BIO: Bruce Taylor is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, where he has taught Creative Writing, Literature, and Film for over 35 years. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and editor of eight anthologies. His poetry and translations have appeared in such places as The Chicago Review, The Columbia Review, The Formalist, The Nation, The New York Quarterly, The Northwest Review, and Poetry. His fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Arabesque Review, Carve Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Slow Trains, The Vestal Review, and in anthologies such as Bar Stories, E2ink-1: the Best of the Online Journals, and You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories.

Taylor has also served as a member of the Literature Panel of the Wisconsin Arts Board; host of The Writer's Workshop: Wisconsin ETN; and as program scholar and consultant for the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, and the Annenberg/CPB Project . He has won awards and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, Fulbright-Hayes, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and the Bush Artist Foundation. He is the recipient of the 2004 Excellence In Scholarship award from UW–Eau Claire.

Taylor has read and lectured at places and events such as University of Arkansas, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, St. Thomas College, Loyola University, Bowling Green University, Washington University, Koreyo University (South Korea), Yonsei University (South Korea), Freemantle Arts Center (Perth, Australia), Australian Biannual International Arts Festival (Adelaide, Australia), Queensland University (Brisbane), “The Loft” (Minneapolis), Mottly Gallery (Green Bay), Ripon College (Ripon, WI), Canterbury Bookstore (Madison, WI), Jean Feraca’s “Wisconsin Idea Network,” ERN Wisconsin Public Radio’s Live At Five, Eau Claire Regional Arts Center, and the Chippewa Valley Book Festival (Eau Claire, WI).

PUBLICATIONS:
Pity the World: Poems New & Selected (Plain View Press, 2005)
Why That Man Talks That Way (Upriver Press, 1994)
This Day (Juniper Press, 1993)
Wisconsin Poetry (Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991; reprinted 1993)
The Darling Poems (Red Weather Press, 1982)
Idle Trade: Early Poems (Wolfsong Press, 1979)

The above books (with the exception of Wisconsin Poetry) are available at crossroadbookstore.com/Search.shtml

Eating the Menu: A Contemporary American Poetry 1970-74 (W.C. Brown/J. Kendall Hunt, 1974)

OTHER POEMS ONLINE:

Literary Salt
Nerve
Poetry
Snakeskin
POEMS
FOREIGNER

See him grunt and point.
See him with his big cold
body grunt and point.
Listen to him try
to talk like a person,
the way our words turn
to rubbish in his mouth.
Who could love him,
his face, a moon, his skin
the belly of the carp.
He walks like an ox.
He looks at the smallest thing
as if it were a miracle.
What a world that must be
the world that is his
where you can’t ask for food
or tell a woman she’s beautiful
where you can’t pray or sing
or speak drunk to the dead
or cry out in the night for help.

—Bruce Taylor

from Pity the World, Plain View Press, 2005