Reckoner

by James Tate

Poems deal with conversation, history, art, nature, marriage, winter, friends, health, movies, questions, food, and politics

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1986

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

[Jeff T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been looking for a copy of this for years, after reading an Ashbery interview in which he called it his favorite book by James Tate. My ex-roommate in Oakland (hi Clay!) had a lovely first edition, but I could tell it made him nervous when I played with it (but then I had this habit of tumbling while reading while tumbling). Now that I have access to the NYU library system, I take home bushels of books and do nothing but read and sleep and read. I love this book, especially A Beer Ain't Got No Bone. The poems are shapely in diverse ways, and yay for that. Someone should reissue this book, don't you think?

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sadness of My Neighbors
-by James Tate

Somehow, one expects
all that food
to rise up
out of the canning jars
and off the dinner plates
and do something,
mean something.

But, alas, it's all
just stuff and more
stuff, without pausing
for an interval
of transformation.

Even family
relationships
go begging
for any illumination.

And yet, there is competence,
there is some quiet
glitter to the surface,
a certain cleanliness,
which means next to

nothing, unless you want
to eat off the floor.

[Mills College Library]

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