James Tate, Early and Late

Also: How I read poetry

I’ve been on a James Tate kick lately. These happen every few years. Are you familiar with Tate? A great poet who lived from 1943 to 2015, he had an inimitable style that developed over time into great chunks of prose that, while they didn't always look at first glance like what we regard as a poem (stanzas, line breaks, and so on), still read like poems in the most inventive, twisty, funny, and heartbreaking ways. But this was a mode he evolved into. Early on, his poems looked more like… poems.
I’m splitting hairs here, though, really—or being disingenuous, maybe. Because I am one of those poetry readers who believes that if you tell me it’s a poem—that your intention for any given piece was that it be a poem—I’ll accept writing in any form as a poem. And this points at the larger picture of my approach to reading poetry: total acceptance of the writer’s intent. Or, rather, being willing to take the ride. This has come up on my podcast once or twice, but my basic approach to reading a poem goes like this: Read it once, at whatever pace, all the way through. Don't worry about understanding it. Don't grasp for meaning. Let the language pass over and through you. Because poetry, for me, functions first at the level of language and instinct. The language of some poets works for me at first read; the language of other poets does not. I know, once I’ve finished this first, willfully ignorant read, whether that poem or poet is for me—whether, on the level of language or, to put it another way, music—it is going to hit the spot in terms of my taste in poetry. If the language doesn’t work for me, the meaning—if one is even ever to be gleaned—doesn’t matter.

Early Tate

So, Tate. This week I’ve been reading his first collection—1967’s The Lost Pilot—and his final collection—2019’s posthumous The Government Lake. I wanted to see how it would feel to see the nascent stages of a great poet’s body of work and then jump to its climax—with no sense of the intervening stages and evolutions. This took some forgetting of all the other Tate books I’ve read, which was surprisingly easy. Only a small number of poems—or should I be honest and say more like lines or, if I’m lucky, stanzas, stick in my memory at all times.
Taking this leap from first book to last book—a jump of a few decades—was illuminating and served to endear me even more to this unique writer. The Lost Pilot, which was originally released as the 62nd volume of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, is named for a poem about Tate’s father, a pilot who disappeared and was presumed dead during WWII when Tate was a few months old. I want to use the word “poignant” here even though I don't like it because, if that word was invented for any use, this is it. It begins:

Your face did not rot
like the others – the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others – it grew dark,
and hard like ebony

I’m cutting it off mid-stanza there because one point seems to have been made in this excerpt. Again, the first time I read this poem I read it without work, effort, or conscious thought. I let it steamroll me. It’s now, after countless readings, that I start to coalesce in my head what some of it might mean to me—not that it will be anything near what it meant to Tate. That being said—caveat emptor—what I get from this passage is a setting apart of Tate’s grief from the grief of others. For Tate, something is special and privileged about his own mourning. And I think that maybe it has something to do with him taking up the identity of poet and really owning it. The memories of a poet, I read here, immortalize what’s being remembered. So even as his father’s face, which is in the process as we read of being set down for the ages in a poem, becomes hard and sculptural, like ebony, the face of his co-pilot, remembered as it has been by non-poets, has rotted. It is, now, in gory detail, “corn-mush.” And this is because the poor guy didn't have a bard for a son. He’s forgotten; his face has faded. The face of Tate’s father, however, has become a frightful, dark totem. This is just one of a million possible readings of what Tate set down. It could be horribly wrong. It will change for me the next time I read the poem. But today, right now, this feels right to me.
Something else I like about this bit is where and how the line and stanza breaks come. Cutting off in mid-sentence gives the poem a jittery, halting, breathless feeling. Try reading it aloud and you might agree. Then there’s the splitting of “corn-mush” over two lines. It’s as if Tate couldn’t bear to let that horrible detail live on its own line. In an opposing strategy, he lets “He was more wronged than Job.” be the only complete sentence that gets its own line. He wanted the impact of that line to live on its own both in terms of meaning and also in terms of rhythm. It’s a younger poet’s choice, I think. A little unsubtle. But, when read aloud, boy does it work.

A few lines later, Tate writes:

… If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you…

Oof. See above re: “poignant.” The desperation and honesty here—the admitting that he sees his father as a being living in the sky, “compulsively orbiting” Tate and everything else on the Earth he left behind, as well as the simple “I would touch you” which feels like a standard wish from the living to the beloved dead—combine to a dreadful, moving effect. And, toward the end of this short poem, a perfect stanza appears:

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

Two sentences that, as a fellow member of the Dead Fathers Club, I do not feel the strength to interrogate too deeply.

Late Tate

Now we skip to later Tate. To, in fact, his final poems. The Government Lake, which was named after a line in a poem by Tate’s former student David Berman—

Those summer evenings by the government lake,
Talking about the paradox of multiple Santas
Or how it felt to have your heart broken.

—is Tate in his fully evolved form, a master surrealist prose poet. Compare the structure of the earlier poem above with this snippet from the poem “Debbie and the Lumberjack”:

I’m sorry I never said goodbye. I’m sorry I forgot your
birthday. I’m sorry I ever met you. I’m sorry I bought you
that drink and made you sick. I’m sorry I couldn't find the way
to the hospital. I’m sorry I couldn't remember what kind of roses
you liked. I’m sorry we fought over such a small thing. I’m sorry
I let the lion get too close to you. I’m sorry I taught you English
all wrong. I’m sorry we flew backwards in a storm. I’m sorry
you never got to eat a meal with my friends…

I’m again guilty of cutting a line off at the end there, but tricky Tate just wouldn't end any of them with the end of a sentence. See how each independent entry in the litany above breaks over the end of a line? What does that do to your breath when you’re reading it, especially aloud? It imparts to each thought a pause that gives it a special kind of gravity and drama. What will come next? How will this thought end? In Tate’s later poems, the culminations of lines are almost always surprising. When I read these poems, I wonder about Tate’s compositional strategies while writing them. I get the sense, and I sort of hope, that he started these things with just a line in mind. A line that came from the ether, maybe. And then he followed the trail in an improvisational, spontaneous way as line after line accumulated, forming into a narrative that is both otherworldly and thoroughly grounded in things of the world. If this is the way he composed, it’s just, like, wow, what a mind he had. Even after decades of practice and living inside the poems, the thought of Tate leaping from thing to thing the way he does in this work is astonishing.

Look at the story-jumps in his poem “The Jackdaw’s Head”:

We let them out of prison on Christmas and they never came back. That
was okay. We didn't like them anyway. But they did leave a mess. Their
cells stank to high heaven. And, it’s true, they did commit crimes where-
ever they went. We felt bad about that. We forwarded their names to other
crime prevention agencies in the hopes that they might catch them and put
them away in their prisons. But they never did. Crime spread throughout
the region. We felt bad about that. Then the leader of one gang became a
priest, and that made all the papers. And the leader of another gang started
food drives in several poor neighborhoods…

Yet again, I will point out that the excerpt above cuts off mid-line. The entire poem, on the page, looks like one big chunk of paragraph. Anyway, what do you make of this passage? Am I alone in thinking that it says more, in its elliptical way, than many short stories?

I guess this is the place where I’m supposed to present my big takeaway in terms of the development of Tate’s poetry from its early to its late days. But I don’t know that I want to. I just have stray observations, or maybe even just one stray observation, that occurs to me right now. It’s interesting to me how the poetry, between these two eras, becomes thicker and more packed. The typical structure of what our eye immediately recognizes on the page as a poem is abandoned, like doing away with a safety net or riding a motorcycle without a helmet. But these could be bad analogies if we look at the move toward a prose style from another angle, which is that there is actually safety in the prose structure. When a casual and perhaps not-inclined-to-poetry reader sees a paragraph, they might feel more apt to read the poem than if they’re presented with a spiky, sparse landscape of branches and breaks. It could go either way for me depending on which direction the wind is blowing. But one thing I do feel convinced of—as much as anyone can really feel convinced of an opinion—is that as Tate got older and his style leaned more toward a prose field, he was becoming more full of things and ideas and more interested in perpetuating the oldest art form of humankind—storytelling.

A few other things from this past week:

Beloved by Toni Morrison
I continue to read it, continue to be destroyed by it, and continue to feel unprepared to write about it.

Tickle Me by Lesley Arfin
A book of watercolors by my friend Lesley. I helped with editing it, and I’ve been proofing it. It comes out in the near future. Lesley is mainly known as a writer, and I’m looking forward to people getting to know her cozy-but-spooky artwork.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
I’m re-reading, after many years, this dark collection of linked stories from 1919 that focuses on one small town and its cast of strange characters. Maybe it’s the geographical connection, but I see it as a version, for its time, of Harmony Korine’s Gummo, which also pilloried and celebrated small-town Ohio.