{"id":134209,"date":"2019-03-07T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T14:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134209"},"modified":"2019-03-06T17:42:12","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T22:42:12","slug":"james-tates-last-last-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/07\/james-tates-last-last-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"James Tate\u2019s Last, Last Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

JAMES TATE, CA. 1965. PHOTOGRAPH BY ELSA DORFMAN<\/p><\/div>\n

When James Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind more than twenty collections of poetry and prose, including\u00a0Dome of the Hidden Pavilion<\/em>, published right around the time of his death. Most of us assumed that this was his final book. But it turned\u00a0out there were more poems, which have been assembled into a truly final volume, The Government Lake<\/em>, to be published by Ecco in July of 2019. One of those poems, \u201cElvis Has Left the House<\/a>,\u201d appears in The<\/em><\/a> Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s Spring 2019 issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the course of his career, Tate won every imaginable award available to American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He was revered by poets of virtually every aesthetic persuasion, from stern formalists to wild\u00a0experimentalists. He had a legion of poor imitators, whom my friends and I called \u201clost pilots\u201d after the legendary, eponymous poem of Tate\u2019s first book, which won the most prestigious prize for young poets of its time, the\u00a01967 Yale Series of Younger Poets award. When he wrote that book, he was only twenty-two, a kid from a deeply religious Pentecostal family in Kansas City, who somehow found his way to poetry and then to the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. The legend goes that he just showed\u00a0up, showed them his poems, and was admitted on the spot by the director of the program, Donald Justice. If that story\u2019s not true, I don\u2019t want to know.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I was never a lost pilot, but I was a student of Jim\u2019s in the nineties at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1971 until his death. As a teacher, Jim was pleasurably, respectfully distant yet astoundingly perceptive. He had great patience. He would wait and wait, for weeks and weeks, in vaguely kind ambivalence until a student finally did something truly magical, at which point he would come alive and praise that moment in the poem so precisely and with such great generosity that we all understood this was bigger than personality or ego. These moments were powerful, and not only the poet but everyone in the class learned something about what it meant to go beyond the ordinary. He somehow managed to avoid the pitfall of making us feel we were writing for him, probably because he so caustically discouraged any poetry that seemed like a bad imitation of his own. After I graduated, we became friendly, in the way two people from different generations can be when they love and have committed their lives to the same thing. He was kind and funny, and I never had any desire to forget that he was a master and I was privileged to be in his presence. He and his wife, the poet Dara Wier, also my teacher and mentor, always treated me with immense kindness. Privately, I\u00a0considered them my poetry parents, or maybe (given the not-quite-parental age gap) my very cool poetry older brother and sister.<\/p>\n

If you are completely unfamiliar with contemporary American poetry, you could do worse than to start with Tate\u2019s two volumes of selected poems, the Pulitzer\u00a0Prize\u2013winning\u00a0Selected Poems<\/em>\u00a0of 1991, and\u00a0The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990\u20132010<\/em>. This would be both edifying and incredibly pleasurable. Tate is a great gateway drug, but unlike a lot of poets one might love in one\u2019s youth, the effect doesn\u2019t wear off. It just gets stronger and weirder.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The middle of Tate\u2019s career was marked by the publication of several great books, beginning with the aforementioned Selected Poems<\/em>, followed by A\u00a0<\/em>Worshipful Company of Fletchers<\/em>, which won the National Book Award, and the equally remarkable Shroud of the Gnome<\/em>. The poems in those books were hilarious, clever, scary, and immensely appealing. Poems like \u201cHow the Pope Is Chosen\u201d and \u201cNever Again the Same\u201d became instant classics. He was at the peak of his poetic powers, and it would have been natural for him to settle into this mode. But, for whatever reason, he changed his style. In his next five books, Tate settled into a fully narrative mode, somewhere between a short story willing to abandon its plot at any moment and a prose poem. Occasionally there are tighter lyrics, and sometimes long, shaggy-dog\u00a0stories. There are pets and wild animals (both often gifted with the capacity for human speech), the vagaries of domestic life, humdrum small-town encounters that quickly turn surreal, hamburgers and malteds, baseball games and asteroids and plane crashes and\u00a0religious revivals and see-through babies. The poems veer and swerve and enchant, crack you up and then\u00a0sadden you, and so much more.<\/p>\n

My personal theory (which I wisely never ran by him since I\u2019m sure he would have denied it, as he did virtually any attempt to schematize his creative imagination) is that he was stripping away any of the accepted\u00a0signifiers of free-verse poetry\u2014things like line breaks, imagery, metaphor, wild comparisons and leaps, conceptual rhyme, virtuosic sonic play, and so on\u2014to see what was left. He was looking for the pure poetry after all the things that usually tell us we are reading poetry are gone. He had\u00a0already shown he could write every sort of poem he wanted, and now it was time to look for the core: what makes something a poem and nothing else? In these particular poems, that core is a casual yet headlong,\u00a0absolute willingness to follow the mind wherever it goes. It\u2019s a freedom that cannot be found even in the best of prose.<\/p>\n

The poems in Tate\u2019s final book continue this interrogation. Someone new to his work, or unaccustomed to reading poetry, might find themselves pleasantly surprised by the absence of all the usual things we expect, and perhaps dread, about contemporary American poetry. These poems are\u00a0completely clear, comically matter-of-fact, and incredibly easy to read, while also rewarding to reread. Some of the poems end with a real chortle. On closer\u00a0reading, the charm of the poems doesn\u2019t fade, but a subtle sense of dread, a disintegration of the usual conventions of human behavior and relations, begins to disturb.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something relaxed and unobtrusive about Tate\u2019s sentences. They seem like ones anyone could have written, only slightly weirder. The narrators of the poem remind me of Twain\u2019s characters. They also have the bumbling, revealing\u00a0naivete of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Will Rogers, the innocent American man who keeps discovering he\u2019s not so innocent after all. That may be, at least partially, the source of these poems\u2019 subtle dread: they are, in their\u00a0own quiet way, an allegory for the self-deluded, so-called normal American life.<\/p>\n

Many of the poems begin with a simple yet weirdly compelling first line that sets the scene:<\/p>\n

\u201cSister Bodie walked out of the church.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI walked out of the bank just as I realized it was being held up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI visited my friend Rod who was in jail, I didn\u2019t really know what for.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe raccoon got up on the roof and wouldn\u2019t come down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBetsy fell out of an airplane one day and floated down into the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI sat on the steps for a very long time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In every poem, there is a moment when reality shimmers, and the poem moves out of a purely narrative space and into something more like a waking dream. Some of the poems are wrenchingly sad; the sadness sneaks up on you because of the lack of sentimental manipulation that comes before it.<\/p>\n

In \u201cEternity,\u201d for instance, the feathers of wild poultry start to come down through the chimney of the narrator\u2019s house. Note how relaxed the language is, how little it needs to prove itself poetic: \u201cFeathers started drifting down our chimney. \/ They covered the\u00a0kitchen after a while. They got in our food. Mildred \/ complained of a stomachache, and after a few days she laid an egg.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed out loud when I read that. And then laughed again as the poem continued: \u201cWe were \/ quite astonished and didn\u2019t know what to do. She sat on it for a few days \/ and then it hatched. It was a cute little chick, and it resembled Mildred \/ in\u00a0certain ways.\u201d The mordant hilarity of the line breaks belies the notion that these poems have no form.
\nMany more chicks are hatched, but by the end of the poem, a fox has gotten into the house and all the chicks have been eaten. Something that was merely funny and sweet becomes full of pathos. And then it is deepened beyond\u00a0pathos into epistemological mystery:<\/p>\n

\u2026 Mildred said,
\n\u201cWhat are we going to do? There\u2019s nothing for us to do now.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ll go
\non as we did before, when there were no chicks,\u201d I said. \u201cBut I can\u2019t
\nimagine that. Without chicks there was nothing,\u201d she said. \u201cWithout
\nchicks we had one another. We loved each other, remember that,\u201d I said.
\n\u201cIt seems like so very long ago,\u201d she said. \u201cTo me, it seems like it
\nwas only a few days,\u201d I said. \u201cTo the chicks it was an eternity,\u201d she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Time is, unsurprisingly, one of the recurring concerns of this volume. \u201c<\/strong>A Pea in a Pod\u201d is about two brothers separated after their parents die in an accident. The narrator grows up in\u00a0a rich household, his brother in one where his adoptive father beats him until he runs away. The poem ends with a conversation between the two of them:<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo peas in a pod,\u201d the narrator says. \u201cWhat?\u201d replies the less fortunate brother, understandably.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing. I feel we\u2019re all the same, it\u2019s just that the ticking\u2019s
\ndifferent,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat\u2019s the ticking?\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the mystery,\u201d
\nI said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More people die in this book than in Tate\u2019s previous work. There is a willingness to imagine bodily decay, disappearance, and death, without a speck of sentimentality or self-pity. A slightly silly poem about\u00a0going on vacation for a week to a place where there\u2019s no food anywhere ends:<\/p>\n

I walked around in the daylight
\nwhen I had the strength. I never did find anything to eat.
\nI slept when it got dark. But this is the hard part to explain,
\nI got to like it. The weaker my hunger made me, the more I
\nthrived. I woke the seventh day and I wanted to hide out
\nhere forever. There was a knock on the door and a man said,
\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to leave.\u201d I said, \u201cNo, please let me stay.\u201d \u201cYou
\ncan\u2019t break the rules, you must leave,\u201d he said. I raised my
\nhand up as though to pray, and that\u2019s when it happened. I
\nslowly disappeared into the darkness of the cabin, never to be
\nseen again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mundane actions and objects become symbolic, full of mysterious resonance. That has always been the strength of Tate\u2019s work, from his very first book until his last: the ability to reveal the ordinary as strange, funny, dangerous, and full of meaning. In that way, the poems are existentially encouraging. Something interesting is always waiting around a corner. At the end of a poem titled (for most of the poem, obscurely) \u201cThe\u00a0Argonaut,\u201d a man sits down and finds himself in conversation:<\/p>\n

I sat down in a garden. A woman came along and sat
\ndown beside me. She said, \u201cNice day, isn\u2019t it?\u201d I said, \u201cYes, very,
\nI like it.\u201d \u201cWhat do you do for a living?\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m an accountant
\nin the government,\u201d I said. \u201cThat must be nice,\u201d she said. \u201cBut most
\npeople I know think I\u2019m a Communist,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s a joke, right?\u201d
\nshe said. \u201cTo me it is,\u201d I said. \u201cTo me, you look more like an
\nArgonaut,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat\u2019s an Argonaut?\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s somebody
\nwho swims in the deep waters of the ocean in search of treasure,\u201d she
\nsaid. \u201cI found a penny in my bathtub once when I was a kid,\u201d I said.
\n\u201cThen you\u2019re an Argonaut,\u201d she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m going to say something sacrilegious, at least to the lost pilots of the world: The Government Lake<\/em>\u00a0might be the best introduction to James Tate. It is sad and exhilarating to realize that, with these poems, Tate has completely mastered yet another form he invented. I read the poems and thought, This one is a classic, now this one is a classic, and now this one is a classic \u2026 until I realized the whole book was. In some ways, this is my favorite of all of his books.\u00a0It\u2019s funny and sad\u00a0and troubling and weird and singular. Only someone with a great mind, who had devoted his whole life to poetry, could write so casually, while also conjuring such a quiet, wild, mysterious force, to the very end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read our \u201cArt of Poetry\u201d interview with James Tate in our Summer 2006 issue.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Matthew Zapruder\u00a0is the author most recently of\u00a0<\/em>Why Poetry\u00a0(Ecco, 2017), and<\/em>\u00a0Father\u2019s Day (Copper Canyon, forthcoming in fall 2019). He teaches at Saint Mary\u2019s College of California, and is editor at large at Wave Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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