Spiel Photo (c) 2008 P. Welch
a/k/a the artist Tom Taylor
a/k/a the artist Thoss W. Taylor
Visit “SaatchiArt” online to view the artist’s current portfolio of paintings and prints which are for sale
“the kiss” (c) 2009 by The Poet Spiel
“Agenda” (c) 2010 by the poet spiel
“Romancing the Pain” (c) 2015 Spiel
Spiel writes with great range and passion. So much so that it is easy to hear and remember only his loudest shouts — those poems in which he pounds the door and cries out for the injustice, the inequality and sorrow of this life. But flip these poems over and find a poet equally equipped to write soft, spare, musical poems filled with sentiment and yearning.
these are perilous times—
—when you don’t know if you should teach your little ones to sleep standing up with their backs to the wall and their running shoes on
or if you should benevolently slip into their bedrooms and place a pillow over their tiny faces then press it downward til the frantic kicking ceases
The Poet Spiel
The Poet Spiel was born out west to decent white farmers the same year the U.S. entered WWII, a maverick child who made art which evolved as he matured intellectually through many lifestyle changes leading to considerable national exposure.
But in 1996, traumatic life/death illness abruptly halted his career; then, when his life was spared, he became reticent and for the first time ever, uncreative –until the spring of 1999– when he unearthed an urge to write. And this opened the pathway to become the Pushcart Prize contender, devoted author, known for often socially conscious, sometimes iconoclastic poetry, curiously human short stories, seductive spoken-word recordings and astute bits of visual art frequently published internationally in scores of independent press journals, both online and off.
“…(Spiel) challenges the current tendency of small press poets to do little else but reaffirm the pedestrian nature of life. Spiel refuses to produce small, tasty commodities that gloss, harmonize, and freeze frame. Rather than impose epiphany onto image, Spiel moves from image to social analysis. Therefore, ‘Spiel Speak’ is an audacious language of struggle, a language of talkback which invades, ignites, and possibly even transforms the reader.”
“Tom Taylor is like a human prism. The facets of his art mark achievements many artists fear as well as envy.”
“Taylor consistently confirms my idealistic belief that the creation of art should be — can be — an act of integrity.”
“…with neither sentimentality nor cynicism, Taylor is proving himself a precocious master of perception for people as individuals. …because his seemingly effortless technique lets the viewer concentrate on the subject, unconcerned about how its striking air of truth was achieved.”
“the big quiet” 24″ x 48″ (c) 2007 by the poet spiel
making pictures without mouths
unloading griefs i did not know
in pictures without mouths
in pictures rows of pictures
stacks and stacks of pictures
of the children
without faces
without mouths
to speak
to tell of all their needs
to tell their stories
where they’d been
why they stood before the houses
without doors
without windows
stood before those houses
could not speak those children without mouths
in pictures that i made
unloading griefs
that at that time i could not know
and at that time i changed my name
to hide my blackened tongue
so blackened then
by griefs of secrets hidden there
behind my face
without a place to speak
and hushed by circumstance
beyond my naïve understanding
sullen and in grieving
making pictures
rows and stacks of pictures
without mouth
This poem first appeared in Spiel’s chapbook, it breathes on it own, published by Pudding House Publications and is performed by Spiel on his C.D., “breathing back words.
“Chasing The Sky” (c) by the poet spiel
chair
i wish you were a chair there
a soft open chair
i wish you were hair there
as bright as ripe wheat where
i wish you were air there
at dawn its freshness of sky there
in my mirror there
me watching me there
resting on you as chair
combing through you as hair
inhaling you as air
i wish you were a chair
me reclined on you there
in my mirror where
i finger you as hair
oh i wish you were air here
and i were a chair
Hear Spiel perform “chair” on his spoken word/music collaboration C.D. with composer Jack Moss, “breathing back words.”
epitaph
cast my ashes on
agitated water
where my enemy
cannot surround them
where my best friend
cannot long to wake them
Spiel wrote his classic “epitaph” ten years after a team of gastro-enterologists had (incorrectly) assured him his “time had come and (he) should get (his) affairs in order to prepare to die.”
lapdog
keep a hungry dog at your feet
to lap up the detritus
so no one will know
you crumble along the way
the end
i don’t think
anyone cried
on the first day
but
there was loud silence
around
the kitchen table
dad phoned
the wheat threshers
told them
there would not be
no filthy sweat work
one out-of-hell
sweep of hail
had wasted his readied crop
one day too soon
no one wanted to talk
so i hid my mouth upstairs
just played and played my harry belefonte
till it numbed me dead
when i came to
my dumbed diamond needle
was banging
deep grooves in my head
my folks were still
in the kitchen
staring
at dark
the dogs were scratching o
ur screendoor
and i wasn’t sure if
the cows had been milked
my dad had to quit
a lifetime
dedicated
to farming
and we had to move
where our only harvest
was just a dumb little patch
of green grass where i rooted
a pussy willow cutting
hoping it might grow fast
to hide
the naked bathroom window
of a little white house
crammed between
everybody-strangers
who did not drive trucks
who made their lights
push through
my bedroom walls
after bedtime
and me just listening
to the slick-black street
where a kid could not
kick dirt
From “once upon a farmboy,” a Spiel chapbook published by MadmanInk, 2008.
The Poet Spiel identifies himself as having been a maverick from birth, brought into this world by common white folk on a small farm out west, the same year the U.S. entered the bleak years of WWII. In 1996, a major confrontation with what was promised to be his imminent death, changed the course of his life. He abruptly dropped a successful career as a visual artist and became withdrawn and reticent. For the first time ever, he became uncreative. Then in 1999, an urge to write arose within him. Since then, scores of independent press editors have published, in the hundreds, his often raw poems of conflict, his quirky, insightful short stories and his various and odd bits of art and photography. He is credited with the publication of more than one dozen chapbook and book collections of poetry and short stories. One of Spiel’s letterheads reads: “Without your ear, I have no voice.” Though he considers writing a deeply private process, he believes his work is not complete until it touches the thoughts of others–a holdover from the decades of his life as a nationally acclaimed visual artist, when, presenting himself under other personas and with various types of art, he was recognized with more than four dozen solo exhibitions, coast to coast, in galleries, museums and universities (see list below). His art has been published worldwide in a broad array of formats. Spiel is known for his work with socially conscious subjects and being unusually comfortable with taking us on journeys into the discomforts of deep secrets many may share but find too personal or too dark to reveal, such as the psychiatric disorders with which he has coped throughout his life, the injustice of government he observes daily, the nonsense of war, the perils of homosexuality, incest, the reality of suicide, the declining years and Alzheimers disease. He is masterful at risking an uncertain world where, harboring the visceral paranoia that accompanies surveillance at our every turn, we wish everything would turn out okay but we are too often disappointed to find that it does not.
Duck and Cover” (c) 1987 Tom Taylor
Spiel’s writing can be found in small and independent press publications in The U.S.A, Canada, Indonesia, Nepal, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Britain, both on and offline, such as: Abbey, Alpha Beat Press, art mag, Ascent Aspirations, Barbaric Yawp, Barking Dogs, Bathtub Gin, Blind Man’s Rainbow, Bogg, Buckle &, Broomweed Journal, Chiron Review, Cliff’s Soundings, Covert Poetics, Dana Literary Society, Dream Garden, Fight These Bastards, Gargoyle, Gloom Cupboard, Happy, Iconoclast, Impetus, Iodine, laurahird.com, League of Laboring Poets, Lilliput Review, Lost & Found, Lucid Moon, LuVER Radio, Lynx Eye, Mainstreet Rag, March Street Press, Marymark Press, Misfit Magazine, Muses Review, Neotrope, Nerve Cowboy, New Verse News, No Exit, Open Cut, Opium 2.0, Pass Port Journal, Parting Gifts, Pearl, Penhimalaya, Plain Jane, Poems-For-All, Poesy, Poetry Motel, Poets Against the War, Pudding House Publications, Pueblo Poetry Project, P.U.L.P., Quill & Parchment, Ragged Edge, Rain Mountain Press, Remark, Skidrow Penthouse, Slipstream, Small Press Review, Snapdragon, St Vitus Press, Sugar Mule, The MAG, Thunder Sandwich, TouchStone, Transcendent Visions, Unlikely Stories, Word Riot, Zafusy, Zen Baby, Zygote in My Coffee, ZYX
NEW ACQUISITIONS BY THE RENOWNED WILDLIFE ARTIST, TOM TAYLOR
May 27-September 17, 2017
Sangre de Cristo Arts Cente
210 N. Santa Fe Ave
Pueblo CO 81003
Throughout his seven decades of making art, Tom Taylor has worked in many genres of art. He became best known for his boldly stylized wildlife images, first developed when he lived in Zambia where he produced the 1981 calendar for the Wildlife Conservation Society of Zambia. Upon Taylor’s return to the U.S.A., opportunities became available for him to establish the Tom Taylor Brand with his unique paintings of animals and birds. Many companies, national and international, licensed his images for use on posters, calendars, and a host of various products.One series of fine art posters for the Field Museum of Natural History opened the door to projects for the World Wildlife Fund, The National Audubon Society and The National Wildlife Foundation. His wildlife paintings are represented in the permanent collections of the Audubon Society, the Leigh Yawkey Wildlife Art Museum, The National Wildlife Art Museum and the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History. In 2016, Tom donated over 100 of his gouache “circle paintings” originally meant to be produced as collector plates. Tom (aka the Poet Spiel) resides in Pueblo with his partner Paul Welch.
Solo Exhibitions:
Tom Taylor aka Thoss Taylor aka The Poet Spiel.
Museum, University, Gallery, and Private Solo Exhibitions
In alphabetical order.
( * indicates venues where Considerations of the Confines of Thoss W. Taylor is known to have been exhibited.)
Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, Aspen, CO. 1981
Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, Aspen, CO. 1989
Born Free Gallery, Evergreen, CO. 1995
Bradford Junior College, Bradford, MA. 1971 *
Brand Library Art Center, Glendale, CA. 1971 *
Breckenridge Gallery, Breckenridge, CO. 1995
California Institute of the Arts, Burbank, CA. 1971*
Center for Idea Art, Denver, CO. 1983 *
Charles Cowles, New York City, NY. 1971 *
Colorado State University/Pueblo. Pueblo CO. 2012 (major retrospective)
The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC. 1973 *
CORE New Art Space, Denver, CO. 1995
Dyer’s, Longmont, CO. 1995
Edge Gallery, Denver, CO. 1989
Edge Gallery, Denver, CO. 1990
Eugenia Butler Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 1971 *
First National Bank, Loveland, CO.1981
The Flanders Show, Longmont, CO. 1980
Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD. 1965
Gallery East, Loveland, CO. 1981
The Gallery at Hudson’s Bay, Denver, CO. 1985
The Gallery at Hudson’s Bay, Denver, CO. 1984
Gallery at The Loft, Pueblo, CO. 2010
The Gondolier, Boulder, CO. 1964, #1 (first solo exhibit)
The Gondolier, Boulder, CO. 1964, #2
Harris Fireside Lounge, Longmont, CO. 1964
Hunter College, New York City, NY. 1971 *
Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, CA. 1971 *
Kadoya Gallery, Pueblo, CO. 2016
Landmark Gallery, Longmont, CO. 1981*
Landmark Gallery, Longmont, CO. 1982
The Longmont Museum, Longmont, CO. (1989 retrospective)
The Moote Home Show, Ft. Collins, CO. 1980
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Balboa, CA. 1971 *
NFSC Show, Wheat Ridge, CO. 1995
Nova Scotia College of Art, Halifax, Nova Scotia. 1971 *
Pioneer Museum, Longmont, CO. 1971 *
Pirate – A Contemporary Art Oasis, Denver, CO. 1988
Pirate – A Contemporary Art Oasis, Denver, CO. 1987 *
Prince George’s College, Washington, DC. 1965
PST/Perpetual Conceptual, West Hollywood City Hall, West Hollywood, CA. 2012
Reese-Palley Gallery, San Francisco, CA.1971 *
Rex Evans Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 1970
Rex Evans Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1969
Royce Galleries Ltd., Denver, CO. 1996
Royce Galleries Ltd., Denver, CO. 1992
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. 1971 *
Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, CO. 2016
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA. 1971 *
San Juan Gallery at PCC, Pueblo, CO. ( a 2011, seven decade retrospective)
Sotheby Park-Bernet/ Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX. 1971 *
Two Squares Gallery, Denver, CO. 1965
University of California, Davis, CA. 1971 *
University of California San Diego, CA. 1971 *
University of Colorado Memorial Fine Arts Center, Boulder, CO. 1964
University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO. (a 1983 retrospective) *
Vectra Gallery Pueblo West Library, Pueblo West, CO. 2016.
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. 1971 *
Wildlife Conservation Society of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia, Africa. 1980
Wildlife World Museum, Monument, CO. 1982
Follow The Poet Spiel on Facebook
[pvcp_1]
Please note: permission to use Spiel/Taylor work in any form must first be obtained by specific request, per item, per usage.