An Interview with Carol Taylor
Carol A. Taylor is a Texas-born poet who loves meter, form, and rhyme. Her poems are more intellectual than emotional. She has four chapbooks, including the bilingual Sonetos del Inglés, and in 2023 she gathered up her complete works to date and had them printed as a private legacy to her children. Houston Skyline is her first commercial book. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies.
Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?
It’s funny, but the excellent poets I memorized as a child never made me want to write. I figured there was enough bad poetry to go around, and I was sure mine would be bad. But a friend was staying with us after her divorce and she would read me her lines while I was cooking dinner. Nothing very memorable, mostly emotional stuff you write for the therapy that’s in it, and not well written, until one evening she read me a poem she called “Night With a Wolf.” I thought, Wow! That’s incredible! If she can write something like that then I can do it, too. I knew at least I could handle the spelling and grammar and the meter and rhyme, so that night I wrote my first poem, and I thought it was brilliant. It wasn’t, as I realized years later. I also found out years later that my friend didn’t write “Night With a Wolf.” I don’t know how that misunderstanding came about, but I can tell you for sure that I wouldn’t have dared to even try to write a poem if I’d known then. So I owe my writing to a poet named Bayard Taylor who lived in the 1800s and to my friend who copied his lines in her notebook.
What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?
Teacher, free-lance translator, software manager, executive assistant, secretary, travel coordinator, bookkeeper, classified ads agent, Navy wife, and stay-at-home mom of five.
Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?
Too easy, really. After moving to Houston, I began writing Texas poems with a book in mind, and I could see the Houston skyline from my upstairs window.
What part of publishing your book made it feel real for the first time?
The first royalty deposit: $24.12.
What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?
Read the poems more than once. They all say something and have different forms and relaxed meter that may take a moment to get used to if you’re looking for iambic pentameter or free verse.
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