The evening was set up so it would seem as if the two women were just having a conversation—out loud, about poetry. They talked about the life of a teaching poet, about things like rhythm and sound. Then one asked the other to read some of her poetry, and so Marilyn Taylor, Milwaukee's poet laureate, did.

Marilyn Taylor, former Milwaukee poet laureate, shares a couch in her Shorewood home with her cat, Jake. Photo/Jeffrey Phelps	"There's so much going on outside of Milwaukee, in the state," says Marilyn Taylor, who recently ended her term as Milwaukee poet laureate. Photo/Jeffrey Phelps

With a sly apology to her elderly audience, Taylor declaimed from her chair up front: "Now the Barbaras have begun to die, / trailing their older sisters to the grave, / the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye / just days ago it seems, taking their leave. . . ."

The audience, about 50 residents at St. John's on the Lake, was delighted.

"It was a wonderful evening," said Sophie Parker, 77. "Her poetry was really good. I don't know that much about poetry, but I know that she is able to make certain points that are applicable to a lot of feelings that people have. She hits the target . . . and it brings up emotions that almost all people have had."

Jean Hester, the 87-year-old chairman of St. John's library committee, was so taken she actually stood in line to buy Taylor's latest collection of poems, "Subject to Change," which has been nominated for a prestigious national award, The Poets Prize.

"I think I liked the themes she was writing about," Hester said later. "I just remember enjoying the evening very much and deciding I really would like to have her book so that I could read some of them over again."

The evening at the residential home before Christmas was among the last readings that Taylor gave as poet laureate. Her two-year term expired at the end of the year, ending a whirlwind of readings and workshops and speeches she delivered statewide as the city's foremost ambassador of poetry. A few days from now, her replacement, Shorewood resident Peggy Hong, begins a two-year term, bringing a different kind of poetic voice to the city.

"It's been really fun," Taylor said a few weeks ago, listing the 38 events she appeared at during her term. "I have an inner movie star that just loves this. I like the gigs. I love poetry, and I love promoting poetry."

Kate Huston, city librarian of the Milwaukee Public Library, which chooses the poet laureate, noted Taylor was an excellent presenter of the spoken poem. "She always left the audience wanting more," Huston said.

For someone who started out her post-college working career as a jingle writer and a copy writer for the Sears catalog, Taylor has come a long way. She is beginning to be recognized in national poetry circles as a gifted formalist and yearly leads seminars at a leading formalist poetry conference in Westchester, Pa.

"I usually do write in forms," she acknowledged, explaining she enjoys writing sonnets and other verse that follow a given structure, pattern and sound. "People say: 'Why do you do this? It's so artificial.' But all poems are artificial, not just formal forms. I like it because it gives my poems more unity, and it also plays up what I'm good at, which is a good sense of meter, of sound, of rhythm.

"Masochism is what it's been called. It is harder, but I get a finished product. And it's fun for me . . .

"I'm scorned by some for this . . . but I work best within those pre-fabricated vessels that I can fill with my phrases and my ideas."

Taylor's structures may be formal, harking back to Keats and Shelley, but her images and language are contemporary. For instance, traveling on a busy road in Cambodia a few years ago with her husband, retired Milwaukee attorney Allen M. Taylor, she was struck by the beauty of verdant fields of rice paddies. Then she realized that beneath the shallow waters the paddies were sown with abandoned land mines. A month later, that image became a poem, "The Blue Water Buffalo," that beautifully, yet chillingly, conveyed a political fact of everyday life in a Southeast Asian country. It's a poem that never mentions the phrase "land mines" but ends with the word "horror."

"It takes me months to write one poem," Taylor said while lounging in the Journal Sentinel cafeteria during a recent interview. "I do my creative work at night, from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m."

A tall, active woman with a halo of dark hair around her face, Taylor can often be seen on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, where she taught in the creative writing department and now teaches an honors course in poetry and writing. UWM is where her poetry began blooming.

As a child growing up first in her native Chicago and then later in Whitefish Bay, Taylor liked poetry well enough but was too busy with other pursuits to bother much with it.

Her father, born in Antwerp, Belgium, had run away from home and immigrated to Canada and then somehow found his way to Chicago, where he made a good living designing packaging for the dry-cleaning business. Taylor remembered him as strict and very European with a good background in literature. "I was read to, a lot," she remembered. Her father introduced her to Robert Louis Stevenson.

Her mother, the daughter of a Chicago dry cleaner, had attended the Sorbonne and graduated from the University of Chicago. The family moved to Whitefish Bay while Taylor was still quite young, and then moved again to Madison while she was in grade school. She believed that her family, including a half-sister, was normal, average. But there was a secret. It wasn't until "late in my life," Taylor said, that she discovered her mother was Jewish. "They kept it from me so well and so long that I feel no relationship to Judaism at all."

That discovery still affects her.

In her early adulthood, life was good. After she graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in mass communications, she found a job at Sears Roebuck in Chicago.

"I thought I was going to be an ad copywriter. I wrote for ladies underwear at the catalog. But after a year I went to the Chicago Tribune—for six or seven years—to work in promotions and publicity. It was lots of fun. It was great to be single in Chicago."

That ended when she married her father's lawyer and set up housekeeping in a small house on Terrace Ave. in Milwaukee.

"I keep telling him I married a prom king," she said, adding mischievously, "He's 20 years older than I am, but he's got all his marbles. It's very nice."

When their only child was in first grade, Taylor, who always found the sounds of words fascinating, decided to get a master's degree in linguistics at UWM.

"I took a course called 'Literary Stylists' and got into the structure of poems and meter and feet and stress patterns," she recalled. "And I thought, 'I think I know what those poets are doing, and I think I know how to do it.' "

So, she took a workshop in poetry and found she had a natural affinity for sound, for the rhythm in words. She received a PhD in English and creative writing in 1991. And three years later, she published her first full-length book of poems, "Shadows Like These."

She was on her way. From working as a teaching assistant, she graduated to adjunct professor, teaching during the day and writing poetry by night. She worked hard at her craft. Lewis Turco's "The New Book of Forms" became one of her staples.

"He has the rules for gazillions of them (poetic forms)," she said. "I followed the instructions, and I could hear the sounds, hear them. I grappled with it; it was very hard. But I learned the trick was to use these forms and still make it sound like today's speech."

Today, she is a pro, mentored by such nationally known poets as Dick Allen and hooked into the poetry scene statewide.

"She's a wonderful poet, and she's doing something unusual with her formalist orientation," said John Lehman, founder of Rosebud magazine and poetry editor of the Wisconsin Academy Review. "You can enjoy her poetry on different levels. . . . She's poignant and funny, an outstanding teacher and a lively human being."

Taylor is helping Lehman with his latest publishing venture, Cup of Poems and a Side of Prose, a free quarterly magazine that is distributed in coffeehouses, bookstores and libraries. She's also a contributing editor for the nationally circulated, Waukesha-based The Writer magazine for which she writes articles on craft. She's busy with writing circles, readings and her two favorite professional groups, the Council of Wisconsin Writers and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

"There's so much going on outside of Milwaukee, in the state," she said, talking of her future plans. "I'm online with a small critique group, 12 of us, and I get a lot of feedback from them. I see them at the Wisconsin Fellowship meetings—and we drink till dawn!"

Poetry in Wisconsin is thriving, she says, pointing at these statewide groups. There's plenty going on.

Yes, life for this former poet laureate isn't going to be lazy.