James Tate (2) (1943–2015)

If you occasionally think of your life as aimless and absurd, you're not imagining things. Or maybe you are: Call your online outbursts tweets, but birdsong is much more urgent. Surrealist poet James Tate, who died in July 2015, turns the woodpecker's tap into a Morse code warning from the front lines. Too bad cracking the code seems like such a bother. Crawl out on his limb, and soon the folly of it all will make perfect sense. Here's rel="nofollow" target="_top">just one poem to give you an idea. Maybe you can't relate. But most of what I read on social media seems just as sadly ridiculous, and nowhere near as much fun.… (mer)

James Tate's second full book was Oblivion Ha-Ha, published in 1970 by Little Brown. It has an orange and blue dust jacket with a picture of kite flyers. The back cover is a full page photograph of the romantic young author.
The book is most famous for three poems, "The Blue Booby," "Little Yellow Leaf," and "The Wheelchair Butterfly ('Beware a velvet tabernacle')." At first glance the book is full of funny surrealist poems, the song of a manic whipporwill. Its all of the same sequined cloth. However, just below the surface of so many of the poems there is a sad and lovely melancholy. The words which appear most are Orange, black, dark and darkness. The poems are in the same category as and somewhere in between Ashbery and Simic. In these poems bread sighs, a "rollerskate collides with a lunch pail," " the dark is an available religion," and "chameleons can walk around a small room." These are tall skinny poems of delight and despair. I particularly liked the following poems:

1. Poem, which starts of the volume, is terrific:
"He did the handkerchief dance all alone
O Desire! it is the beautiful dress

for which the proper occasion
never arises.

O the wedding cake and the good cigar!"

There's a little Kenneth Koch there too.

2. "Prose Poem," which is of course lineated and racous [raw cuss].

3. "The Tryst," in which the word 'baleful' is perfectly used.

4. The manic, maniac "Shadowboxing," sweet and lonely.

5. "Twilight Sustenance Hiatus" in which the colon is well placed:

" There is so little news fit to print:
Yesterday a moth caught fire."

6. When Kabir Died," " Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers," "Conjuring Roethke," "No End to Fall River," and the long last poem "Bennington."

"Hello again, mad turnip,"… (mer)

I find myself getting into a groove sometimes when I’m reading the poetry of James Tate. This particular poetry collection was Return to the City of White Donkeys, from 2005, and again he constantly surprised me with the twists and turns that inhabited his work. As I read poem after poem of his, I found myself expecting just about anything to happen. He could be writing something approaching a fable, or a mundane modern story that suddenly takes an enormous leap, or animals could be conversing, aliens landing, plagues breaking out, the police rapping at the door, a character could be having an out-of-body experience, a person could be finding or losing his love, or you just might not have a clue to what is actually going on. One should never assume that Tate was happy with entirely changing everything around just once in a poem, more change could easily be found in the very next line.

My Tate groove is that anything and everything could be sitting there, waiting for me. Reading a book of his writings carries over and loosens up how I think, approach things, write, and even dream. He breaks up the standard linear and routine way of seeing things, and his poetry rekindles the unique and the unexpected. Again, Tate reaffirmed that the joy and power of literature and its ability to reach people is a truly amazing thing.… (mer)