{"id":95625,"date":"2016-03-15T18:13:59","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T22:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95625"},"modified":"2016-03-16T10:19:38","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T14:19:38","slug":"james-tates-last-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/15\/james-tates-last-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"James Tate\u2019s Last Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late last year, I saw John Ashbery give a reading at Pioneer House, in Brooklyn<\/a>. At one point, he read a prose poem by James Tate, who died last summer<\/a>. It was, Ashbery said, Tate\u2019s final poem\u2014so incontrovertibly final, in fact, that it had been discovered in the poet\u2019s typewriter soon after his death. What Ashbery went on to read was terrific: as I recalled, it opened in a comic mode, riffing on all these bogus feats Tate<\/span> claimed to have accomplished that year (hot-dog-eating contest winner, arm-wrestling contest winner, et cetera) and building\u00a0to a quiet, rueful meditation on aging.<\/p>\n

It seemed almost too perfect to have been plucked\u00a0unedited from a typewriter, so much so that I wondered, in passing, if maybe it were a sly, prankish\u00a0tribute. I knew, or I thought I remembered, that Ashbery and Tate\u00a0had been close. \u201cHe has developed a homegrown variety of surrealism almost in his own backyard<\/a>,\u201d Ashbery had written of his friend in 1995\u2014a variety in which we find \u201csomething very like the air we breathe, the unconscious mind erupting in one-on-one engagements with the life we all live, every day.\u201d The poem Ashbery had read was so rich with those \u201ceruptions\u201d that I knew it had to be Tate\u2019s.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to say that Tate\u2019s final poem appears in the\u00a0Spring\u00a0issue of The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>, along with four new poems by John Ashbery. Below you’ll find a photo of the\u00a0poem as it was found in Tate\u2019s typewriter. His last line, given the circumstances, has a new resonance. What are the chances?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last year, I saw John Ashbery give a reading at Pioneer House, in Brooklyn. At one point, he read a prose poem by James Tate, who died last summer. It was, Ashbery said, Tate\u2019s final poem\u2014so incontrovertibly final, in fact, that it had been discovered in the poet\u2019s typewriter soon after his death. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[21540,21347,10175,5234,3161,21539,7221,165,605,11146],"class_list":["post-95625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-hot-dog-eating-contests","tag-issue-216","tag-james-tate","tag-john-ashbery","tag-photographs","tag-pioneer-house","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-readings","tag-typewriters"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJames Tate\u2019s Last Poem, Found in His Typewriter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The poem appears in our new Spring issue.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/15\/james-tates-last-poem\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"James Tate\u2019s Last Poem by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 15, 2016 \u2013 Late last year, I saw John Ashbery give a reading at Pioneer House, in Brooklyn. 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