Volume 10 191
ily and his own interests into southern literature and
its concerns. According to the writer George Gar-
rett, however, Taylor had a unique perspective on
the southern themes of heritage, place, and family,
since he came from a family and a community of
Quakers dating back to eighteenth-century Vir-
ginia. In other words, Taylor may have come from
the south and been educated into its literary tradi-
tions, but his community had always been oppo-
nents to both war and slavery on moral, religious
grounds.
Perhaps this dissenting heritage explains Tay-
lor’s attraction to the poetry of James Dickey. An-
other southerner, but also a generation older than
Taylor, Dickey was critical of some of the region’s
literary conventions. In fact, Dickey was the first
poet significantly to change the assumption that
southern literature ought to consist solely of fic-
tion. When he burst on the scene with his narrative
poetry, he incorporated into the forms of pastoral
poetry the themes and plot lines of southern fiction.
Thanks to Dickey’s precedent, then, Taylor
had a place, stylistically speaking, already waiting
for him when he began to publish. It was as if
Dickey had given him permission to write his sto-
ries in verse instead of in prose. Unlike Dickey,
though, Taylor extended his narrative thrust: his po-
etry is often far more willing even then Dickey to
spin a yarn. In fact, Taylor’s use of narrative has
often been somewhat controversial because, ever
since the 1960s, American poets have preferred po-
ems that avoid too much story and plot. But taking
his cue from Dickey, Taylor has told story after
story in each of his books.
The story told in “Landscape with Tractor” is
particularly notable because it links the narrative
tradition of southern literature (particularly its
gothic variant) to the structure of a pastoral poem.
The play of genres, however, is not what makes
this an important poem. Rather, it is the thematic
result of this combination that matters. For thanks
to his manipulation of the conventions of both gen-
res, Taylor is able to sharpen his own focus on race,
the real subject of his poem. Both southern litera-
ture and the pastoral require, as part of their struc-
ture, that the writer deal with, and engage, social
themes. Both southern literature and the pastoral
are incredibly social genres. By definition, they
both require writers to examine the people who live
in specific well defined rural communities. By con-
trast, if one were to focus in one’s poem only on
an individual or only on a pure description one
would not be writing either the conventional pas-
toral, or conventional southern literature. There-
fore, Taylor’s “Landscape with Tractor” becomes
one of the key documents in contemporary Amer-
ican literary discussions about race and racism pre-
cisely because it so successfully blends the south-
ern literary tradition and the ongoing tradition of
pastoral poetry. It is precisely because Taylor
blends two fundamentally social genres together
that he is able to get inside the story of race in
America.That this social element of Taylor’s poem has
been well understood is clear from perhaps the best
reading of the poem so far. That reading, interest-
ingly enough, does not come from an essay but
rather from a poem, “On the Turning Up of Uniden-
tified Black Female Corpses” by the African Amer-
ican poet, Toi Derricotte. In her poetic response to
Taylor, she implicitly comments on Taylor’s racial
theme. But before explaining Derricotte’s critique,
a more detailed glance at Taylor’s poem is in
order.The poem, in twelve stanzas of four lines each,
relies on meter for its rhythm. Usually, four-line
stanzas indicate a ballad. This would make sense
since the ballad is the most common English lan-
guage form for telling stories in poetry. But ballads
depend on a particular rhyme (abab) and a partic-
ular meter (four beats, tetrameter, alternating with
three beats, trimeter). Although this poem does
have a ballad’s four line stanza it does not have ei-
ther its rhyme or its meter. In other words, the poem
is not a simple country tale about the common folk,
low subjects fit for a low form. It may be possible
to say that these lines are in three beats. But to do
this one would have to know that, already by his
third book, Taylor himself was known for his use
of the anapestic foot, something he learned, so
George Garrett tells us, from James Dickey. The
anapest, two unstressed syllables followed by a
stress, would allow one to read Taylor’s lines as
trimeter, a common meter for ballads. But, to my
ear at any rate, these lines scan better as pentame-
ter. In other words, even the ghost of a reference
to the ballad in the form of a three beat line is less
likely than the more conventional, more serious
five beat line, (pentameter). This means that the
poem is more serious than a ballad. Because bal-
lads are not the pastoral genre’s most impressive
form, because ballads are considered low and of-
ten anti-intellectual, it ought not to be surprising
that this poem would look like a ballad even though
it actually scans in the same meter as Shakespeare’s
sonnets and Wordsworth’s great period poems.Landscape with Tractor