Torches

by James Tate

Unicorn Press: 1968 (First Edition)

"1300 copies published: 1030 glued into
wrappers, 250 bound into boards
30 numbered and signed by the poet
case-bound by Donald Rojo in an or-
iginal fabric by Joe & Anna Burgess."

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

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

[Alia Kobuszko · Rating 4 out of 5]

LITTLE MISERY ISLAND
The green sponges sway on their stalks
above are the shadows of herons
We throw our clothing into the sea

and try to create a child
Smooth periwinkles are clinging to the rocks
a ghost crab stands by himself

waiting for the tide
to bring him a midnight drink
I put my mouth on yours again

then we start back toward town
Our silvery faces ascend the hillside
dumbly as if to warn the moon

I do not remember the last spoken word
only the wet joy
of your emerald body

[edmondegreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am simply stunned. I can't believe what he's done here. How different it is from his other work, yet equally brilliant if not better.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the record of a love affair, well disguised and discrete, of course (this is Tate), but with portraits of the rioters in Chicago (it's also 1968), Jean Valentine, as well as scenes of New England during that turbulent time:

At last we reached the cliff
even in the darkness
we could see for miles and miles

Glances were exchanged
and we hurled our torches
like babies into the river
each weeping louder than the other

A few sparks hung in the wind
and drifted back into our faces
so we turned and started back
down the path toward home

When we arrived it was morning
The neighborhood was doing
what it had to do
papers and milk and mail

We were surprised to find
that it had not changed
or if in fact there was a great change
suddenly we cared.

("The Torches")

This, and several other poems here (though not the one that includes Valentine) got folded into The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), Tate's first book with a major publisher. I love this book for the peek it offers me of a young but disaffected voice trying to transmute the materials of that strange period.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

All limbs are not necessary:
I have a tree surgeon in mind.
He is such a lonely man,
but he is kind,
and the tree is in need

of his gentle hands.
Not all limbs are necessary,
my wife agrees.
She is a cripple from the Bronx;

something about a train
in Yucatan . . .

from "The Tree Surgeon"
by James Tate (b. 1943)