Convincing The Body

Convincing The Body

Poetry by Cheryl Boyce Taylor

“Convincing the Body is not where poetry is headed, it is where poetry IS,” says Patricia Smith of Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s third book of poetry. Lush, edgy, sparse and elegant, these poems are not merely written, but lived. Divided into six movements, this work unflinchingly addresses injustice, war, sex, love, and hope. There is nothing random or predictable here. “Redemption shines like light through pinholes. This collection revels in the language of promise, the poems are ways of understanding our times and our lives,” says Bill Fogarty. Boyce Taylor stakes her pen in the vein and calls us out. “She don’t tek no mess,” says Cheryl Clarke.

Convincing The Body

about the author

Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City since the age of 13, CHERYL BOYCE TAYLOR has been writing poetry since her son Malik was born. As a young wife and mother, it was often difficult to discuss the hardships of her new role as parent with her family. The world was in the throes of the black power movement, the women’s movement, and the war in Vietnam. Such a different world, from her carnival and coconut-water Trinidad. Even though her son was an infant, she worried about the life he would have as a black man in racially divided America. After hearing Nikki Giovanni read, Boyce Taylor began writing poetry to make sense of her life, and this new world she was attempting to shape for her young son. In “Poems of Glass and Bone,” a poem dedicated to Audre Lorde, Cheryl Boyce Taylor asks, “who is this girl writing notes to the hard earth?”

Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s work has taken her around the world, to Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. She has performed at some of New York City’s hottest venues, such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, Aaron Davis Hall, The Bowery Poetry Club, Lincoln Center, and this past summer she opened at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park for Shadow, one of Trinidad’s most talented Calypsonians.

In 1994, Boyce Taylor was the first Caribbean woman to present her work in Trinidadian dialect at the National Poetry Slam. Along with her New York team, they won third place. She has toured the country as a road poet with Lollapolooza, and recently performed for Mamapolooza in New York City. Her works include two collections of poetry, Raw Air, and Night When Moon Follows.

When asked to name three things that best describe her work, she smiles her little girl mischievous grin, and says… “A Mack truck, a kiss and an open road…”

author photo: © 2005 Artis Q. Wright.

from the weblog

Cheryl reads tonight in NYC!

Cheryl Boyce Taylor featured at Pink Pony Reading Series!

Friday, February 9, 2007 at 6:00 PM 29 Cornelia Street (btw Bleecker & W. 4th Street NYC 212 989-9319) admission $5.00

Come one, come all!

Cheryl’s latest book, Convincing the Body, will be available for purchase.

February 9, 2007 10:08 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A Family Affair: An Interview with Cheryl Boyce Taylor

(Note: This interview originally appeared in Lambda Book Report, Spring 2003, two years before her current work, Convincing the Body, was released.)

Writers who immigrate to other countries often spend time thinking and rethinking about how the worlds they live and dream in conflict or complete one another. Some of them are fortunate; they honor home by remembering, and recognize their contemporary life through acknowledgment. Trinidad-born and Queens-bred Cheryl Boyce Taylor is such a writer. A strong presence on the poetry circuit in New York City since the early Eighties, she is the author of two books of poetry, Raw Air (1997), and Night When Moon Follows (2002). In addition her work has appeared in several anthologies, and she is a well-regarded performer. Boyce Taylor, fifty-two years young, possesses a voice that lays bare the simple yet complex realities of being a Caribbean mother and lesbian who writes to inform, comfort, understand and be understood. What becomes clear in my conversations with Boyce Taylor is her love of story. She delights in language, much like her mother-now a seventy-seven-year-old award-winning storyteller who, still to this day, is called upon to spin yarns. Boyce recalls, “[She] told me stories at bedtime. I think that’s where it may have started for me.”

Boyce Taylor began honing her craft at the age of eight by writing letters to teachers, family and imaginary friends. “Our teachers always encouraged students to have adventures during school break, and to write stories about them. I loved that! So I always did, but my brother,” she says with a laugh, “well, he didn’t. Reading and writing was something that really held my attention back then. I clearly remember doing it during summer vacation when life seemed a little dull and dreary.”

School also helped Boyce Taylor shape the language she utilizes in her writing. Bored by the work of British writers whose words she describes as “stiff, archaic and rigid,” Boyce Taylor was enraptured by the language of her people. “Calypso… offered a less rigid, freer style of writing. I wanted to find a way to capture the speaking voice of my family. Calypso offered room for cursing, gossip, sex talk, lawless, unruly language. I loved it.” Boyce Taylor’s compassionate voice is also politically charged. “I write in Trini dialect or patois, to present my people just as they appear in their everyday life, and dialect allows that to happen,” she says. “Now we know how Trini people sound when ‘dey’ mad, when ‘dey’ intimate in ‘dey’ bedroom, when happy/sad. I use Trinidadian dialect in honor of my grandparents who died before I was born. Most of what I know about them is made up, but one thing is for sure: I know how they sounded when they spoke.”

When Boyce Taylor immigrated, alone, to New York in the early 1960s (her mother followed nearly a year later) the seeds of her preoccupations with identity, language and water started taking root. “I was devastated. I didn’t know that I would miss my mother that much,” she says. “I also missed little things that I took for granted, like making ice cream on Sunday, roasting cashew nuts, the dialect, calypso - all of it became so important to me. I knew something was in it that I needed, so I held on for dear life. It was all that I knew.”

Years later writing also came to rescue a twenty-two-year-old mother of one. “[Motherhood] wasn’t what I thought it would be,” she says with a smile. “A little too much work for me!” Again she picked up the pen, and soon after Boyce Taylor began traveling where she found herself immersed, literally, in one of her life-long preoccupations: water. “I didn’t know why I needed to travel to the Caribbean twice a year and get in the water; I just did. My body would be tired, and it called for being submerged in salt water. After that I could go for another nine months.” Water is a reoccurring motif in Boyce Taylor’s work, notably in the multimedia piece “Moon Over River Talking Back,” in which a river complains about being poisoned by humanity, and in her text “Water,” which was commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow with funding by the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown, founder and artistic director of Evidence, a contemporary dance company. Brown was drawn to the richness of Boyce Taylor’s voice, and was determined to work with her. “I began dreaming about water and even when I was awake, water was all over my life. I called Cheryl, and she sent me over ten pages of text within twenty-four hours,” says Brown. Boyce Taylor would recite the text as Brown improvised. “It was a special way to work, and I learn a lot each time we come together,” he says. Currently the two artists are in the research stage of another collaboration, “Redemption.”

Boyce Taylor’s contemporaries tend to use similar adjectives when describing her. “Exuberant, curious, sometimes silly, and truly generous,” says Donna Lee Weber, writer and longtime friend. “I would describe her as vivacious, alert, at times maternal, full of life, persistent and commandeering,” says Pamela Sneed, fellow writer and author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom, Than Slavery, and of the forthcoming collection of memoirs, essays and stories, “20 Minutes Was Forever.”

Indeed for the past three decades Boyce Taylor’s work has made a mark, in New York and nationally. Besides tirelessly performing her work at bookstores, colleges, libraries and other venues, in 1994 she represented New York at the National Poetry Slam, and toured as a road poet with the Lollapalooza Music Festival. Most recently she was named poet-in-residence at the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center at the Brooklyn Public Library. “I hope to infuse the teens and adults that I will be working with with the joy, wonder, excitement and adventure of poetry,” she says. “The primary goal of the residency is to reach as wide an audience of teens as possible to expose them to writing and reading poetry, and to produce a publication. Poets House, who partnered with Brooklyn Public, will be watching this program closely as a model to duplicate nationwide.”

As for being a lesbian in this position, Boyce Taylor is clear about her primary focus. “Truthfully, being a lesbian has not come up yet. Unfortunately Caribbean folks are still very homophobic,” she says. “I am not closeted (Cee, her lover of four years, inspired the love poems in Night When Moon Follows), but for me being a Caribbean woman poet is the proudest mande that I can wear. I do not wear my rainbow flag to work, but I won’t ever shy away, or be untruthful whenever the topic or discussion conies up. I am a proud lesbian, but it is not my first identity. Poet is.”

And for Boyce Taylor, storytelling is a family affair. In celebration of Mother’s Day she will be performing a reading with her son, Phife, who is a member of the hip hop trio, A Tribe Called Quest. Consider that in the fourteen years while she was raising her son Boyce Taylor concurrently built a successful career as a respected writer, and managed to earn a bachelor’s from York College in theater, another from Long Island University in education and a master’s degree from Fordham University in social work. And she shows no signs of slowing down. In the months ahead Boyce Taylor is keeping busy with other projects, including finishing a manuscript of poetry called “Where There Are Bones.”

Although her projects are numerous, Boyce Taylor’s mission remains steadfast. “As a Trinidadian living in America, I live in a world of duality. It is incumbent upon me to represent both, with equal amounts of fairness and justice. Trinidadian dialect for me makes a political statement,” she says. “It represents the African griot, or oral tradition. It also represents a departure from the language of the colonizer. My job here is to capture all that has been lost through our first passage, and dirough migration. That is the ultimate work of my poetry.”

January 29, 2007 5:10 PM | Link | Comments (0)

Cheryl Boyce Taylor's Readings in October 2006!

CHERYL BOYCE TAYLOR reads with jazz musicians Where: HYDROGEN JUKEBOX, Saturday, October 28th, 5:00 - 7:00 PM. Admission: $5.00 & open mic. Location: Downeast Arts Center, 203 Avenue A, between 12 & 13th Street.

EROTIC READINGS, ROMANCE & FANTASY with Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Samiya Bashir, Gwendolen Hardwick & others… Admission: $20 reading and wine reception to follow When: Sunday, October 29th, 5:00 PM Location: SHOOTING STAR THEATRE, 40 Peck Slip Directions: A/C to Broadway 2/3/4/5 to Fulton Walk East on Fulton to South Street Seaport For reservations and information call 917.239.6690

October 26, 2006 10:49 AM | Link | Comments (0)

Convincing the Body - New Reading!

Come join us for a book release party UPTOWN!

Tue 11/1/05 — Book Release party Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 6-8 pm 515 Malcolm X Blvd @ 135th Street New York, NY 10037 (212) 491-2226 Opening act: Baron

This event is free. There will be books for sale at the event. And the beautiful Cheryl will be reading from her third book, Convincing the Body!

For more information visit Vintage Entity Press.

October 31, 2005 7:22 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Book Parties for Cheryl!

Cheryl Artis pics 017.jpg

Please join us to launch Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s latest book, Convincing the Body!

October 24, 2005 9:02 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cheryl Readings!

“She Don’t Tek No Mess Book Tour”

September 20, 2005 7:31 PM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Convincing Praise

early praise for Convincing the Body:

“Cementing her reputation as one of our creative treasures, Cheryl Boyce Taylor has wrapped her soul around these poems. The poet’s vision is boundless, her rhythms addictive. This is not where poetry is headed - this is where poetry IS.”
— Patricia Smith, Close to Death

“Cheryl Boyce Taylor is a heroine of language. In her nurturing hands it lifts from the page like a musical note, filling the air with aroma and sound. In Convincing the Body, Taylor takes any fixed notions which remain past page one and bursts them open like a ripened fruit when taken between the teeth. In the end there is nothing but flavor, rhythm and ecstasy - sweet, sweet ecstasy!”
— Samiya Bashir, author of Where the Apple Falls

“Cheryl Boyce Taylor don’t tek no mess. In Convincing the Body she makes us a generous offering. And we accept. Sexy, political and encapsulating of what we know and do not know of our current times.”
— Cheryl Clarke, author of After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement and Living as a Lesbian

“In today’s difficult times - warring, consumptive, suspicious - the poet speaks stronger, harsher, and more stunningly precise than ever before. There’s seriousness here, a gorgeous sharpness.”
— William Fogarty

“Reader, beware - do not enter these poems unless you are ready to partner with them, the Poet and Reader as Lovers. This is the work of a poet at the peak of her powers.”
— Bob Holman

More soon come …

September 4, 2005 11:34 AM | Link | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)