The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State

Richard Taylor

800 Richard Taylor “Upward Mobility” A professor of English at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Richard Taylor also owns a bookstore and writes poetry, including Bluegrass (1975) and Earth Bones (1979). Girty (1977) is a long narrative poem about a renegade white man who went to live with the Seneca Indians and took on their ways and attitudes against the encroaching whites. For his two years as poet laureate, 1999–2001, Taylor was also an eloquent spokesman for literature throughout Kentucky. In a dialogue between the poet and a rock—yes, a rock—in his ironically named “Upward Mobility,” Taylor pokes fun at human pride and conceit. In this poem the complacent rock is perhaps wiser than the almighty man. h for A. R. Ammons Given your druthers, I said to the rock, what is it you would most like to have that is man’s? Is it a tower of bone from which to lord it over the others? Is it reason, virtue, a face that is the mirror of God’s, an opposable thumb? Oh no, said the rock. Those heights where the air is anemic are nothing to me, and dialectic puts me to sleep; give me wind any day over babble. Having little use for the upright, I prefer proneness, my niche on the slopes, sedentary ways. Admitting that much is beyond my grasp, still I know God’s face at the head of the hollow The author’s name 801 is a craggy wonder. When it rains, when it washes, I take note of the flow, but mostly I keep to my stratum, resting frugal and flat. All right, mundane. But indispensably mundane. Richard Taylor 801 ...