What Were Yards

ISBN 978-0-9772485-1-3 $16.00

Limited edition of 40 copies, available from the author only.

Breaking the Silence

The first in the series, available at Amazon.com & selected bookstores

“Tagett is the ultimate maker, with infinite patience taking on a world of astounding sights and ‘apparitions.’” — Kevin Killian

“His poems demonstrate a simultaneous mistrust of, and a longing for, meaning.”
— Brian Lucas

“The poems have clarity, economy, sincerity & mystery—a nice combination, & unusual these days.” — Stephen Kessler

"The poems follow some kind of internal logic . . . like there is an often apprehensible necessity in the sequence of images, which makes me feel good." — James Mitchell

Literary Biography

Born on the 14th of February 1936, I began writing poetry in earnest with the emergence of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. I had moved from my home in Ashtabula, Ohio to New York City early in January 1960 soon after being discharged from a four-year stint in the Air Force. It was at this time I met my lifetime companion, the Cuban born painter José Laffitte, and I soon joined a poetry workshop under Arnold Weinstein at the New School for Social Research, where I garnered a second prize Dylan Thomas Award.

By Columbus Day 1961 we were in San Francisco where I was dying to meet Jack Spicer, and I soon found myself in a workshop with him and Robin Blaser, Stan Persky, and George Stanley on Sunday afternoons at Stan’s place in North Beach. The “worked” poem. Near the same time I was in a seminar at San Francisco State College under Jack Gilbert. About a year after Spicer’s death in 1965, I joined Robert Duncan’s workshop at the Society for Individual Rights, while some of these gatherings later took place in Duncan’s home, or under his auspices at other locations with special guests. In August of 1969, Paul Mariah, one of the participants in the gatherings, and I started Manroot magazine, funded in large part by grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines through the National Endowment for the Arts (before it was virtually destroyed by Jessie Helms), and we also held a frequent and critical floating workshop for a few years which Duncan graced occasionally.

In 1973 José and I moved to the Russian River area of Sonoma County, California and became involved in a “heady” poetry community with Hunce Voelcker, Andrei Codrescu, Harold Norse, and a host of younger poets.

I continued co-editing Manroot until 1978 when we returned to San Francisco and went back to school, new jobs, and part-time destinations abroad. The 80s were essentially a lost decade, as all community seemed to have dissolved. Love died in 1992.

Around 1994 I met some poets in their 20s whose heroes were the same as those for me when I was in my 20s. What does this mean? Anyway, thanks to them, I have an audience again, and a new kind of long-distance community. Now life is Internet. Good to have a monkey.

Web Log Purpose / Description

This is primarily a self-advertisement for a series of books that will comprise my collected poems. There is no consideration for chronology within each or across the series. Regardless of being well under the poverty guidelines of this dear oasis, I believe that self-publishing is the only way to go. I’ve never afforded much time before to spreading myself about, and as a friend recently confided, “I do get a tinge of satisfaction that my poems are not fashionable.” Also, after 45 years in poetry, I just can’t wait out more at this point to realize a concept that by then I may no longer be comfortable with, while new work that may have fit my ongoing concept will pile up at some other end all orphaned again. Moreover, I want total control. Hopefully, a separate “collected” will include these and other poems, the earliest along with newer work, should anyone be willing to take it on. As I told my friend, if somebody out there digs you, somebody might relieve you of going it alone. If not, you go on because that’s what you do, and it’s out there for the future, which is now and tomorrow banking on echoes of the dead who are never really dead. All the joy—the necessity of it all—is in the process anyway. The business end is a pain in the ass and just distracts you from what you love. You want recognition, but you don’t want to sell out. Damned you be popular!


This is also a forum for other poets whose work I admire, as well as the poets they like, a mixture of living and dead. Without a community in time and across time, we have no audience beyond some disembodied abstract. There is no need for work to be new or previously unpublished—only the best, the proud, the crazy, anything but sluff. The idea is to eventually weave some of these into a book or books with the cooperation of the authors, conceptually, visually, and financially. Real books. It’s one thing to blog, but online publishing just doesn’t cut it. Books are like people: they want to be touched and bedded. Beseeching you soon.

Contact: tagett@mac.com