Hints to Pilgrims

by James Tate

Tate, James

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published August 1, 1982

About the author

James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he worked since 1971. He was a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.

Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange.

He published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.

Reviews

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part 1 contains some amazing work, including what is quite possibly my favorite poem (aptly titled Poem). Part 2 weakens a bit for me. Some of the word salad surrealist Beefheart wannabe stuff doesn’t work, especially with so much of it clustered together. Though there are a handful of good ones in there (The Remains, Fuck the Astronauts). Part 3 redeems itself a little, pulling the narratives back together and abandoning some of the abstract surrealism, but not enough for this to be a true classic.

I love Tate’s work and this is worth reading, though it concentrates too heavily on some of his style that I find to be the most forgettable.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tate in serious surrealist/dada mode, like Captain Beefheart on speed.

[e · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Jim’s from what’s otherwise his period of peak operating powers (begging the question of the influence of Rimbaud extending to longevity), largely because he’s more in love with momentary shocks & in-line misdirection than anywhere else. The effect seems sort of mean-spirited in ways you don’t see elsewhere in his work. Although, strangely, as he aged & softened (allowed himself sentimentality here & there, sure, but also became largely dependent on the shaggy dog story template) the work also suffered, and so that tension between the surreal and the sentiment, most of the charm of this early period, is dissolved & what you’re left with is this “interpreted unreal,” let’s say. Rilke cautions us about the interpreted world; if we accept that an irrational number is still real, then what of the unreal as present in pure ratiocination? It’s not very pleasant, needless to say.

There are some good poems in here (thus the rating), but they mostly resemble stuff from Absences or Oblivion Ha-Ha, and those collections are more consistent. Tate selected less from this one than the surrounding volumes for his Selected Poems and while I don’t doubt that he believed in all of these at the time, there’s a strong sense throughout of experiments he needed to try for himself, if only just once. This one, which didn’t appear in that selected volume, was probably my favorite of the whole collection:


CLOSET TRAILS

The fogmachine turned over like a suicide note
on the pajama trail which leads to paradise.
On the trail of mittens that leads to crises
I stood there for a moment with my dingbat nephew.

Two pale sailors lifted an icy disk from his heart
on the breakfast trail where the hershey bar is snoring.
Along the trail of paratroopers with nosebleeds
a rat opened its toes into a tributary of pudding.

This was no reptile with a resilient necktie:
this was the rapturous trail of children that leads nowhere.
The mica trail where vows are broken:
I threw myself over the ledge

into the rotting canyons of rat-mirror,
the abandoned trail where Baudelaire is teaching braille.
A man with a closet of stringy dreams
on the trail of big yoyo parties

waded through the rippling waters,
trails we follow instinctively,
imagining himself more honest than New Jersey.
The silver barn jumped up in the sky.

[Stephen Kowalkowski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Favorites:
A Sparrow
Who Can Tell When He Is Awake

[Rex Libris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of essays, mostly on literary topics. A nice light, amusing read.