Buffalo Poet Dallas Taylor Has Found His Voice

Dallas Taylor (Photo by Yves-Richard Blanc)

The poet Dallas Taylor doesn’t like snow. While he’s lived in Buffalo all his life, he’s never gotten used to it and each year he would escape to Georgia to be with his mother’s family rather than endure winter here.

Nonetheless, Taylor has a cat — (yes, you guessed it) — named “Snow,” who makes regular appearances as a DJ on Taylor’s Instagram channel. And in a recent interview with 1120 Press, Taylor talked about his cat and his work.

Always knowing he’d like to write for a living, his work has evolved from battle raps to love poems as well as performance, both live and online. In the end, he’s found what feels right.

“There was one night I was up late with the cat, of course, just watching battle raps on YouTube,” he said. “The next day at work, I see a headline: ‘TSA declares peanut butter a liquid.’ I wrote that down and I just started writing like I was writing a battle rap, and it turned into a poem. It turned into a love poem, of sorts, and that felt pretty good. It felt pretty natural. I wrote it down as if I was going to perform it and later that week, I learned there was a poetry slam. It was too much for me not to perform this poem. My first ever poetry slam, I came in second place.”

Taylor took it as a sign and said even though the “TSA Peanut Butter Poem” may not be great, there was a “click in his head” as he performed it. He decided to go all in with writing and that’s where he is two years later.

“I felt it was God’s will,” Taylor said, adding he tried several creative ventures including photography and dance, but none of those felt as right.

“It was like, ‘you’ve done these things here, but your calling is poetry.’”

Taylor progressed quickly. He joined the Pure Ink Poetry Slam team in their 2024 bid at the Southern Fried Poetry Slam and has been to the event twice. The slam showed him there was an entire world of poetry of which he is just discovering.

Yet, even so, one could say Taylor’s accomplished quite a bit already, which is something he acknowledges himself. In fact, he feels he’s come far enough to start giving back.

“Now that I’ve found my voice in poetry, I feel like my mission is to allow others to express themselves and find their voice,” he said.

“I feel I write a lot about the human experience, more so as a man going through emotions — something that we don’t really express a lot,” he said. “I’m trying to show that it’s normal, it’s regular and it also should be encouraged and allowed. I feel like we go through a lot of times having to stifle a lot of those emotions.

“Growing up, all I heard was boys were not supposed to cry. Boys that cry are weak boys. I feel so agitated sometimes and trying to be vulnerable is sometimes difficult, but I found it to be more artistic to do it through a poem and more satiable to the audience.”

For Taylor, it’s all about being real.

“When I tell you in a poem that I cried, it’s because I was crying in real life… real tears,” he said. “There were tears on this paper that I’m writing on.”

Follow Taylor’s Instagram HEREto keep up on his work, and performances. You can alsocheck out his linktr.ee HERE— (which also includes his YouTube channel) — for all that Taylor has happening. See Dallas perform his poem 'Steve Wonders' below.