Photography © Chad Parenteau

 

For Jeff, We Have to Keep Doing this Thing

I’ve known Jeff Taylor for five years, having first encountered him in one of the Garage Poets virtual readings he hosted in mid-2020 or thereabouts. I know full well now that I’d only just arrived late in the book of Jeff, and I didn’t know then of his 20-year career in writing and local, progressive activism. I also didn’t know then that I’d come to regard him as a brother in all this, in life. I marveled at how relaxed and together he was as a host. I loved the full NewEnglandness of his hosting style, rocking that beret, chill in the garage or even on that back stoop in the dark, cigarette going, ready with an encouraging word and connecting something in the next poet’s poem to an experience or place or band he was influenced by. And I could never get over that warm yet guttural laugh of his. His poetry was firmly grounded in the real and the tangible and the everyday image, and yet his delivery had this implacable urgency to it, as though each line was more desperate than the last to get you to believe him, as though each line timed the precarious leap just right and with enough oomph the connect at the last second to the next line.

When Jeff would pause in reading a poem of his, you really felt as though you could see that joist he nailed into the wall to support that pause. And that was true regardless of Jeff’s chosen poem topic. Jeff wrote about everything: bands, poetry, fun with substances, love, family and utterly numberless other themes, although today I am thinking about his poems that centered on progress and progressive politics, the way his words would excoriate the far right in a way that didn’t serve to elevate Jeff’s ego but instead to show the devils among us what they really look like.

I think often about Jeff’s ability to catch and blend so much of the varying spokes of social and political life in just one poem, his perception of the disconnects and persisting injustices in American life absolutely spot-on, like in these lines from his “Family Politics,” published in the 2023 Read or Green Books gun violence awareness anthology American Graveyard:

“…I try to picture what it would be like
to live in a world where doves and wolves
bathe each other in truth / when my wife ran for city council the
question she was asked most was
who’s going to watch the kids…”

To underscore what’s evident in the quote above, Read or Green Books Founder, Publisher and Editor Marissa Prada had this to say of this experience of working with Jeff: “Jeff was always a vivid and unapologetic storyteller. He was a pleasure to work with and fought the good fight alongside us poets.”

Jeff Taylor was a hell of a man and a hell of a poet; I have adored the man ever since that first virtual poetry reading. If you knew Jeff, then you knew about his infectious laugh and his very mellow demeanor. And how could you not? Here was a man who participated. He was the kind of person anyone could strike an instant friendship with. As you got to know, Jeff, you also got to know that he was very much a family man who dearly loved his wife Ariane and his daughters Emily, Charlotte and Phoebe, as well as their dog Walter and their cat Frankenstein (and also Elvira the cat, who just passed on a few weeks ago). I recall the times in the Zoom readings when one of his daughters would make a brief appearance and it was so good to see that side of the poet, to witness even for a moment his love for his family. I am writing this tribute to Jeff after having spent some time this afternoon in tears, trying to figure out what possible sense there could be in his sudden departure from us. I stop trying to make sense of it because my heart is broken enough, and I think of these lines in Jeff’s poem “Lamp Worn”

“…there are plot devices unfolding that haven’t been revealed yet…”

How Jeff often liked to put a touch of the prescient in his writing, like he knew part of the poet’s job to is to look through all the cacophony to see into the next time of peace.

Jeff had a habit of connecting people to each other. It was his way. Ever the comfy conduit, he was the way with which I got to know several poets in the national poetry scene. I keep thinking about his recent poetry successes, his publication in March 2025 in The Literary Underground. We had plans to meet at the end of every month, to discuss our wins and losses in the poetry submission efforts we’d both been ramping up. Jeff would send me the names of literary journals he’s sent work to (and got published in), and I would return the favor in kind. We met just twice, with his adorable Boston Terrier making appearances in the Zoom meets we’d have, but I’d wanted it to go on. I feel as though I should have messaged him a reminder for us to meet again.

In our private and public conversations, I probably told Jeff a dozen times that he sounded like home to me, that his voice and accent brought back to me the place of my birth and youth, and I always thanked him for that. He’d often give a little chuckle at this, as though just a bit embarrassed to have his accent called out. It was my way of telling him that I loved him and was grateful for him. He’s always sounded like home to me. A brother of mine.

We are we to do now that he is gone? First we have to know that as long as we remember to remember him to each other, he is not gone. Second, we have to take care of his loved ones, give for them and show them in concrete ways that we love them and care. One way we can do this, and I’d urge you to do so, is to visit https://www.welovethetaylorfamily.com for ways to pitch in and support. Third, we have to keep doing this poetry thing, this art thing, this expression thing, because Jeff cheered us on when he was alive, and I just know that wherever he is, he would not want us to give up.

As Jeff said in his poem, “I’m Not, But I Am,”

“…I’d make
a terrible waiter
but I’ll bring you
what you
ask for…”

Leave it to Jeff to have always known what we were asking for.

 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy and The Rye Whiskey Review, among others, and he has work forthcoming in The Literary Underground and Cul-de-sac-Of-Blood. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me. Interestingly, he can’t stop looking at the sky.

Chad Parenteau is Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine. The above photo was taken from a performance by The Garage Poets Jeff Taylor, Ethan Mackler and Anna Geoffrey at the Oddball Festival on August 13, 2023 in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Jeff Taylor passed away this past weekend.