Marilyn L. Taylor

CONTACT:
Address: 59 Settler Hill Circle, Madison, WI 53717
Email: mlt@mltpoet.com
Website: www.mltpoet.com

BIO:
Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee, taught poetry for fifteen years with the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Taylor’s work has appeared in Able Muse, Measure, Light, and Rhino, among many other journals and anthologies.  She has been a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Parody contest, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet award, the Lascaux Review prize,  and was recently awarded the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for formal verse.  Taylor now serves as an Associate Editor for two poetry journals (Verse-Virtual and 3rd Wednesday).  Her eighth poetry collection, Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems (2021) is now available from her website, www.mltpoet.com/Books.

PUBLICATIONS:
Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems, Kelsay Books, 2021  

Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Kelsay Books, 2018 (Senior Editor)

Step on a Crack, White Violet Press,/ Kelsay Books, 2016

Going Wrong, Parallel Press, 2009

The Seven Very Liberal Arts, Aralia Press 2006 (Limited Edition — Sold Out)

Subject to Change, David Robert Books, 2004

Exit Only, Anamnesis Press, 2001

Marilyn L Taylor’s Greatest Hits, 1986 - 2000, Pudding House Publications, 2001

Shadows Like These, Wm Caxton Ltd, 1994

Troika I: The Accident of Light, 1991

Poetry

The Amazing Perseverence of the Sand-Hill Crane

Endangered species? Not this chick—she’s got
a built-in arsenal:  claw, bill, and feather,
and soon she’ll pull her leggy act together,
gear up for the hunt. She’ll troubleshoot
the dales and dunes where eligible males
from her subgenus are inclined to loiter,
then browse around, observe, and reconnoiter
until she’s got her target by the tail.

Not for her, macaws that squall for freedom,
Not for her, the frowning peregrine;
She wouldn’t know an albatross from Adam
and doesn’t want some freckled featherbrain
puttering in the garden, spitting seeds.
One crane. One skinny crane. That’s all she needs.

The Day After I Die

they will find the cure
for whatever got me,
and a unified theory
of physics will be announced
by a consortium
from M.I.T.

Following the funeral,
Earth will be contacted by
intelligent beings from
the Farquhar galaxy--
immediately after which
Tesla will announce a car
that can run forever
on table scraps.

Within the week,
Abbott Labs will introduce
an age-reversing cream
on the very heels of
a morning-after diet pill
that tastes exactly
like a Cadbury’s Easter Egg. 

Finally,
the woman they hire to clean
and fumigate my house
will come across a sheaf
of my old poems (tucked
optimistically inside a catalogue
from The Gap)

and turn them over to
her Thursday client, Billy Collins,
who (ignoring an infinitesimal twinge
of envy) will gallantly take charge
and see to everything--
including, of course,
any immortality.