Viper jazz

by James Tate

Book by Tate, James

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read this book which I carried around in my backpack in my early 20s. James Tate was a revelation to me at that time and helped form me as a poet. He still thrills.

[Krzysztof · Rating 1 out of 5]

James Tate Talking Blues

Let it be known that flarf has existed since at least 1972.

Dali and Buñuel would read Viper Jazz and say, 'Dude, that was the idea.' I.e. idealessness.

Simic said, 'Like Ornette Coleman: Everything done so wrong, but sounding so right.'

A show of hands, good readers: who finds Coleman [to be] listenable?

Pennsylvanians say, 'This brain needs washed [from a previous brainwashing]'

Caulfield says, 'Say something no one understands, people will do anything you want.'

Reviews say, 'We sense a serious vision' and 'The prosily discursive body is attenuated.'

Wallace said, 'Academics are cagey and succumb to pleonasm out of fear of being understood [to be an idiot]'

Lerner lamented, 'My repetition was praised but, alas, my poems were understood.'

Byrne said, 'Say something once, why say it again?'

To be [understood] or not to be [understood].

The greater the fatuous non sequitur, the fewer flights of fancy. I said that.

The cut-and-paste method is literally the new definition of figurative hackery.

Darnielle said, 'You may not like Tate's methods, but you gotta admit [he's] a real nice kid.'

I liked Tate later on. Later, Tater.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poem (I Can’t Speak for the Wind)

I don’t know about the cold.
I am sad without hands.
I can’t speak for the wind
Which chips away at me.
When pulling a potato, I see only the blue haze.
When riding an escalator, I expect something orthopedic
to happen.
Sinking in quicksand, I’m a wild appaloosa.
I fly into a rage at the sight of a double-decker bus,
I want to eat my way through the Congo,
I’m a double agent who tortures himself
and still will not speak.
I don’t know about the cold,
But I know what I like I like tropical madness,
I like to shake the coconuts
And fingerprint the pythons,-
fevers which make the children dance.
I am sad without hands,
I’m very sad without sleeves or pockets.
Winter is coming to this city,
I can’t speak for the wind
which chips away at me.

-----
some favorite excerpts:

What is the sky,
The sky is a door,
a very small door
that opens for an inchworm
an inch above his rock,
and keeps his heart from falling off

----
My body has no no body,
and my spirit hath no spirit.
like the like the like the like the
nest of spiders beneath your arms,
the wind carries your shadow through her dark hills.

---

Trained slugs race across his jello
in eight-cylinder sombreros

[Ann Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early Tate; I much prefer his later work, particularly Ghost Soldiers. Some of these pieces fail to resonate 40 years after their composition, but this collection should be useful to scholars of his work and to poets who are interested in seeing the progression of a well-known writer's voice/style as it develops.

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has there ever been a more appropriately named book of poetry? Even at his most free formed and jazzy (forgive me), Tate throws in devastating lines that can radically change the focus of a piece. What once was focused might be broken, what once was blurry might be clear. Or maybe you're left just as confused as when you came--if not more so. For me, Tate is the best. This is not my favorite collection of his, but there are enough solid pieces in here to give the interior architecture of your brain a proper jostling. Reading Tate is inspirational because as hard as you may try to imitate him, you never succeed but rather develop a language all your own.

[Stephen Kowalkowski · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tate, my man… Can you start making sense?

Favorites: A Radical Departure

Quotes:
He pummels the countryside
with tiny vodka empties,
thinking: “With a wife
like mine, fuck ecology.”

[Tyler Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Berman secrets within

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of his books - this feels more grounded in the everyday and the flights more wondrous for it.

[Mills College Library]

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