Taylor Mali Transcript

Music Credit: "Some Are More Equal," an improvisation performed by Paul Rucker and Hans Teuber from the cd, Oil.

Taylor Mali: The last poem of Bouquet of Red Flags is called “NightFall”. “When I go, I wanna go in the same way night is set to fall. Because, it is day that does the falling while night, at the other end of the twilit sky, to take its proper place, rises into evening.”

Jo Reed: That’s Taylor Mali performing his poem “NightFall” which appears in his latest collection of work, Bouquet of Red Flags and this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. I'm not sure that April is the cruelest month, but for art lovers, it's one of the busiest and the most joyous. April is the month when we celebrate both jazz and poetry, which means here at the arts endowment, we're preparing for the Jazz Masters' concert and Poetry Out Loud, the national competition where high school students from around the country match their skills in reciting classic and contemporary poetry.
It’s our good fortune that this year’s host for the Poetry Out Loud finals is Taylor Mali. Taylor Mali is a poet who moves easily between page and stage. He himself is a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, as well as the author of four books. A former teacher and passionate advocate for the profession, Mali is probably best-known for his series of poems about his own experiences in middle school and high school classrooms. 

I spoke with Taylor Mali in his Brooklyn apartment and I was trying to get a sense of the trajectory of his career, so I asked what I thought was a very sensible question...

Jo Reed: Taylor, what came first, teaching, writing or performing?

Taylor Mali:  Writing. No, performing. No, teaching. My father used to write poems and recite them, sort of rhyming toasts, occasional poems. He would recite them at his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and my mother’s 50th birthday party. When he died, I found poems that were written from the 1950s when his mother got a garbage disposal and he had written a rhyming poem about that, very sentimental, very funny but yet very sweet, sort of Dr. Seuss meets Robert Frost. So I grew up watching my father perform these poems at big family gatherings to the delight of everyone there, and so for me poetry was always a very public art form, very much of a performance, and so I brought that with me to my writing. And then I was an actor and I went to drama school and I didn’t want to be a professional actor, and I brought my performance training with me to my presentation of a poem, and I went to graduate school. And I was always a little bit too histrionic for the poets and a little too literary for the actors, so I discovered slam in graduate school. But, I thought who’s going to make a living as a professional poet. You know what? Most of the poets I know are teachers, and so I was a teacher out of grad school and I would write poems about teaching. And some of my most well known poems are poems that I wrote about my daily experiences in the classroom. So when you ask a question like, “What comes first, poetry, teaching or writing,” it’s hard for me because in a part of my mind there’s not much of a difference between all three of those. And I like to quote the Latin poet, Horace, who said that the task of the poet is to either delight or instruct and that we must reserve our greatest respect and approbation for those who can do both at the same time.” So when I sit down to write the goal is to both instruct and delight, but if I can't do both, knowing me, I would rather be merely delightful than solely instructive. But how is that not also the task of the teacher, to instruct and delight? So teaching, writing, performing, they’re all mixed up for me.

Jo Reed:  So poetry was important to you when you were a kid. When did you start writing? Did you write when you were younger?

Taylor Mali:  Yes, I did. I like to tell people that I wrote my first poem when I was about five about walking to Central Park and then walking back from Central Park and stepping in dog poop on the way to Central Park and my babysitter saying that, “You have to look down when you walk.” And then looking down and bumping into an old lady on the way back from Central Park and her say, “Taylor, you have to look up when you walk.” So my first poem was about damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That’s what I like to tell people. I’m sure it’s not true. I do remember thinking that but I don’t think I wrote it down.

Jo Reed:  Why poetry, Taylor? Why not fiction, short stories? Did you ever think about anything other than poetry?

Taylor Mali:  Sure. No, I did, and because I was an actor, I had been a playwright and I have written short stories, but the immediate appeal of poetry, once I discovered the poetry slam, this competitive poetry reading, that sort of steered me towards poetry, perhaps because I’m a competitive person. The Moth competitive story slams didn’t exist then. But I’ll tell you what, I went to drama school in Oxford for a summer and studied with the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, this program that Yale puts together to try to get American actors to study with British actors to get better at doing Shakespeare. And at the end of the program there was a talent show, and I decided that I was going to write a new form of song because it was the mid-eighties, and I was going to write a rap. So I wrote this rap about living in Balliol College in Oxford for the summer, and it was a rhyming poem, basically rhyming couplets with a beat, with me doing beat boxing in between. And it went over so well, and I think that was probably when I got really bitten with this bug of if I did my own spin on Dr. Seuss in a performative way, it made me come alive. I just felt more alive reciting rhymes and parceling out what little wisdom I have in spoonfuls laced with sugar so that people would take them down. That’s what, I feel most alive when I’m in front of people, entertaining and delighting and instructing them.

Jo Reed:  Well, tell me about the poetry slams that you did. Do you remember your first one?

Taylor Mali:  Of course I do, yeah. I went to Kansas State University from 1990 to 1993. Kansas state is in Manhattan, Kansas, and the poetry slam that I went to was in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where the University of Kansas is. And one of the professors on my masters committee, Larry Rogers, said, “Hey, have you heard about this thing called the poetry slam? It started in Chicago in the mid-eighties. Here we are, it’s 1992, and they do it over in Lawrence.” And I said, “No, but it sounds very much like what I would be interested in.” And it happened at a strip club on the fourth Monday of every month. They would give the dancers the night off and invite the poets to come in and reveal themselves in a different kind of way.

Jo Reed:  Oh, that is funny.

Taylor Mali:  There was a pole onstage that you could use if you wanted to. There was a mirror on the back of the stage. I like to think that regular clientele of the strip club would show up and say, “Where are the girls?” And the bartender would say, “Oh, the girls have the night off but it’s a poetry slam. Stay. Have a beer.” And I’d like to think that some of them stayed and got hooked on poetry, but I don’t know whether that happened. And I loved it. And my hands shook. One of the reasons that you should memorize your work is that if you don’t this will happen. People will see your hands shaking, and if you’re really nervous your legs shake. Have you ever had that happen to you speaking in public?. But your clothing will vibrate your nervousness.

Jo Reed:  So you loved it right away.

Taylor Mali:  I loved it right away, which is not to say that I was good right away. I have developed over, that was my first slam was in let’s call it 1992, so 23 years ago.

Jo Reed:  When you started performing at slam poetry events did you find that it also had an impact on the way you would write poems?

Taylor Mali:  Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Performance really should be part of your editing process, and sometimes when you perform a poem for the very first time, you’ll discover that you didn’t get a laugh where you thought you were going to get a laugh, and a line that you thought was going to be just like a throw-off line or maybe even a serious line suddenly finds bizarre humor. And there are two ways of approaching that. I call it an error of performance, and you can either go back and fix it in the writing, or you change the way you perform it. I have a poem called, “Playing Scrabble with Eddie” about playing Scrabble with a dyslexic student who spells a bad word and spells it backwards and, should I do the poem?

Jo Reed:  Absolutely.

Taylor Mali:  Maybe I should just do the poem. Playing Scrabble with Eddie. “Despite his dyslexia or perhaps because of it Eddie can beat every other eighth grader in Scrabble, kick their ass, in fact, and he knows it, though he can't say it, at least not in those words, because if he said “ass” in my eighth grade I would give him a detention on the spot. See, Scrabble was made for his mind. Show him a rack of seven tiles and he can tell you in an instant 10 words that use some combination of those letters. His mind is hardwired for confusion, for the jangling clangor of consonants and discombobulating vowels. But ask him to spell those 10 words and he may dare to read “dear” when the word reads “dread.” Combine dyslexia with hyperactivity, which now we call ADD, attention deficit disorder, though Eddie impishly says, “DDA, da-duh,” 15 grams of Ritalin dispensed by the nurse twice daily, an IQ of 162 and all the hormones of a 13-year-old boy just dying for an education, and you’ve got yourself one horny, wacked out eighth grade genius staring at the seven tiles of his rack as if only getting them all in the right order was going to unlock all the secrets of the language. Eddie stares at my face, at the board, at his rack. At his rack, at the board, at my face, and I wonder what his dyslexic, rearranging mind is doing now with my eyes and my ears and my nose. How many one-eyed Picasso-faced English teachers are staring back at him from the educated audience of his adolescence. How many monsters can he spell with my face? But here comes the word, “K-C-U-F.” Kcuf? “Eddie, I think I’m gonna have to challenge you on this word, ‘kcuf.’” And Eddie reddens. Eddie reddens like he finally got the punch line to a dirty joke, which in a way he has. Eddie reddens like I finally caught him swearing, which in a way I haven't yet, and the letters pivot around the K-C-U-F. “Oh, well, that’s different, Eddie.” “Is that okay, Mr. Mali?” “Is that word okay, Eddie? Is that word okay? You got the ‘F’ on a double letter square. You got the ‘K’ on triple word. That’s 51 points, young man. Way to go.” “Excellent,” says Eddie. “I’m gonna kick your ass,” and so I give him a detention on the spot. So that’s the end of the poem, but the first time I performed it I didn’t know that that was the end of the poem and I had another stanza about the appropriateness of language. “How come, Mr. Mali, when I say the F word I can do it on the game but...” And I said to Eddie, “It’s all about the appropriateness of language.” I said, “It’s all about the appropriateness of language.” You know, that was the way I thought I was going to end, but the first time I perform it at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they still have a slam every Wednesday night, they just clapped and people were like with their applause saying, “That is the perfect ending of the poem,” and I was smart enough for once to realize I can't top this. What am I going to do? Get them all to quiet down and then give them my gratuitous coda that I was going to put at the end? So this is all by way of saying that performance should be a part of the editing process.

Jo Reed:  Well, you’re talking about editing and performance, and teaching is all wrapped up in that because teaching is fairly performative. When did you start teaching and why middle school?

Taylor Mali:  Part of the terms of my scholarship at Kansas State University was to teach freshman composition, and I had never really done any teaching before that. And I found that I loved teaching first-year students how to write different types of assignments, personal reflections and persuasive essays and research papers and evaluations. And so when I got together with my fellow graduate students on the weekend they always wanted to talk about the poems that they were writing, and I wanted to talk about the assignments that we were giving and the papers that we were getting in return. And so upon leaving graduate school I thought, well, I’ve got two skills. I can write and perform poems. That was one skill. And I can teach. And the teaching seemed like it was the better road to go down if I wanted to pay the mortgage, and so I started teaching. But I wanted to teach younger students because the college freshmen that I had in Kansas, they already had too many bad mistakes. I was like I need to catch them earlier, so I need to be a high school English teacher. And the first job I had was actually teaching eighth grade and I loved it. I just loved eighth grade.

Jo Reed:  Where was it?

Taylor Mali: Cape Cod. I was the substitute teacher for a while and that was miserable. You don’t know anybody’s name; therefore, you don’t have any power over anybody. There’s a reason that God has a million names. And eighth grade was wonderful. And I’ve taught high school and I’ve taught other grades. Eighth grade remains my favorite; sixth grade a very close second. And why middle school? I think there are so many teachers who avoid middle school. So many middle school teachers are only there teaching in the middle school because they’re waiting for something to open up in the high school, and I think I’m partly a good middle school teacher because I was so much of a middle schooler in my heart. I’m a 13-year-old boy in my heart still, so I think I understood their language.

Jo Reed:  Well, you wrote a poem called “What a Teacher Makes” that was actually kind of a game changer for you.

Taylor Mali:  It was. It was, that poem and YouTube. I wrote the poem based on a New Year’s Eve party that I went to in 1998 and performed it at the National Poetry Slam Championships a couple of times, and it got filmed. And then when YouTube was invented just 10 years ago, 2005, that poem was put up on YouTube from the finals. And, my career wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren't for YouTube and however it was who illegally posted that video of me performing “What Teachers Make” from the whatever National Championship it was that I performed in, and that’s the poem I’m probably known for. The poem got separated from my name and rewritten and sent around the world as anonymous cyber spam. Many people listening right now have probably received some version of this poem, which I’ll do right now.

Jo Reed:  Yes, please do.

Taylor Mali:  “What Teachers Make” or “Objection Overruled” or “If Things Don’t Work Out You Can Always Go To Law School.” He says, “The problem with teachers is what’s a kid gonna learn from someone who decided that his best option in life was to become a teacher?” He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about teachers. Those who can do, and those who can't teach. I decide to bite my tongue instead of his and resist the urge to remind the other dinner guests that it’s also true what they say about lawyers because we’re eating, after all, and this is supposed to be a polite conversation. “I mean you’re a teacher, Taylor. Come on. Be honest. What do you make?” And I wish he hadn’t done that, asked me to be honest because, you see, I’ve got this little policy in my classroom about honesty and ass kicking, which is if you ask for it then I have to let you have it. You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C plus feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor, and I can make an A minus feel like a slap in the face. How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best? I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups. No, you cannot ask me a question, so put your hand down. Why won't I let you go to the bathroom? Because you’re bored and you don’t really have to go to the bathroom, do you? I make parents tremble in fear when I call home at around dinnertime. “Hi, this is Mr. Mali. Hope I haven’t called at a bad time. I just wanted to talk to you about something that your son said today in class to the biggest bully in the grade. He said, ‘Hey, why don’t you leave that kid alone? I still cry sometimes. Don’t you?’ And that was the noblest act of courage that I have ever seen.” I make parents see their children for who they are and who they can be. You want to know what I make? I make kids wonder. I make them question. I make them criticize. I make them apologize and mean it. I make them write, write, write and then I make them read. I make them spell, definitely, beautiful, definitely, beautiful, define, nightly, B-E-A-utiful until they will never misspell either one of those words again. I make them show all their work in math class and then hide it on their final drafts in English. I make them realize that if you’ve got this up here then you follow this in here. And if somebody ever tries to judge you based on what you make, you give them this right here. Here, let me break it down for you so you know what I say is true. Teachers, teachers make a difference. Now what about you?

Jo Reed:  And that poem made a tremendous difference.

Taylor Mali:  Thank you.

Jo Reed:  Were you teaching at the time when you wrote that poem?

Taylor Mali:  Yes.

Jo Reed:  How did your students, did they hear about it?

Taylor Mali:  I don’t know if that was, I put my teaching career on hold. That’s not true. In June of 2000, I said goodbye to my sixth grade homeroom class and I haven’t received health insurance through my employer since then, but I’ve never stopped teaching.

Jo Reed:  You moved from being a teacher to still teaching but also being a real advocate for the profession of teaching.

Taylor Mali:  Right.

Jo Reed:  Is that fair?

Taylor Mali:  Yeah. No, that’s fair. But a strange advocate for the profession because there are wonderful advocates for the profession like Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol, who are educational philosophers and researchers, and I’m not that. I’m just sort of the eloquent cheerleader.

Jo Reed:  Are there characteristics that you think are really vital for a teacher to have?

Taylor Mali:  Yes. Well, I mean the most important thing that any teacher can have is love for his or her students, even when you do not like them. You need to love them. You need to love. You need to, and also you cannot consider teaching just to be something that you do on the side. It needs to be who you are or else you will burn out very quickly. There’s a writer named Parker Palmer whose sort of main thesis is you cannot hide who you are. What you do needs to be who you are, and if you’re not doing what you are, then it’s time for you to change that.
Jo Reed:  And what about poets? Are there vital characteristics that a poet needs to have, do you think?
Taylor Mali:  Sure, an unflinching eye for observation. And also, you need to know, you need to have at the back of your mind why should anybody care? Why should anybody care about this? For me, poems need to be about things. And, yes, you need to love words and you need to love language. And to write my kind of poetry you need to be willing to experiment with the rules of language. You need to know them in order to break them, but you need to answer that question, “So what? Why should anyone care?”

Jo Reed:  I want to talk about a series that you run called “Page Meets Stage”

Taylor Mali: The series has been around for 10 years here in New York. Billy Collins, one of my mentors and I were the very first pairing in November of 2005, and we’ve had 60 or 70 pairings since then. It’s become a monthly series that we have. The third Wednesday of every month here in New York City we take a page poet, like a literary poet, a Pulitzer prizewinner-- the subtitle of “Page Meets Stage” is “Where the Pulitzer Prize Meets the Poetry Slam.” And we’ve had Pulitzer Prize winners. We’ve had United States Poets Laureate, and I pair one of them with a more performative poet, like me, like a spoken word poet or a slam poet, and they read back and forth poem for poem. And it’s a wonderful series. It’s not a slam. It’s not a competition. Poetry wins every time. And it’s great to see the fans of one poet show up and discover that they love the work of this poet that they’ve never heard of.

Jo Reed: You mentioned Billy Collins as a mentor.

Taylor Mali:  I call him my mentor. He’d be shocked to hear me say that, perhaps. I took a couple of classes with him at summer writing colonies. Billy is a spiritual mentor more than he is, although I have taken classes with him he’s a spiritual brother.

Jo Reed:  And you wrote a poem in your new book.

Taylor Mali:  Called “Frank McCourt Joins Billy Collins on the Patio at Sunset,” and this is entirely true because Frank McCourt was teaching a memoir class right next to Billy’s poetry class that I was in. And I remember we would hear them laughing through the wall and he would go, “Hold on a second,” and he would go out the window and would go, “McCourt, shut your crew up.”And then he would come back in and say, “Friends shouldn’t let friends write memoir.” So they had an adversarial relationship. This was the Southampton Writers Conference that I went to, maybe 2007, and this is based on that. “Frank McCourt Joins Billy Collins on the Patio at Sunset.” The two of them, the one with whiskey, a chilled white wine for the other, watch as the sun dips into Long Island Sound. “It’s a beautiful sunset,” says Frank in his brogue, to which Billy replies, “Back off, McCourt. The sunset is my territory and the sunrise. You stick to your miserable Irish childhood and leave us poets the sun and the moon, which rises even now I call its name.” Completely true story.

Jo Reed:  That’s a great poem. That really is a great poem.

Taylor Mali:  Thank you. Thank you.

Jo Reed:  I love it.

Taylor Mali:  And it’s totally found, you know? You asked what the important qualities of a poet are and I said a strict ability to observe and to describe and also to always be having in the back of your mind why should anybody care. Well, I thought, you know what? This is a delightful story, and if you change a few things that doesn’t have to be a poem, you know? In fact, there are a lot of people that are like what makes that a poem? I mean if you saw it on the page you would see it is written in nine lines, three tercets of equal length, and you can see, oh, there’s a wisdom to where I break a line. If you saw that on the paper you would say, “Oh, yeah, okay. That’s- that’s a poem.” But Billy Collins was always asked, because his poems are sort of prose-y narrative poems. It’s like what makes this a poem? And he’s sick of answering that question. And I heard him once say, “Prose is like an apple and poetry is a bird. And you know what? Let’s just leave it at that.”

Jo Reed:  You’re hosting Poetry Out Loud at the end of April.

Taylor Mali:  I’m very excited about that. These will be the best high school poetry reciters. It’s not what I do. It is what I do. I recite mostly my own poetry. And I sure wish there were an equally well-funded contest that would bring students from all over the country to Washington to let them recite their own work. And apparently all the kids go back to their hotel afterwards and have a slam. I’m very much looking forward to it, and I can't wait to see what I learn about performance. And I have an ulterior motive. I want one of my poems to be put into the paideia of 900 poems that they can choose from.

Jo Reed:  I think that would be a great idea. Do you think you develop a special relationship with the poem when you learn it by heart?

Taylor Mali:  Absolutely. I had a teacher in college who said, “You can't actually claim to understand a poem until you have memorized it.” For me, of course, the roots of poetry are bardic and oral before they were literary, so you need to internalize the rhythms of a poem. And things happen when you memorize a poem. You realize, oh, my God. I realize, I know now why the author chose this word instead of this word, which would have worked there. It’s because she was saving that word for the next line. And you find out there are things that are easy to write but that are hard to say out loud. You need to memorize a poem. When you work with a poem and you memorize it you understand it better.

Jo Reed:  Who do you read?

Taylor Mali:  I read poets who I’m about to get at “Page Meets Stage.” I go back to Billy Collins. I read Sharon Olds. Robert Frost, I have a fondness for. And I read Sarah Kay, who used to be my protégé, and then she became my colleague, and now she’s my mentor. And she’s in her mid-twenties and she’s just traveling the world doing great things with poetry. Today, we’re in the middle of April, National Poetry Month, and so there’s a lot of poetry out there that’s being written today. A lot of my compatriots, including myself, are taking part in the 30/30 poem a day challenge where we post a poem every day.

Jo Reed:  Why does poetry matter?

Taylor Mali:  Why does poetry matter? It matters for the same reason that bright colors matter. Our world would just be a lot less interesting to live. Our lives would be less interesting if we didn’t have it. I’m not quite sure why it matters, but it matters desperately.

Jo Reed:  That was poet Taylor Mali. His latest collection of poems is called Bouquet of Red Flags.  Taylor Mali will be the host of the Poetry Out Loud Final held at the Lisner Auditorium, here in DC on Wednesday, April 29, beginning at 7:00 pm.   It's free and open to the public, so come!  And if you can't make it to the Lisner, no worries, we're webcasting it live.  Just go to Arts.gov for details. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.