you her number, just call her up, man.” So I did, and Nikki said, “Go on up to Columbia. John Killens has a workshop, it’s open to people from the outside and so on,” and that’s what I did. And so I told Wesley about it too and Wesley and I started attending John Killens’ workshop. So the group Bud Jones was made up of Fatisha, Wesley, myself, a young woman named Verano and then Fatisha brought in a young guy, she said, “Mervyn, I met this kid man he’s a boy wonder.” He was eighteen years old at the time, Dennis Reed. And he was amazing. He had a poem called “Definitions.” He said, “Definitions are found not given.” He says something about the way this room moves after a reefer. He was an amazing young guy. And we’re still friends to this day. He’s in Washington and sometimes he’ll send me a few poems. He was out of poetry for a while, and he kind of lost that magical thing he had when he was eighteen. And I said, “You have to climb back into that boat, man.” So he’s been working and every now and then he’ll come up here and we’ll sit down and look over some stuff.

Isaac: Around what year, or years, was this happening?

Mervyn: You mean with Bud Jones?

Isaac: Yes.

Mervyn: We started out in the seventies. That was when all the readings were going on and the whole black poetry scene was alive and strong and everything. But Fatisha – I’m jumping forward – Wesley ended up having to go to prison because he got drafted and he refused to go to Vietnam. That was during the time of the Vietnam War, and he said “No, I’m not going.” So they arrested him and then he went on trial and he said to the judge, which I guess was the wrong thing to say at that time, he said “I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in fighting.” And he said, “If I did, it wouldn’t be in some country like Vietnam. I’d be fighting in the black man’s army.” So the judge heard that and probably just went ballistic, and so they gave him four years at Lewisburg Penitentiary. So Bud Jones, it made us closer. We spent a lot of time doing readings, raising funds to buy him records and books and stuff like that. Every month or so we’d take a trip up to Lewisburg, and check him out and so on. And we’re still good friends, and, well his story is a long story. But he’s written quite a few books. He’s got a book called Tragic Magic. He’s got another called Darktown Strutters. He always was interested in the minstrel thing, with the black man. And he could give you the whole history. Well, actually, Darktown Strutters is really the whole history of minstrels among blacks and how it came to be and how they survived and so on. And he eventually adopted a kid, a black kid, which turned out to be kind of a tough move because the kid turned out to be a handful. But he stuck with it, and he moved a lot, trying to find a comfortable place to raise this kid. And Wesley ended up buying a house way upstate in the woods, which I guess was some dream of his. He built a house way up there. He’s had kind of a rough streak. He went out to dinner one evening with an African writer friend, and when he was coming back home, he heard all these sirens and it was his house, his house had burned down. Some kind of electrical fire.

Isaac: Wow.

Mervyn: He had a hard time. But he has a strong heart. And he said, “Well, like Shakespeare said, first time tragedy, second time farce.” That was his way of just dealing with things.

Adrian: So I was going to ask, I feel like I read somewhere, that the Bud Jones poets were sometimes divisive or controversial. Was that your experience with that? Was there some backlash to what you were doing? I don’t know where I read that.

Mervyn: You know, it might have been from something I wrote myself, because I said – I always refer to the group as “The infamous Bud Jones.” So I may have put that reference in. But we were a very underground group. There were certain people who knew of us and certain people who felt – first of all, there were people who felt that Fatisha was . . . she took no prisoners. She was that kind of person, and poet. She didn’t book people who she thought didn’t have skills. We had a series, she ran a series of readings up at a restaurant up on the west side of Eighty-sixth Street called “The Only Child.” You know I read with Toni Morrison one evening, man? Can you believe that?

Isaac: Yeah, when?

Mervyn: Well, this was back in those days. I wish I could find one of those flyers for you. That would be a gem. I know I kept some of them. But Toni Morrison, because Fatisha would team up two people, a fiction writer and a poet, every Sunday.

Isaac: That’s a very cool idea.

Mervyn: And one Sunday she had me and Toni Morrison. And Toni had just put out that book called Song of Solomon. She had just written that and I was just in awe, you know, so by the time she finished reading, I asked her about a character in her book, a character named Milk Man, a kid who was breastfeeding up to nine-years-old. So I was asking her about her characters, but then I said “Well, I know, people must come up to you and tell you this kind of stuff all the time.” And she said, “No, not in the way that you’re telling me, nobody goes into that kind of detail.” And she was really sweet, man! And then, afterwards I was telling Wesley, I said “I got Toni’s number, man.” And he said, “Good luck with that,” because she was known to be kind of tough. And so they messed me up, man, because I got kind of cold feet and I never called her.

Isaac: You never called her?

Mervyn: No, I got cold feet. Because people would tell me, “Oh, Toni Morrison, man. She’s going to chew you up.” But I should have called. Of course. Even to this day . . .

Isaac: Maybe the number hasn’t changed.

Adrian: I was going to say, you still have her number? Call her right now.

Mervyn: No, her house burned down, so I know she has a new number. But there’s a poem in The Waving Gallery that speaks to her.

Isaac: Do you want to read it?

Mervyn: Yeah, I’ll read it. It’s called “In the Act.”

In the Act

“After nearly half a century, denouncing

brutality becomes a fairly circular

enterprise.” – From a review of Toni

Morrison’s Home, by Sarah Churchwell

in The Guardian, April 2012.

- And in the review, Churchwell was

kind of criticizing Toni for staying on

the same subject all the time. And Toni’s

novel, Home, is about a veteran who was

coming back to live in America, a black

man. And Churchwell was kind of saying

that Toni had stayed on the same topic

for too long. And so my response is really

to this woman, and in the poem, “In the

Act,” I say:

Maybe so, but I’m not ready to give up

on this lady, not ready to interfere with

mothers who won’t let anyone near 

their children, rather raise the rock

and smash them if they must, Her

road to Paradise is the long way,

the uncorking of a bottle and realizing

it’s not water, drunk before we know

the patter-roller’s still dogging our step.

Write another, honey, how your boys

get through disguised as tumbleweed,

anything dead, that can’t be killed

twice.

The end of the novel is not your ending.

Just breath you draw to begin again.

In a country full of dead ends, you tell

of the need to turn around and find

some other way, the house in the distance,

a woman fetching firewood, building a fire.

-- --

- So I’m saying, “Write another one. Never mind what they say.”

Isaac: What’s the line about, something like “When you get to the end, it’s not an end, just a chance to catch your breath”?

Mervyn: Draw breath again. In other words when you get to the end of a novel or a piece of work, it’s not the end, it’s just a chance to breathe.

Isaac: But it is really important to have that ending, right? To have that chance?

Mervyn: Yeah, to breathe again. It makes me think of something that Derek Walcott said when I was in graduate school. And it’s an interesting concept and it’s something I have to remind myself of all the time. He said, “If you’re using an axe, if you’re chopping, then there are three things that happen. It’s not just ––– boom! Because there’s got to be the reflex then, where you draw back, to come again. So there’s a pause and then a coming in. It’s not just one motion.” So that’s actually the breath that’s drawn in between there all the time. It’s a bit like . . . my grandson is a baseball player, he’s fanatic about it, and I remember going, I remember one of the kids, you know how they raise and sway the bat before they swing, but there are kids who are natural hitters, and there’s something in their play with the bat that, even though the pitch is a fast ball, the hitter still takes the time . . . there’s a slight back movement before he comes down. It’s almost like that back movement gives him the impetus. In other words, you can’t start from too close to your body, because if you do you won’t get all of your power. There has to be a back movement, and it gives the hit a beauty in the spin. Darryl Strawberry had it before he got into drugs and went crazy. My son’s grandmother was crazy about him. So I was talking about that breath, right? And I can’t remember how Derek Walcott put it, but it was something about how in the act of writing, that there’s the silent recoil almost, right? That has to be in there, so that you get ready to do the next line. In other words, you can’t just keep going forward. You go forward a line, and then you have to back up a bit to get to the next line. So there’s a breath in between those lines that makes all the difference to your music. So that’s the intake I’m talking about; that when you reach the end it’s not really the end, it’s just the end needed in order to begin again, that allows you to take a breath.

Isaac: I love that. You mentioned earlier, that you wanted to say something else about Fatisha?

Mervyn: So yeah, she was really instrumental in forming the Bud Jones group. And she was a real general. And sometimes she would insist on things that I wouldn’t agree with. She’s a Sagittarius, so she’s tough like me but she’s actually late November, which are the tougher Sagittarius.

Isaac: So her birthday must be right around now then?

Mervyn: Yeah, right around now. But she passed away. But she would say, “I’ve got access to a basement in the Village, let’s do some readings there.” And I would say, “Okay.” And she would say, “Well we could do three nights,” and I’d say “Three nights!? No one’s going to read for three nights.” And she’d say, “Why not?” So I would say, “You’re not going to get people coming for three nights of Bud Jones.” I would say, “Let’s do one night, and make it a big night,” but she insisted, so we would do two nights, like Saturday and Sunday. And usually I was right about these things. The people who were there were mostly the people I’d invited from Brooklyn. And not only that. It was fall, and it was getting chilly, and there was no heat in that basement. So it wasn’t comfortable. But we’d end up fighting all the time about these things. “C’mon man, why don’t you want to do it? People got to hear you,” she would say. And I would say, “Yeah, they have to hear me, but they have to be comfortable! You can’t invite people to a cold basement.” So we used to fight a lot. All the time. And then eventually what happened is that she got sick and things kind of went downhill from there, and also Wesley went off to prison, and the group didn’t break up, but it wasn’t the same, and then gradually you know I think everybody began going in their own direction.

Isaac: Do you remember the last time you spoke with her?

Mervyn: With Fatisha? Last time I saw Fatisha was when she was living on Forty-second Street. Way west on Forty-second street there’s housing for artists over there. There was one called Westbeth in the Village. And she managed to get one of those apartments over there on the west side. And the last time I saw her was when I went to visit her over there. She’d been sick for a while, but she wasn’t bedridden, she was still moving around, but she was sick. And I’ll tell you what she was doing. She was doing something incredible. She was doing watercolors. I guess as therapy, she started going to museums and looking at watercolors and so on and she started doing that, and she had hundreds of them already in her hallway. And she said take whatever you want, take whatever you want. I actually have a poem called “Fatisha’s Paintings,” I think it’s in No Back Door, one second:

Fatisha’s Paintings

1.

She painted them when the cancer

was out of its cage, snarling

like a feral cat: women

with a cure for men’s ills,

and none for themselves.

2.

The women stand and sip their cups,

the men drain theirs and sip them

on the arm of the couch.

The woman’s breasts are

two odd sizes, the cancer

seeming to prefer one

over the other.

3.

The woman’s eyes are sad.

They seem to see the world

from the beginning, before

any of the stars went out.

The men, you could tell they

flinched when she sketched them,

when she asked them to pose naked.

-- --

Mervyn: Yeah, a scary woman. Take your clothes off! I’m going to draw you!

Adrian: This was the woman who said, if you were bulletproof . . .

Mervyn: Yeah, yeah. Would you start a revolution then? Yeah. It fits with the character, right? Yeah. The men flinch when she says pose naked, man. Big guys I know were scared of that girl.

Isaac: Did she have a chance to see that poem?

Mervyn: No, she died long before this. So anyway, after that time when I saw her and she showed me the painting, soon after that she moved back to California and was in a hospice out there. And Wesley managed to go out and see her. He’s the person who saw her last. She had a son named Tabala. And it’s interesting, her son’s name means “war drum.”

Isaac: Wow.

Mervyn: I’ll tell you the kind of person she was. One time her son was playing – they lived on the eighth floor up on a street in the seventies, or eighties, and her son knocked a pot or a vase out, and it fell and almost hit a guy down on the street. And he looked up, and I don’t know if he found the apartment or what happened, and he went up to Fatisha and started complaining, and she said “Fuck you, I wish it had hit you in the head.” Yeah. She was not easy, boy. She was not easy, but she was a helluva poet. She didn’t write any full collections but she wrote two chapbooks.

Adrian: I often think this about musicians too, but I’m sure it’s true with any art, people who have written incredible things that have never been published, that nobody has ever seen. Bands that have played in garages that nobody ever listened to, and the best in the world was never recorded, was never written down. . .

Mervyn: But it’s only alive in the memory of one person or two people who still have it in their minds.

Adrian: And slowly it’s threading through, and it’s made its impact so lightly, but nobody really knows the source, right?

Mervyn: Right. And it just takes one person, “You should have heard this.”

Adrian: You should have heard this.

Mervyn: She wrote two books, and this is one of them: Sapphire Longing in the Blue Dust.

Isaac: Wow.

Top of Column 3

Mervyn: Yeah. And that’s her. You see it, right? You see it? Fatisha.

Adrian: It’s just the one copy in existence here?

Mervyn: Well, that’s the one I got. She wrote that and then there’s one other book she put out. I can’t even remember the title of it, but that’s the girl.

______________________

[Mervyn shows us one of Fatisha’s watercolor paintings, which is hanging in his bedroom. We gather in his living room again.]

______________________

Isaac: So what do you enjoy about teaching poetry?

Mervyn: The language of poetry is sometimes difficult to express, and I think I like the challenge of it, how do you talk about the poem? How do you find a way to say what makes the poem work? Because there are all the technical things you can talk about. You can talk about measure and meter and you can talk about form, you can list all the forms and so on. But how do you find a way to have a conversation about a poem? It’s not easy, right? Because sometimes, and a lot of times, you as the person who wrote the poem, can’t even say how you came by that line. That line arrives to you, with you, fully clothed right? And it’s amazing to you, and it doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does happen, it’s like you keep going back to it to try to find out how those moments happened. I can point out a few of those moments to you.

Isaac: Yeah?

Mervyn: Yeah. I can point it out. When they came and what they did. And I think it’s funny, you get them and sometimes you just don’t. But this is a poem called “The Outing,” and it was in Bomb Magazine. And I don’t know if they use that word a lot here, but in the British West Indies we used to say, oh, we’re going on an outing. It’s like an excursion. Like a day out, a day at the beach. And in this poem, it’s the voice of a man, and my later books have more of a kind of a personal voice. I think these earlier poems, there are a lot of speakers, lot of different speakers, not necessarily me. So that you could read through the book and not say, oh, well that’s about me or it’s an experience that I had. Because very often it sounds like somebody, just people. So this one talks about a man, a man is talking and he’s winding up a day when he’s been out with his family. And I think I can remember the times when I wrote this. I wrote this at a time when I was feeling like myself and my son and his mom should have been more like a family, and not through any undoing of hers. It’s my own hesitation, right, because . . . somebody was talking the other day about women and all these men now who are coming, not coming forward but being found out for their wrong treatment of women. And one of the questions that a writer, a woman was asking was, how do you feel about a man whose work you admire, but who you are disgusted with for his behavior. She was specifically talking about someone like Woody Allen, right? Because his work is genius but he himself may be obnoxious. So how do you as a woman reconcile the love you have for what he can do, with film or writing or whatever it is, and at the same time be horrified at his conduct. And so I think, for example, of one of Walcott’s poem, “Another Life,” where he talks about how this woman that he was attracted to, and he says something like, “How could she know that I have left her before I left her?” In other words, that even while I was falling in love with her, I was already moving away from her. In other words, it’s more the idea of being in love than the actual thing itself. Do you get where I’m coming from?

Isaac: I do, but I’m trying to figure how that links with . . . You’re saying it’s more the idea of falling in love than actually being in love and you’re comparing those two, between writing a piece of work and the writer himself?

Mervyn: No, I think what I’m thinking about is the writer who puts the idea of love in his work, which he’s not going to find in the real world. He’s always going to be disappointed, because it doesn’t measure up to what he’s writing about. And so he ends up moving on all the time. A lot of broken hearts on account of love being sacrificed in the name of art. So that the man, rather than spending time with his family, might get up and go off and spend months trying to do some piece of work.

Adrian: Instead of spending time with his family, he’s trying to idealize the action of spending time with his family.

Mervyn: Exactly.

Adrian: Thus removing himself from his family to be able to romanticize it and bring this sort of idea into existence.

Mervyn: There you go.

Adrian: Thus, but sacrificing the actuality and the reality of it. Or giving all of that away.

Mervyn: Well sometimes, or sometimes he might just be a dog. But the poem, “The Outing” I think at this time I was feeling like why can’t I just settle down now, with this family I have here. I think this kind of came out of this, even though it doesn’t talk about me at all:

The Outing

And when there is

no more ice in the cooler,

and the kids hang

their heads out the car,

I turn to her and say

drive.

We don’t honey

each other, we sit

silent in the sunset.

Out over the hood

the tail-lights swarm, I’m

in the mood for darkness,

and jazz.

Sitting, we travel

like a drawing-room

that moves, one kid

holds a shell, he

eased out of the sand,

it’s all the money we have

save for cosiness

and sex, and sidelong

looks at the sea.

The sea? Yes, I make

a science of everything,

The orange rind

drying in the kitchen,

the doggish way the moon

herds the stars. Were it not

for the road under us,

we’d slip into

the fields. Faster, I say. 

-Mervyn: So the lines that came to me, as if by magic, in that way, are where the poem says, “I make a science of everything / the orange rind / drying in the kitchen,” –– the rhythm and the balance of those words is just . . . you can’t try to make that up. That just comes.

Isaac: “I make a science of everything,”

Mervyn: Yes, that’s just to lead up to it, but the real thing is “The orange rind,” listen to the music, it’s just happening, “the orange rind drying in the kitchen.” “The orange rind / drying in the kitchen.”

Isaac: Maybe the poem is doing the work, and you no longer have to.

Mervyn: Well, something like that. And then the lines that follows it, changes that sort of soft easy thing – “The orange rind / drying in the kitchen, / the doggish way the moon / herds the stars . . .” Now, I’m not a cowboy. I don’t know anything about herding, right? But the image of how a dog herds the animals ––– put that up there, “The doggish way that the moon / herds the stars . . .” So the moon is like a sheepdog, herding those stars around. That takes the poem out of the ordinary and puts it somewhere else.

Isaac: It’s really special to be able to show people how to access that space, in their own mind.

Mervyn: If you’re lucky and if you work hard enough as a poet, it will come to you more often than not, but it doesn’t happen on its own. One question that came up on a panel at the Miami Book Fair was how do Caribbean writers make their poems accessible to the world? In other words, if you’re making local references, there are people who are not from Trinidad who may not get what that’s about, right? So that’s another challenge. How do I write about things that I love or things that remain precious to me, but have you share in that enjoyment and love, even without explaining it? So for me, these are the kind of things that you reach for, that you don’t get it too much, and if you don’t get them, what you end up doing is creating things that sound kind of clever, but they’re not quite there. These things happen on their own.

Adrian: I hear that. I experience that sometimes, when I’m writing.

Mervyn: And you have to move yourself out of the way, kind of right?

Adrian: Yeah, I get in my own way a lot.

Mervyn: Because the ego steps up.

Isaac: Watch this.

Mervyn: Yeah, watch this.

Isaac: Did I misread that you never learned to swim?

Mervyn: No, you’re right. I never did. The thing is, there’s a lot of people from the islands who can’t swim. They have a really healthy respect for the ocean. I remember going to St. Maarten one time, and we were on the beach and these women were selling little curios and so on, and one said, “Are you all going swimming?” And we said, “No, people from the island don’t swim.” And growing up I remember how some of the oceans in Trinidad are not those wonderful, peaceful-looking placid bays and so on, with blue waters and so on. There are some rough beaches in Trinidad. And some of them are known for terrible currents. So you’re asking me how come I’m not a swimmer. I don’t know, maybe it was passed down from my father; my father never once went to the ocean. The neighbors would be taking us to the beach and we would say, “Come on, Dad,” but he just wouldn’t. And this is where the title comes from, right? No Back Door. He would say “The sea has no back door.”

Isaac: What do you think that means, in terms of the sea not having a back door?

Mervyn: Oh, it just means that there’s no exit, that kind of thing. That if you go in and you get into trouble that there’s no exit, there’s no way out. There are other ways of saying it now. I think people from Barbados say, “The sea has no branch…nothing to hold onto.” So the sea has no back door, it means in a weird way that you go in and that there’s no exit, there’s no place to come out. And I thought that, you know, as a title for the book it works, because it’s a lot like the situations that we find ourselves in, with ambitions and so on, that there’s really no escape route. That you simply have to make out of your difficulties what you can. You just have to take your difficulties.

Isaac: Right. And there’s all sorts of things that we can do to try to sort of escape, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, but it doesn’t work. So you better learn how to sort of turn it into something else.

Isaac: Maybe poetry helps?

Mervyn: Yeah, poetry helps, but poetry can also sometimes lead to other things…which makes me wonder, I’m thinking about Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, someone who writes powerful verse like her, why would she kill herself? But it’s more than the poems, right? But Walcott said something in a poem, he said “The classics can console, but not enough.” So she wrote all these poems but it wasn’t enough, the pain I think of relationship with Ted Hughes, and all of that. And the other one that makes me wonder too is Anne Sexton, who was a beautiful woman, who wrote these just incredible poems, right? And then she commits suicide. And she’s got one of the best titles ever, right?

Isaac: Which one?

Mervyn: To Bedlam and Part Way Back. She has some fantastic poems in that book.

Isaac: I think one of the theories that you hear is that, well poets are actually looking closely at what’s difficult in life, and sometimes looking too closely and for too long becomes unbearable.

Mervyn: Too much.

Isaac:: Yeah. I don’t know if I buy it, but at least it’s one theory, right?

Mervyn: Yeah. It’s one theory. I have a painter friend, Leroy Clarke, who when I talk about poets being mad and all of that, Leroy always say, “Don’t let them convince you of having to be a mad artist and all that.” He says, “You can be an artist without being crazy.” He says, “It’s possible. Don’t let them lump you into that whole thing, so you’ll feel that in order to be great or to belong, you have to be crazy,” he said, “Don’t ever let them persuade you of that shit.”

Isaac: Yes.

Mervyn: So which is why I think I’m not the kind cloistered poet, who sort of shuts out from other things. For a long time, I just partied my ass off. And even now, if somebody calls me, hey, I’m ready to go. Because otherwise you can get yourself swamped into stuff. And there’s a lot going on that’s still wonderful, right? There’s a lot to discover still. Life is what you make it. It’s a cliché, but it’s true, because you can allow yourself to get swept under by all kinds of stuff, but you can also, in the middle of the most horrible thing, look up and see something absolutely wonderful.

Isaac: I think it’s important to decide to seek those experiences out, right?

Mervyn: Yeah, but there’s also those experiences that happen when you’re not looking, right? Or then there’s also the accidents that wake you up. I remember I was teaching at Bronx Community College, I remember coming down the hill when it was starting to turn dark. And it’s a long walk in the Bronx, and I was coming down that hill to catch the train at 183rd Street, and I was thinking about the class and about something that I could have said differently. And I was just full of all of that, and as I turned the corner, something hit me ––– BAM! ––– and it shook me out of my reverie, for sure! And I thought I was getting stuck up or something. And all it was, the wind had picked up a paper cup and slapped me behind the ear. But it got my attention! I said, “Don’t be day-dreaming! That was always a tough neighborhood. And also, I thought, that class is over. When you get home, you can think about, alright, maybe I’ll do the lesson like this, right?

Adrian: It brings you into conscious contact with the moment.

Mervyn: Yeah.

Adrian: It takes being slapped in the face by a paper cup.

Mervyn: It gets you up, yeah. There’s a lot of stuff, a lot narrow escapes. I remember once on Franklin Avenue, something had happened with the train and they made us switch at Franklin, so I was at Franklin waiting for the train. So I was standing there, close to the edge. And in those days they didn’t have the yellow lines saying, don’t stand too close to the edge. And I was thinking, this damn train, man? And I was standing there, and I was looking one way because the train was supposed to be taking me into the city, right? So I was leaning near the edge, and looking. And as soon as I leaned over a little bit more, the train went ––––– schuuuuuuuuuuum!

Isaac: Oh my God! In the other direction?

Mervyn: I mean the breeze was on my cheek! One more second and it would have just pulled my head, whatever would have happened, it would’ve knocked me right into the path or something. The train wasn’t supposed to be coming this way but because of whatever was wrong with the line it was reversing on the track. That got my attention, too. So there are good surprises, and there’s also horrible shit, so it all tells you, you have to be awake. You can have reverie and all that stuff, but you also have to be awake. You have to pay attention.

Adrian: Is there anything that you would say, you miss about your first few years in New York, when you were still trying to find your way?

Mervyn: When I first moved here I had just graduated from college, and didn’t have my green card, so there were about twelve years where I couldn’t go home, and those were painful years. I remember going to work one Carnival Tuesday morning, and teaching class in the Bronx, when the snow was coming down, and I would just think, Jesus, I shouldn’t be here. But now when I go back, it’s not the same country as it was back then. And you can tell, by reading some of the poems in Voices Carry, where a lot of those poems talk about the violence. The murder rate for this year is already four-hundred and something. There used to be a time, when I was growing up, when the murder rate in Trinidad…if there were two murders in the year, people were shocked. And that would be something you would talk about. There would be four murders for the year, tops, back in those days; now they have four-hundred, and it’s just been increasing and increasing and increasing. So I’m saying that to say yeah, I don’t miss the years when I couldn’t go back home whenever I wanted to, but the impulse to just get up and go wherever I feel like going now, well, is tainted with the idea that where I’m going is not always safe. So I don’t know anybody who is too comfortable in these times, even if you have money. Or when you come through the airport, man, and you can feel the tension, right? You know that you don’t have any drugs; and you don’t have any weapons or anything, but people are still nervous. People are scared.

Adrian: I hear that.

Mervyn: And sometimes the hungry years are okay if all the things are equal, right? If there’s something to aspire to, when you can say, “Okay, I don’t have it but I’m going to work hard—I’m going to get it.” And it seems like there’s a clear path to whatever the goal is. But when you get to the kind of years like these, when it’s not so clear anymore, which way is the way to go. Then you get befuddled because now…you don’t mind the pain, and you don’t mind the suffering, or what I call “the empty belly.” You don’t mind the hunger, because you know, “Okay . . . this is what it’s going to take to get me to where I can at least feed my kids tomorrow,” Right?

Isaac: Right.

Mervyn: But it’s not so clear anymore! It’s not so clear how I’m going make it to the factory to the job because between here and the factory, a lot can happen, right? Some fool can drive a truck down into the crowd, right? One of the things I remember talking about when they gave Walcott the Langston Hughes Award years ago up at City College, and I was introducing him and talking about him and so on. And one of the things I remember, it was soon after 9/11, and one of the things I was thinking about was how the poet at one time could have been the prophet; he could’ve talked about things to come because he had vision and he could see things, right? What happens when reality begins to outstrip the vision? What happens when reality begins to happen faster than the poet can keep up with? So that he can make all these incredible lines about magical things happening and possible mythical things happening, but yet we have no answer for standing and watching bodies coming down like paper. We didn’t realize for a long time that there were actually people jumping! It looked like somebody had thrown files out of an office and it looked like paper was floating down until, “Say, wait a minute! That’s a man!” So, part of my introduction with Derek was talking about how the entire journey of being a poet must have changed somehow, when things begin to happen, which even in our wildest imagination, we didn’t have a picture for. Somehow, reality has caught up because everything that we kind of thought, the Dick Tracy watch and all that stuff, right? It has happened! It has already happened. So, you have to be real good. How far can you stretch things now? What can you come up with that’s beyond? Or maybe you go back to something quieter.

Isaac: It’s a good question, maybe the answer somehow ties in with who the poet feels he’s writing for, or why he writes poems at all. Who would you say you write for? When we went to lunch a few weeks back, I think you mentioned that you want to write poems that people who may not usually be all that interested in poetry, can still enjoy. Can you say more about that?

Mervyn: I think I want to pull back a little on that, in terms of writing for the people. I think I write for poetry’s sake, to see the possibility of poetry, where it can take you, what it can do. And if I can get that to work, then it will be for the people. I can’t have writing for the people as my main thing. I don’t see myself as a savior for people. I think I’m kind of too selfish for that. I’m not a savior. But I think, if I can get poetry to work in the way that it’s supposed to work, then it will serve a bigger purpose. And that bigger purpose is the purpose of the people. But I can’t start off with the people in mind. Because if you start off with the people in mind, then the poems won’t go but so far. And then also, what I keep in mind, more than the readers, are the people that I put in the poems. I want to be just to those people. So there’s a poem in Voices Carry called “Only Son,” which is about the death of a friend of mine’s son. Colors is his name, he lost his son. And that was one of my best buddies when I go home now. So when I go home I miss all these guys. But his son looked just like him. But he died very tragically. His son, from a very early age, got involved with some wrong stuff. And this is what gangsters do. They recruit young kids to do the dirty work. Because if they get caught, then they’ll just serve time as delinquents, right, as teenagers. So they hire these little boys to do their job. And this is what happened with Colors’ son. And Colors’ son looked just like him. So I’m saying, when I write a poem like that, I write it, not to make Colors happy about the situation, but to explain something to myself and to Colors about what happened. You know? I don’t know how to justify what happened, to say, he was a good boy. That’s not what I’m trying to say. And I’m not saying that I write in an academic way, because there are people who explore poetry to try to match Yeats or who try to explore some very intellectual notion of what poetry is. I’m not trying to explore the intellectual as much, as much as the intuitive, the thing that happens almost without you, in that magical kind of way. The poem, for example, in Voices Carry, “A Kind of Valentine,” about the Japanese woman who came to Trinidad, and who was murdered, I try to talk about that. Almost like speaking to her spirit. To say, I wish I could have held your hand or something. I wish I could have not let that happen. It’s almost like a kind of voodoo, right, you’re powerless, but the only power you have then is this thing -- to utter something. And maybe by uttering that thing, you can make the bad things go away. There’s a poem in Voices Carry called “Bad Dream.” And I remember my mom, I used to have terrible, frightening dreams when I was a kid. And I remember my mom’s only consolation, when I would get up in the middle of the night and talk to her she would say, “It’s a bad dream, it’s just a bad dream.” Just to call it a bad dream would put it in context and help me go back to sleep. So this is “Only Son” for Colors:

Only Son

for Colors

You showed me the boy, when

he was three, red and skinny, your

spitting image. Years later, when

he was only thirteen, you worried

that he had done his first job, some

dirty work that left him, the gun

heavy in his pocket, to get back

however he could from down by

the sea. Now a grandfather,

you describe how the police

found him out on the highway,

head one way, leg another, how

they wouldn’t let you near the

folded wreckage, the bodies of

those who called him, Come

go, spread like the fingers of so

many arms, his face no longer

the spitting image of anything.

-- --

Mervyn: So I think I write to come to terms with things that I have no control over, to find a way…not to package it, but to say that I spoke on it, to say that I didn’t just completely ignore, what happened.