From delays in international customs to sourcing the right size screws, Theodore Archer Pope’s opus had to clear more than its fair share of hurdles.
The Lazarus Taxa, which will be released on October 10, 2024, with WayWord Books, is a heartfelt and at times heartsick look at the innermost thoughts of a creative soul. AsPope explains, a Lazarus taxon is a grouping that disappears from the record, only to appear again later. In this sense, his work in these two volumes has been gleaned from scribblings, slams, and slatherings of paint from days past, work that at times has been crumpled and thrown at his audiences, and at other times forgotten in his studio, buried under the ever-multiplying art he creates daily.
While Pope’s live performance readings are, as poet Thomas Rain Crowe says, a “hybrid combination of wise old sage and someone teetering on the edge,” on the page, his work also bridges the gap between ancient wisdom and the otherworldly. A review for Pope’s rEdlipsticK (New Native Press, 2005) says his “writing is imbued with an extra-terrestrial grounding that, for the reader, brings on vertigo while being in love with flight.
And fly he does!”
From his glory days as a Slammer, to Covid-era despair, rather than writing poetry, Pope has always aspired to be poetry. “I don’t want to read or perform poetry. I simply want to be a vessel for poetry to come into the world… a radio. A receiver with a speaker,” he says. John Dancy-Jones, publisher, papermaker, and author, says The Lazarus Taxa “takes you on a glorious roller coaster ride with swings from anguish to sudden treasuredrevelations. [Pope] lives the life of a philosopher but stays deeply grounded in the messy, chaotic swirls of daily existence.” However you acquire Pope’s poems, Dancy-Jones urges you to, “read them out loud!”
“Last Day of Summer Break,” in Someday You’ll Meet Poetry, which Pope says stands as his autobiography, begins in a restaurant:
When you were a kid
you went to a restaurant w/ your
friends. You spilled
your drink.
The Glass broke into 4 pieces
maybe there were more
small shards.
Splinters.
The middle of the poem addresses his embarrassment, his friends’ compassion, the realization that something has changed, and ends with the first day of school:
Next day at school in a class
you meet poetry
and think
this is like yesterday.
Poetry is shattering a glass of
Lemonade.
The oversized cards that make up I Almost Quit Writing feature full-color reproductions of Pope’s paintings with handwritten, as well as typeset, versions of his poems. (Writer Tim Peeler rightly points out that Ted’s left-handed calligraphy is an art unto itself.) In the voice of a slightly distraught anti-hero, Pope writes of country gangsters and submission guideline angst, weaving them improbably with nests of copperheads and the drone of wasps “their buzzing a/Tibetan bowl song.”
The Lazarus Taxa will be available in a specially bound case that includes: Someday 
You’ll Meet Poetry, an illustrated booklet, and I Almost Quit Writing, realized as a series
of oversized cards. Subscribers who opt for WayWord Books’ total experience also
receive a custom “I Met Poetry” ball cap and a vessel with a Schröedinger’s cat-type
message that begs the question: Is Poetry alive or dead?
About Theodore Archer Pope: Theodore Archer Pope, of Morganton, NC is often cited as
embodying both the avant-garde and Appalachian, the disruptive and down-to-earth. His previous work includes Black Mountain College celebration installation, The Black
Mountains of Mars; Varve, a seasonal deposit (Lorimer Press, 2013); and rEdlipsticK
(New Native Press, 2005).