Comet Wine.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

On the basis of Comet Wine, the late Ruth Taylor must have been a very popular performance poet. In their rush of rhymes, baroque and arcane allusions, pop culture references, playful lyric egotism, and beat rhythms, her verses seem clearly meant as much for the stage as for the page.

Mixing contemporary bar scenes with Tarot divination and appeals to pagan gods, Taylor fashions a singular speaking persona, who loves a good time in the past, present, or future (there are lots of science fiction and horror references), but always, and expectedly, ends up singing the blues. As she tell us: “I sing the lovestruck spotlight of first sight / The stunning emanation of the Unstrange Stranger in the Night / The come-together gnosis in the premonition of a blink / That puts all sub-neutrino life I synch / That glides a spectral Sambonian swan upon a rink / And slower than a slo-mo replay of a déjà-smile / Dismantles all other unrealities with style / I should croon the epileptic afterglow of the first smooth— / … / Or wail the ‘was anything real’ blues into midnight hues.” So she also comes across as something of a Romantic mystic, calling out to the “Endless I / Thou,” in poems after poem like the quotation above.

There’s certainly sass and a kind of delight in pushing various discourses together in as huge a pile as possible. Audiences would thoroughly enjoy these verses; readers may not get quite the same lift.