Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Fifty years at work in the field, he has been changing with the times, alert to the tiniest of human feelings as well as to the larger currents of shared social struggle. Like Jack Spicer, with whom he worked closely and on whom he coedited a volume of lasting value, Tagett knows when and how to lure the right words to his page, and how to insure they stick close to his branches.... I know of no other American poet whose very pages are as well filled out. What an accomplishment!"—Kevin Killian.

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Richard Tagett was born in Ashtabula, Ohio in 1936. He loved pumping gas and redesigned the internal combustion engine when he wasn't memorizing stats on the Cleveland Indians. Always looking homeward, he hid his own buried life in the candle flame of a makeshift altar. He played piano and played in plays and played and played in the gulf and sandlots of the back there. He was a poor student and dropped out of college to become an airman and reader in French Symbolism. He wanted to be an actor on the stage, but they wanted him to be the child he was, turned inward. He lived with a Cuban painter and learned some tricks from poets, now all ghosts, who stayed him from the prison for illegal desires through total sublimation. "A lot went on, a lot ended, a lot of people died," he said. He wants to bring meaning and emotion across as equivalences. He seeks the real—that is, what is really there. He usually fails. He feels that publishing eats him up, and he fights assimilation.

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