The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems, 1990-2010

by James Tate

“Tate’s poems are meditative, introverted, self-reliant, funny, alarming, strange, difficult, intelligent, and beautifully crafted.”
— New York Times
                                 
The Eternal Ones of the Dream is a breathtaking collection of poems from the last two decades of work of one of modern American poetry’s major artists, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate. Tate’s remarkable work—filled with dark wit, dry humor, and deceptive simplicity—is considered among the most accessible poetry written in the last several decades, and it has inspired acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin to write, “Mr. Tate’s gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.”

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2012

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

James Tate breaks my heart. Not only was his recent passing a tragic loss, but his poetry is of the sort that revitalizes your faith in the form, or art in general. It is the seriousness of life as glimpsed through funhouse mirrors with the breathless purity of the morning dew lit up by a firey sunrise. Tate didn’t just show and not tell, he became the myth and metaphor through surreal monuments that marked the the depths of the heart. His poetry is practically baffoonish and nonsensical at first glance, but reveals a deeper understanding into life once you probe the veils of metaphors; Tate doesn’t just provide an image to explore an idea, he cloaks it all in a comical display that puts the gold mined from reality first and lets you guess at the cut-and-dry human existence that serves as the womb for its glorious birth.

Memory

A little bookstore used to call to me.
Eagerly I would go to it
hungry for the news
and the sure friendship.
It never failed to provide me
with whatever I needed.
Bookstore with a donkey in its heart,
bookstore full of clouds and
sometimes lightning, showers.
Books just in from Australia,
books by madmen and giants.
Toucans would alight on my stovepipe hat
and solve mysteries with a few chosen words.
Picasso would appear in a kimono
requesting a discount, and then
laugh at his own joke.
Little bookstore with its belly
full of wisdom and confetti,
with eyebrows of wildflowers-
and customers from Denmark and Japan,
New York and California, psychics
and lawyers, clergymen and hitchhikers,
the wan, the strong, the crazy,
all needing books, needing directions,
needing a friend, or a place to sit down.
But then one day the shelves began to empty
and a hush fell over the store.
No new books arrived.
When the dying was done,
only a fragile, tattered thing remained,
and I haven't the heart to name it.

Tate wrote a style of inimitable poetry of equal parts fun and serious pondering. The Eternal Ones of The Dream, the selected works from 1990 to 2010, pick from the vines of his later writings and reveal a true depth of soul. While most of the poems selected here are a more traditional style of poetry, with only the final selection consisting of his often characteristic style of block paragraphs of prose poems that seem to echo friend and contemporary Russell Edson (I can’t recommend his The Tunnel enough)¹. His passing was deeply felt, and I’ve spent the time since with a copy of this collection on the dashboard of my delivery van, reading it whenever I get a few moments of downtime. Never has he let me down or failed to lift my spirits. It is the absurdities of life that he capitalizes on or the humor found in even the bleakest of truths. Tate repaints the world in a way that makes it more inviting, more meaningful and, ultimately, more beautiful, while retaining the underlying emotions and truths that every human must face. It is a thing of pure perfection.

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

I was walking down this dirt road out
in the country. It was a sunny day in early
fall. I looked up and saw this donkey pulling
a cart coming toward me. There was no driver
nor anyone leading the donkey so far as I could
see. The donkey was just moping along. When
we met the donkey stopped and I scratched its
snout in greeting and it seemed grateful. It
seemed like a very lonely donkey, but what
donkey wouldn't feel alone on the road like that?
And then it occurred to me to see what, if anything,
was in the cart. There was only a black box,
or a coffin, about two feet long and a foot wide.
I started to lift the lid, but then I didn't,
I couldn't. I realized that this donkey was on
some woeful mission, who knows where, to the ends
of the earth, so I gave him an apple, scratched
his nose a last time and waved him on, little
man that I was.

James Tate taught poetry at the University of Massachusetts and was a favorite professor amongst the students for his insight, humor, understanding and guidance. According to a heart wrenching article posted after his death, many students admitted to applying to UMass primarily to work with Mr. Tate. He made poetry a fun, engaging way to look at the world and discover the hidden beauty, rather than a stuffy subject students gut through. Reading Tate is reading the silver linings of life’s dark cloud, and he had the ability to create beauty out of thin air..

Seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day’s extravagant labor

A circle of poet-friends has been slowly reaching their ends on this earth with the loss of Edson, Mark Strand, and now Tate. Luckily we still have Charles Simic from the group, and the overwhelmingly potent beauty from these men’s poetry. Tate makes me hope that a heaven exists simply so he can continue to write his brilliant verse, shaping the clouds and stars into the eternal poetry of the cosmos.
5/5


¹ A wider range of Tate’s style can be found in his Pulitzer Prize winningSelected Poems, which is a outstanding read. It also contains my favorite of Tate’s poems, also a perfect example of his prose poetry:

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

The Promotion

I was a dog in my former life, a very good
dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.
I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer
guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes
tried to get past me almost every night, and not
once did I lose a sheep. the farmer rewarded me
with good food, food from his table. He may have
been poor, but he ate well. and his children
played with me, when they weren’t in school or
working in the field. I had all the love any dog
could hope for. When I got old, they got a new
dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.
He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into
the house to live with them. I brought the farmer
his slippers in the morning, as he was getting
old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a
time. The farmer knew this and would bring the
new dog in to visit me from time to time. The
new dog would entertain me with his flips and
flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just
didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down
by the stream under a shade tree. That was the
end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so
I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise
that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.
At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak
to anyone all day. This is my reward for being
a good dog. The human wolves don’t even see me.
They fear me not.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blurbs on the backs of books are mostly boiler-plate boring. Blah, blah, blah "luminous." Blah, blah, blah, "powerful." And so forth until words mean nothing (which is, I think, the definition of a blurb).

Still, a shout-out to the poet Charles Simic. On the back of this compilation of James Tate poems he writes a blurb that about nails it: "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius.... Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction."

There you go, though some readers---the sensible, logical, sequential sorts---might quibble with that being an attraction. Me, I liked it, too (think Mikey and LIFE cereal). The only asterisk is how much of it you can enjoy in one sitting. Even pepperoni pizza might begin to wear on you if you eat it each day for two weeks straight.

All the poems in this text come from a 20 year stretch, 1990 to 2010. They are selected from the following stand-alones by Tate: Distance from Loved Ones, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, Shroud of the Gnome, Memoir of the Hawk, Return to the City of White Donkeys, and The Ghost Soldiers. And boy, howdy, do some of those titles give an indication of Tate's style.

But let's go better yet. Here's a short poem from the collection that shows Tate's distinctive thought process (hint: it doesn't look like a "process"):


Cunning

I had gotten a nasty bite at the petting
zoo earlier that day. On the bus home I sat
next to a little old lady, tiny and stooped,
her head bobbing up and down. I don't know why
I did this, but I showed her the bite on my hand.
She stared at it for a long time. Then she
reached out and took my hand in her papery
blue-veined hands. She brought my hand closer
to her eyes. Her mouth was open just a little
and my heart started to race. I jerked my
hand out of her grip just in time. She smiled
and showed me her teeth. "They're beautiful,"
I said. "Brand new," she replied.


Your reaction may be, "Say, wha-?" or something thereabouts, but it's clever stuff, random as it may seem. Here's another weird and wonderful example:


Vale of the White Horse

That's where I first met my bride. She
was standing under a chestnut tree during a
summer shower. I stopped my car and offered
to give her a lift. She didn't seem to hear me.
I got out of the car and walked up to her.
Her skin looked and felt like porcelain. "Are
you okay?" I asked. She blinked her eyes as if
coming out of trance. "I was looking for
the white horse," she said. I drove her to
a hospital where the doctor diagnosed her as
being my bride. "There's no doubt about it,
she is your bride." We kissed, and thus the Trans-
Canadian Highway was born.


Tate likes to use specifics, such as the "chestnut tree" above and "papery / blue-veined hands" in the poem before to make the unreal seem entirely real. He also loves a good non-sequitur: "... and thus the Trans- / Canadian Highway was born."

Huh?

I read the book just marveling at how a man could come up with such precise imprecisions. It might be easier to read one of the books selected from at a time, I admit, because a surfeit can be reached when you are reading some 250 pp. of this ilk.

Still, overall, applause. And no way will I try to imitate his style. Imagine how bad that would come off. OK. Don't imagine it. I'm sensitive about my writing (hey, it's going around).

[BooksRgood · Rating 5 out of 5]

dozens of fine poems, some poignant, many surreal and silly. here's an example:
The Search for Lost Lives
BY JAMES TATE
I was chasing this blue butterfly down
the road when a car came by and clipped me.
It was nothing serious, but it angered me and
I turned around and cursed the driver who didn't
even slow down to see if I was hurt. Then I
returned my attention to the butterfly which
was nowhere to be seen. One of the Doubleday
girls came running up the street with her toy
poodle toward me. I stopped her and asked,
"Have you seen a blue butterfly around here?"
"It's down near that birch tree near Grandpa's,"
she said. "Thanks," I said, and walked briskly
toward the tree. It was fluttering from flower
to flower in Mr. Doubleday's extensive garden,
a celestial blueness to soothe the weary heart.
I didn't know what I was doing there. I certain-
ly didn't want to capture it. It was like
something I had known in another life, even if
it was only in a dream, I wanted to confirm it.
I was a blind beggar on the streets of Cordoba
when I first saw it, and now, again it was here.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to Selected Poems (1967-1986) it is lacking a certain disdain for comprehension; there's a density of thought and language that is less crazed here. Less variation in form of poems as well, like my dude has really settled into the kind of poem he wants to write. The good news: the kind of poem he wants to write is a peerless, strange, beautiful and funny reckoning of the world.

[David Ranney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dream On

Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinarily people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
Investing money is second nature to them.
They contribute to political campaigns
that have absolutely no poetry in them
and promise none of the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night
and pretend as though nothing is missing.
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing.
The family dog howls all night,
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations,
croquet, fox hunts, their seashores and sunsets,
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't
forget the good deeds, the charity work,
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the bird feeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but ever present.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken, urbane and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't:
"and if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call
our ancestors back form the dead––"
poetry-wise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow,
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life,
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor.
And yet it's cruel to expect too much.
It's a rare species of bird
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream––
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
and then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.

[Abbi Dion · Rating 5 out of 5]

When in the midst of total depression/mania/anxiety spell, pluck this from the shelf and comfort thyself.

"Shoot them/all!" he ordered. "But, Captain, they're our men," I said. "No/they're not. My men were well trained and disciplined. Look/at this mess here. They are not my men. Shoot them!" he again/ordered. I raised my rifle, then turned and smacked him in the head/with the butt of it. Then I knelt and handcuffed him. The soldiers/gathered about me and we headed for home. Of course, none of us/knew where that was, but we had our dreams and our memories./Or I think we did.

James Tate, from "The March"

[Rob Mentzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this poems, they are so funny and weird it is terrific.

[Isabelle Nordquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each poem was something different and that’s something I appreciated. This collection lacked a cohesive theme yet was captivating in an idiosyncratic way. Some pieces made me upset at not just the meaning but also the fact that I understood their connotation. Some made me recognize myself within them. And others made me feel nothing at all. Which, honestly, was refreshing to read in between conceptualizing all the emotions and words before it. Tate did an exceptional job at saying so much without writing much at all. His work created the space for readers to understand, while being confused due to the many possible meanings behind what they were reading. It was all over the place, in the best way, and I throughly enjoyed it.

[mark mendoza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review of SOFTBACK edition/ Poetry is wonderful and a good-enough selection, but a shameful Ecco (Harper Collins) production – flimsy paper, no dates (!), offensive cheap shortcuts – now requires a decent new edition. Jim was a good friend and mentor to me, a constant defender of all things poetry, and his readers – lost pilots, reckoners, ones of the dream of the dancing bee alike – deserve so much better.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

So truly hilarious, touching, and... unpredictable. It’s like Tate, to get to that degree of unpredictable, first thought about something completely random and riduolous, then thought about what random and riduclous thing might happen after that, then cut out the first instance, removing the connection and leaving that second random and riculous thing to stand alone, two-degrees deep in the weird.

[Nik Maack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Surreal and weird and dreamy, while still being readable. I find a lot of poetry to be so flowery as to almost be in code. Plainly written poetry is a rare thing. This is it.

I read it slowly, almost always pausing after a poem. They're cryptic and weird. Some would get mad and say they're not even poems. Fine, whatever. I like them. Screw you, imaginary jerk I just made up.

Definitely will look for more by Tate and others like him.

[Sebastian]

First read: June 14, 2019, Friday

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best “selected poems” type collection I’ve ever read.

[A L]

At least a little bit of all his stylistic periods.

[ASC Library]

811.5 Tat

[Stephen Rynkiewicz]

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 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.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Tate, you rock the hardest.

[Matt Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review of this & other books at http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2013/03/s...

[h]

contemporary american poetry