Justin Taylor Recommends...

“I think poetry is—or should be—a staple of any fiction writer’s reading diet. It doesn’t matter whether you ever intend to write any poems yourself. And it doesn’t matter (much) whether you prefer classics, or contemporary, or traditional, or experimental, or if you have no particular preference and can’t tell the difference. Any poetry, more or less, will do. Poetry invites you to read slowly and unpack all the different ways a sentence, or phrase, or single word, can have meaning. And of course, those lessons are transferrable to every other aspect of the writing life: the writing part, the prose-reading part, the self-editing part, the teaching-of-writing part (also the pleasure and edification parts). Lately I’ve been reading poetry in the morning, right after I get up, while the water boils in the kettle, and then again while the coffee steeps. There’s about ten, maybe twelve minutes of free time that accumulates around those two parts of the coffee-making process that’s enough time to get through two or three poems, or the same poem two or three times over. The poems—and the smell of the coffee, and eventually the coffee itself—are my bridge into wakefulness. In effect, the poems constitute the morning’s first experience or event, and I find that this sets a salutary standard from which to attempt the rest of my day. I read Derek Walcott’s White Egrets this way, and swaths of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, which is a phonebook—you’d never toss it in a backpack to take on the subway. So I leave it out on the dining room table, and then every morning when I go out there, there it is.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Flings (Harper Collins, 2014)

Photo credit: David Benhaim