[2] In the late 1950s, he became one of the initiators, together with Taras Kermauner, of a circle of young Slovene artists and intellectuals who challenged the rigid cultural policies of the Yugoslav Communist regime.

Due to its open criticism of the Communist regime, the journal was soon censored by the authorities and several of its collaborators, like Jože Pučnik and Taufer himself, were imprisoned.

Between 1962 and 1964, he worked as the director of the alternative theatre Oder 57, staging innovative and subversive plays by Slovenian and foreign modernist authors, among them Dominik Smole, Primož Kozak and Marjan Rožanc.

He also participated in the so-called May Declaration of 1989, in which a group of Slovenian intellectuals and public activists openly demanded full democratization of the politics of the nation, the introduction of a market economy, and the separation of Slovenia from Yugoslavia.

During the war in Bosnia, he personally visited the besieged city of Sarajevo, together with Drago Jančar, Niko Grafenauer and Boris A. Novak, to take supplies collected by the Slovene Writers' Association to the civilian population.

Other notable Slovenian poets of the time include, Gregor Strniša, Dane Zajc, Tomaž Šalamun, and Jože Snoj.

In his later poetry in the 1970s, his literary experimentation went even further, marking the way to a complete transformation of poetic language, which would be then picked up by younger poets, especially by Tomaž Šalamun and Niko Grafenauer.

His Songbook of Used Words (Pesmarica rabljenih besed), published 1975, was conceived as a collection of contemporary variations on Slovene folk songs (especially ballads), and was declared by the philosopher and critic Tine Hribar as the first post-modern work in Slovenian literature.

The poems in the collection Water Marks (Vodenjaki), published 1986, record a story of chaos, and a decline of civilization, cultures, beliefs, ideas and values.

The poems contained in this collection use fragments from ancient Greek myths, archaic images and visions of disasters, mobilized as an instrument of post-modern reality.