Taggart, John, 1942-....

Poet, editor, and professor of English at Shippensburg State College; b. John Paul Taggart.

American poet born in 1942 in Guthrie Center, Iowa. Received M.A. in English literature from the Univ. of Chicago in 1966 and Ph. D. in Humanities from Syracuse Univ. in 1974. Professor of literature and writing at Shippensburg State Univ. since 1972.

Published his first poetry in 1965. Also known as a commentator on contemporary American art and poetry. Was publisher and editor of the journal Maps during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Biography

John Taggart was born in 1942 in Guthrie Center, Iowa. He graduated with honors in 1965 from Earlham College in Indiana, earning a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy. In 1966 he received a M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Chicago, and in 1974 he completed a Ph.D. in the Humanities Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Syracuse University. His dissertation, titled "Intending a Solid Object: A Study in Objectivist Poetics," was one of the first extended discussions of the compositional strategies informing the work of poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Though the work has never been published as a monograph, revised sections of it have appeared in LOUIS ZUKOFSKY: MAN AND POET, edited by Carroll F. Terrell (National Poetry Foundation, 1979) and CREDENCES: JOURNAL OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY AND POETICS (nos. 2-3 Fall/Winter, 1982).

Taggart's poetry first appeared in print in 1965, when three poems--"Upon the Sweeping Flood," "An Egyptian Cat," and an "Evening with Anna Akhmatova"--were published in CRUCIBLE. Since then Taggart's work has appeared in many little magazines and literary journals including THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, THE PAINTED BRIDE QUARTERLY, IRONWOOD, BOUNDRY 2, SULFUR, and TEMBLOR. His work was featured in the 1969 summer issue of Cid Corman's ORIGIN, and the 1979 spring issue of PAPER AIR was given over entirely to Taggart's work. Besides Taggart's long poem "Peace on Earth," a "healing prayer" on the Vietnam War, the issue included commentary on Taggart's work by Toby Olson, Bruce Andrews, Jackson Mac Low, Paul Metcalf, and several others. Taggart's poetry has also been printed in several anthologies including THE GIST OF ORIGIN (Grossman, 1975), PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY (Avon, 1980), NEW DIRECTIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF PROSE AND POETRY (issues 24 and 41), and POETES AMERICANS D'AUJOURD'HUI (Delta, 1986).

In addition to numerous appearances in literary magazines and journals, Taggart has also published several collections of verse. TO CONSTRUCT A CLOCK and PRISM AND THE PINE TWIG (Elizabeth Press 1971 and 1977), Taggart's first and third books, are collections of short objectivist exercises in the manner of Zukofsky and Oppen. THE PYRAMID IS A PURE CRYSTAL (Elizabeth Press, 1974) and DODEKA, with an introduction by Robert Duncan (Membrane, 1979) reveal Taggart's development of a unique style which has attracted considerable favorable attention for its prosodic innovation and formal complexity. In each book, short, pithy objectivist-like images are inscribed inside of boxes and then "plaited" together at the end of each section. THE PYRAMID IS A PURE CRYSTAL is a meditation on a citation from the writings of Georges Vantongerloo, while DODEKA is a retelling of the Hippasus legend, an important character in Pythagorean lore and also the subject of Charles Olson's "The Praises." The formal foundation of both poems, however, is the medieval musical principle of "cantus firmus." In PEACE ON EARTH (Turtle Island, 1981) and DEHISCENCE (Membrane, 1983) Taggart decided to break with the "gem-like" solidity of DODEKA, opting for a much longer line composed of small, repeating syntactical units. While these poems still display Taggart's fascination with Zukofsky' proposal that music is the upper limit of speech, they also indicate his adaptation of etymological strategies discovered in the poetry of Erza Pound and Charles Olson.

Besides the attention given to his poetry, Taggart has earned a reputation as a judicious, though infrequent, commentator on contemporary American poetry.

In addition to seminal articles on Zukofsky, Oppen and objectivist poetics, Taggart has also reviewed the work of Wallace Stevens, William Bronk, Robert Duncan, Bruce Andrews, Theodore Enslin, and several other contemporary American poets. He was also the editor and publisher of MAPS, an acclaimed literary magazine appearing during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, in 1978, edited an issue of TRUCK (1978) devoted to the work of Enslin.

Taggart has been a professor of literature and creative writing at Shippensburg State University since 1969. His work as writer and teacher has been awarded a Ford Foundation (1965), a Distinguished Academic Service Award from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and two National Endowments for the Arts Writing Fellowships (1976 and 1986).