Yes, I hate it when the blood start flowing / But I’m glad to see resistance growing. . .—Gil Scott-Heron, Johannesburg
When people ask how I’m doing, I very often quip: Ain’t dead yet so, I must be living!
August 17, 2024, marked 53 years since I walked off deathrow. Poetry discovered me there & I wrote mySelf anew. The Ancestors willing, come March I’ll enter my 8th decade. Amazing! Just as amazing is that I’m working with family & friends to launch a multicity celebration of my life in poetry & the lessons of community I’ve learned writing. The Octogenarian Tour, Getting Back to Our Roots, from death to life it’s been a remarkable journey, one that may inspire freedom for others.
The tour begins September 28th, at Danielle Andersen’s & Morrison Agen’s Sunia Farm in Fort Wayne. We can use your help to secure other locations to read & speak. We’re looking to set up tour locations thru November 2025.
Poetry is my passion. Writing now 57 years, I’ve had the opportunity to read my work widely, most recently in April touring 5 Massachusetts cities to enthusiastic, responsive gatherings. That experience reminded me that 5 decades earlier I’d toured colleges & community gatherings from Maryland to Vermont & thruout New York state with other recently released prisoners. That collective experience challenged my prison-held assumptions & led me to the work of building community thru poetry & music.
I’ve self-published 8 books since 2017. I’ve written for 57 years but have never put real effort into being published or heard. Now, at 80, I speak from lessons learned about individual & collective identity, & building community relationships. We are in the grip of institutional policies, government propaganda, & corporate colonization. Poeting, writing, & organizing have equipped me with sustainable principles & values, a work ethic & perspective to counter these colonizing forces.
A little perspective
I am the son of Carrie Thomas Taylor & John Henry Taylor, & Margaret Fisher & Tyrone Foster, & the cultural student of Chief James Hawthorne Béy, & Dr. Margaret Burroughs. I was born at the end of WW2 & raised in Elmsford, New York, a village 20 miles north of NYC. On deathrow at 21, in 1967, Poetry resurrected me. Sentenced to die for a murder I did not commit, I discovered life & calibrated an identity thru self-study, books, & prison resistance. The Poetry of Afrikan peoplles living fueled my soul & intellect to write mySelf anew.
Now, when people ask, who are you? I say, a Poet. They ask, what do you do? I say, I poet.
As Poet, I work to bring people together to explore individual & collective possibility beyond trauma-induced mass psychosis. I work to strengthen the life we hold in common. Poetz make the hidden apparent, & bring the apparent into sharper focus. To paraphrase Robert Hayden: Poetry is not an escape but a way to find order in chaos, a way of confronting life.
