For Texarkana writer Wendy Taylor Carlisle, poetry can be found along the highways of our lives—one of them, namely, U.S. Highway 71 north of De Queen, Ark.

It’s where firework stands pepper the small towns along a major thoroughfare, wooing us to buy and celebrate. And highways, after all, are places for journeys and images.

For Carlisle, it’s all rich fodder for her verse and inspires the title poem of her new book. It’s the kind of ordinary place where you can find something universal that binds us together.

Carlisle’s “Discount Fireworks” was recently published by the small, literary California publisher Jacaranda Press, and Carlisle has just embarked on a month-long reading tour to promote it. It’s her second book, following the 2000 publication of “Reading Berryman to the Dog.”

“I think it’s a little more formal than I had imagined. Yeah, there’s lots of sonnets in it,” said Carlisle before starting her reading tour.

They’re poems that have been in her mind for years, so this book took a while to finish as she honed poems to completion.

“You know what, it took me a really long time to do that because it took years for some of those poems to develop,” Carlisle said. Some of them she’d lived with for eight years, still revising them at the last minute.

In part, 20th century modern poets like Wallace Stevens and the T.S. Eliot of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” suggested to her a more formal way to approach her poems.

But in her poems here, the sense of form is sneaky and certainly not rigid.

“I don’t know what made me moved towards form,” she said. “And you’ll notice that a lot of those are ... forms I’ve made my own.”

Carlisle’s work circles themes like childhood, womanhood, knowledge, relationships and even discourse itself. They’re human themes, accessible and smartly pictured.

In a poem like “Decocted Life,” the imagination winds itself back to childhood from the prompting of an old friend’s question.

In it, the speaker imagines herself back to a youthful, innocent scene near the beach, a place that lets her imagination fly while she gazes from a swing and listens to the “ocean chorus”:



“the cardinal, clown, lion, parrot,

puffer, trigger, trumpet,

grouper, hamlet, rockfish,

snapper and the red hind, all of them

singing, singing

as under my perfect dark eyebrows

I flew out across the lawn.”



Or there’s “Bicycle,” where a mother’s words about female beauty and its ability to capture men is intertwined with the childhood bicycle: “O, the long kickstand evenings, the white plastic fringes./ O, the pinstripes, the bells, the chrome handlebars./ O, the sounds of summer traffic,/ the slap of a joker in the wire spokes.”

Carlisle builds a distinctive way of viewing her past selves and other characters in her poems, still questioning and rummaging through those rooms of memory and experience, viewing the world with a sensual and humorous eye.

Her approach makes for poems crackling with energy, surprise and intelligence.

“People say, and I wish I had a name to quote for you, but I think it’s kind of universal, that we have one subject and it is ourselves, that is our first self,” said Carlisle, “so we continue to go back.”

The Florida native eventually found a real home in Arkansas—at first in Eureka Springs in the 1970s. She’s packed a lot of experience into her years, and adventure is welcome to Carlisle.

That sensibility can be found in her work.

“I’ve had a wonderful, crazy life and loved every minute of it. And now thinking how lucky I was to be the kind of person that just says yes,” said Carlisle.

“You just get more out of life by saying yes. That’s my experience,” she said.

About the child she portrays in some of her poems in “Discount Fireworks,” she said, “What you have there is a slightly slyer child and a child out to have a good time, you know someone who has learned to both give but also protect herself a little, you know.”

Carlisle’s tack is to let the poem work itself out before she shapes it.

“Here’s how I write a poem. Something starts me, like Mick Jagger something starts me. And then I just write and write and write. And then I go back and form from what’s there, but during the writing process, that first initial fly out of the lawn, I don’t stop myself. I don’t say that’s a cliché, I don’t say use another word ... I’m in kind of a trance. It’s that thing that happens—if you write, you know it,” she said.

As she puts it, it’s the poem that leads her.

“The poem tells me what it wants to be, and sometimes it takes years to do that,” said Carlisle. “The form usually suggests itself with the final version of the poem. So the poem can be in tercets through its whole life and then something changes in the ending ... and finally I’ll be going somewhere and I’ll be thinking about that poem and I’ll go, ‘Ah, that’s it,’ and then the ending will suggest that it should no longer be in tercets but it should be a sonnet.”

Therein resides a bit of poetic perspective. “The poem tells you everything if you are open to the poem,” she said.

The title poem (one in couplets) arose from a sense of place right here in the Texarkana area. As well, on a more basic level, she needed a poem to match a Robert McGehee painting that she loves and appears on the book cover.

“I needed another poem for that book, and actually I was trying to work on the cover ... and I found that wonderful painting, which is in our living room, and I thought, ‘God, what a great cover that would make,’” said Carlisle about an atypical way she wrote the poem “Discount Fireworks.”

This poem, she said, “just gave itself to me because of something about the shack and (Highway) 71. Yeah, place is very important to me.”

In the poem, she writes about the mysterious urge to take part in the grand revelry of the fireworks show:



“Out on 71, there will be blasts, blowups and sparks

offerings of flame and dust, riots of colored stars



dropped across summer and winter skies, a celestial display

to bring us joy beyond the ordinary



gawk and murmur, demanding each man and woman,

each U.S. child, tip back, chin up to the firmament.”



What’s so striking in her poems is the tangible, dead-on imagery that attends them, a conjuring of scenes that feel inhabited and tangible at the same time serious ideas seep into the lines.

In “Discount Fireworks,” the speaker wonders how someone could keep from being moved by the show, opening a mouth in wonder, or “resist drawing nearer and nearer the fire, exclaiming/ oh and oh and ahhhhhh!”

Much the same can be said of these poems themselves and their intelligent, nuanced way of reeling in the reader.



(“Discount Fireworks” is $12.95, 80 pages, and published by Jacaranda Press in San Jose, Calif. For more about Wendy Taylor Carlisle and her work, check out her Website: www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.)