Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems

by James Tate

The seventeenth book of verse from one of America’s finest and most acclaimed contemporary poets—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.Capturing his inimitable voice—provocative, amusing, understated, and riotous all at once—the poems in Dome of the Hidden Pavilion demonstrate James Tate at his finest. Innovative and fresh, they range in subject from a talking blob to a sobering reminiscence of a war and its aftereffects.Though they are diverse in scope, a theme of dialogue and communication—and often miscommunication—links these poems. Accessible yet subtly surrealist, filled with dark wit, dry humor, and a deceptive simplicity, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion confirms Tate’s continuing relevance as one of the most celebrated American poets of the modern age.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 4, 2015

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 4 out of 5]

You love everything, because you have nothing.

An old saying goes that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. I’d like to adapt this statement to one stating there is a fine line between genius and nonsense. The prose poetry of James Tate, such as the ones collected in his seventeenth and final book, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion are that beautiful dividing line. These prose poems, which seem to exist in a wonderful gap between what is a ‘short story’ and what is a ‘poem’, are primarily constructed out of non-sequitur conversations and events that take the reader in surprising—yet refreshing—directions. It is a world that seems nonsensical and nearly idiotic on the surface, but holds a close proximity to the natural unfolding of our own world and lives and are practically allegorical tales of our existence. Often I hear people describe an author as 'a writer's writer,' or an artist as 'a musician's musician' which gets to the point but does a terrible disservice to all involved. I suspect Tate would be considered 'a poet's poet,' which, granted, makes sense, but also doesn't capture the essence and doesn't need to be the case. Tate creates a work of beauty that we may have to work a bit at, but can open up to anyone and make us better for it. Tate creates an absurdist metaphor of the absurdities of reality, filling them with wit and utterly irresistible charm that will keep the reader scratching their head but always laughing and finding themselves unable to put the book down.

The Baby
I said, “I’m afraid to go into the woods at night. Please don’t make me go into the woods.” “But someone has stolen our baby, and has taken it into the woods. You must go,” she said. “We don’t have a baby, Cynthia. How many times must I tell you that?” I said. “We don’t? I felt quite certain that we had a baby,” she said. “We will have one soon, I feel certain of that,” I said. “Then it makes no sense for you to go into the woods at night. Without a baby to search for, what would you do?” she said. “I’m going to stay right here by the fire where it’s cozy and safe,” I said. “I’m going to put the baby to bed,” she said. “Someday there will be a baby,” I said. “Until then I’ll put him to bed,” she said. “Have it your way,” I said. She went out of the room humming a little ditty. I put a log on the fire and lay down on the couch. Cynthia came running into the room screaming, “The baby is gone! Someone has stolen our baby!” “I never liked that baby. I’m glad it’s gone. And I’m not going into the woods. Don’t even think of asking me,” I said. “A fine father you turned out to be. My precious baby eaten by wolves,” she said.

These are the type of poems you finish thinking 'what the hell was that!?’, yet cannot stop thinking about them for the rest of the day. You return again, reread it, start pondering, and suddenly realize the truth of the page is more than the truth of the daylight. The world is absurd and so why should we address it with logic. In a way, Tate is the uplifting and lighthearted prose poetry version of Kafka’s parables. These poems are quite dark in content but never burden the reader with heavy emotion but merely elevate their mood in the swirling surrealist humor of the stories that twist and turn towards unexpected events. 'A poem out of nothing,’ Charles Simic once praised Tate, 'just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction.’ These are poems that often start by trailing off from a rather dramatic event like a cow having exploded or returning from a doctors visit with bad news or surviving a flood, and then taking off in an unrelated direction and ending up in a bold new wilderness as if you had been chasing a butterfly and found yourself having traveled through a magicians wardrobe into a new realm without realizing it. You finish these poems and feel utterly bewildered, but full of some sage-like wisdom you can’t assess. They are difficult to wrap your head around, poems in a Tate-skull shaped path, but when you come close you feel it’s beautiful world enrapture you on an intellectual level that feels too pure and perfect to hold, like a giant bubblegum ball too big to fit in your mouth but too sweet to not try. These are poems that end like “'I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Neither did I,’ he said’” or “I looked again. He wasn’t there. And then, neither was I.” It is simply befuddling, yet intensely amazing all at once.

War plays a very large theme in this collection. There are lost men helping lost armies find their way, before being sidetracked to buy underwear, ending up doing their entire christmas shopping, and never finding their lost army again, or vacation towns rounded up for war crimes in a war they didn’t participate in. One particularly moving poem, The Battlefield has the narrator watching a battle between ants. The battle is described as utterly horrific and brutal, 'both sides were capturing members of the other to spend the rest of their lives as slaves. It was really a brutal battle,’ but then the narrator simply walks away to attend to their own mundane life and is asked to bet on the battle by a friend (he refuses, the friend can talk to ants and that isn’t fair). It reflects our culture of instant worldwide information and the way we acknowledge the violence and cruely of wars across the globe, but they become just a passing amusement, another story on the tv that might as well be fiction. It is sad, really.

The Psychiatric Unit
I remember the ashen faces of the children with their one good arms reaching out to touch their dead mothers and fathers curled up at their feet. That was the one image that had stuck in my mind. When I got back to the States they stuck me in a psychiatric unit with hundreds of other soldiers. We weren’t really supposed to talk about the war, but of course we did. Sometimes we even cried. Alex asked me if I had ever enjoyed it some days. And I said ‘Yes, there were even days when I thought we were winning.’ ‘Yes, I remember those days, but they were fleeting,’ he said. Then I took a downturn and they locked me away. A nurse brought me my food three times a day and another brought me my medicine twice a day. No one spoke to me. A doctor finally came. He asked me my name. He asked me the names of my family members. Then he asked me if I knew what I was in there for I said I did not. He said I had failed in my ability to socialize with other patients. I said I didnt know what that meant. He said I was always starting fights and knocking over tables. I said I didn’t remember any of that. He said how that was often the case. I said I remembered liking everyone. He said, ‘yes, that’s common.’ He left and I sat alone in my room. I kept thinking of those little children ling amidst the dust of their blown-up homes. Where were they now? I heard a loud scream, and then another. Then all was quiet. There were bars over the window, so thought of escape were not good. I looked at the white walls. They were shrinking, holding me tighter and tighter. One day soon they would smother me. And what can you say about that? That they were doing their job.

Poems such as this one really hit me, having dozens of friends who faced the horrors of war in our youth, Some never made it home, and the ones that did have assured me that it was a place I should be glad I never was. There are few things harder than seeing a best friend face ghosts, real ghosts, of violence that will not leave them. Tate embodies this with finesse and tasteful rendition. Video games are another comment metaphor to reflect a similar statement, how we play at violence and accept it and don’t let it bother us, never stopping to consider that these digital lives are dying painful digital deaths and that we think the same when we see a foreign soldier brutalized by gunfire in a distant foreign war. I remember years ago staying up all night at a friends house playing this Tom Clancy video game—I don’t own a tv or play video games but I used to be sucked into them when with friends, who doesn’t on occasion. We opened a level where we had to clear out all the enemies from a college campus setting and played up the sun trying to beat it (I always insisted on putting the difficulty to the max, 'sexpert’ instead of expert I called it, because you had to 'be true to the game’. Childish jokes I liked to insist upon) and when we finally did we turned off the game consul to discover the news story about the Virginia Tech shooting. I remember feeling as if our playing at war games somehow willed it into existence, and perhaps that culture I was taking a part of, in a way, had. It left me with an ugly feeling for days. 'War Games’ what a sickening phrase. Toy Soldiers has a child’s room filled with toy soldiers and real soldiers, and the boy keeps mixing up the two. There are many poems of being wrongly accused for crimes or of being arrested for being a distant accessory to one, reminding us of our modern guilt in where it is hard to not feel guilty just by existing in a world such as ours. Tate reminds us of our humanity in a world where we seem to have trivialized it. We turn violence into fun and fun into violence.

There was Alan, all skin and bones. I said ‘Alan, what are you doing here?' He said, ‘I don’t know. I’m just a slave. They said it was for the American dream,' he said. ‘But what kind of dream is that?' I said. ‘It’s like something you wish you’d never know,' he said.

However, not all the poems in here are heavy. Few actually are, most are uproariously funny and absurd and are will put a smile on the readers face. There is a man carrying his dead grandma is a sheet, only to cut it open and find feathers and tells a bystander his grandmother must have been an ostritch There is a man held up at gunpoint in a park at night, but he is too engrossed with the beautiful moon to care despite the begging of the thief to fear him: ‘Sit down, for God’s sake. We are brothers under this moonlight. Can’t you see that?’ And there are plenty of the donkeys, cows and llamas that Tate fans have come to expect. This final work from Tate is a wonderful sendoff to a long life of poetry and love of words. Highly recommended for fans of Russell Edson or Charles Simic. You will be missed, James Tate.

4/5

Rats
The church bell rang at noon every day and we all scurried home for lunch. There were six of us, Mama and Poppa, Henry and David, Betsy and me. We had forty-five minutes to eat. One day there was a rat in the stew. Mama tried to hide it, but we found out. Poppa said to throw it all out, but Henry and David said no, then we wouldn’t have anything to eat. Betsy said she would’t eat it, it would make her sick. I said I didn’t care. Poppa said there would be no lunch today, that we would have to go back to work hungry and starve until dinner. I said I would be weak. Henry and David agreed. Betsy said she’s rather be weak than dead. And so we all went to work weak and struggled through our day. I started hallucinating around 4:00 and barely made it home alive. “What’s for dinner?” were my first words in the door. “Wait till the others get here,” Mama said. Henry and David were home shortly. And then, finally, Betsy. We sat around the dinner table eagerly waiting. Finally, Mama came out with a platter of roast chicken. We all applauded and Poppa started carving. We all got what we wanted. We said our prayers and started eating. We ate so much we were stuffed. Then Henry and David started to get sick. Then Betsy, too. Poppa came over and patted me on the heard. “You’re a tough one, just like your Ma and Pa. You’re going to inherit this farm. You’ve got to eat rats to survive,” he said.

[Ben Loory · Rating 2 out of 5]

seemingly endless

[Margaryta · Rating 2 out of 5]

My patience with this collection lasted only up to about halfway, at which time I realized that I can’t keep going. I didn’t go into this collection expecting anything, although I do remember coming across some high praise for it somewhere along the way, which is one of the reasons I was prompted to pick it up.

The poems felt, as a whole, rather lifeless. The subject matter for each one was very quirky and strange, some stranger than others, and some stranger in a more positive way than others. Take, for instance, “My Doctor’s Appointment”, a poem found very early in the book in the first section. Out of all the poems I managed to get through, this was the only one that left a meaningful impact that I clearly felt. It didn’t make much sense, if you really thought of some of the images, such as this passage:

“Have you ever thought of the/ Queen of England naked?” he said. “Maybe once when I was a small/ child,” I said.

It’s not common to hear a doctor say anything even as remotely absurd as that, and what’s more, to say that there’s something wrong with the patient if they don’t do said absurd things. But it’s the doctor’s dismissal and the attack of his pet mongoose that, though not really explained, still feel like they have a place to exist and they make the absurdity stand solidly as its own argument. This isn’t the case for many of the other poems. Some manage to offer an impact at the end that leaves you either grimacing or smiling a little at the irony, but that’s about it. Only the aforementioned poem managed to leave a decisive impression for me.

Tied into this is the bigger issue, perhaps, that I have with the collection: the style. I quite honestly they read very prose-like, with unexpected line breaks that were like a hit-or-miss. I never before encountered this style of poetry, where dialogue was interwoven with the rest of the exposition/description in the poem, but my interest and fascination only lasted for several poems in the beginning. When the pattern persisted for each following poem it began to take its toll, both on originality and on the focus. It was difficult to pay attention to what the poems were ‘saying’ when each one was so similar, even in terms of subject matter.

I didn’t know what to make of this collection, or where it was going. There was a big question of ‘why’ that followed through the collection, building up into a snowball of confusion. It’ll appeal to someone, I’m almost certain, but just not to me.

[Patrick Healy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't want to finish this book. I can't believe James Tate is gone.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tate really strove for something in the prose poem form in his last few books and I think his peak was Memoir of the Hawk. But a few books after that awesome collection thirteen years ago, Tate's dialogue-heavy paragraphs have started to feel weary and a little samey. There are some really great poems in this collection but they're sort of dampened by the weaker poems that don't seem to go anywhere and don't end with enough impact or lingering emotion. Many of the poems are amusing but Tate is too good to just be amusing.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sealed the deal: I'm in love with James Tate's prose poetry. Every poem was alive, off kilter, funny, absurd, sometimes sad, sometimes evocative. I needed and wanted to reread many of them. I was touched by them.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tate's poetry indicts, calmly, the calm that's come over.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actual Rating 4.5 stars
I really enjoyed Tate's collection. These poems were fun, funny, sad, serious, thought-provoking by turns (and sometimes all at once). I found Tate's surreal narratives and dialogue was fluid and energetic and he dealt with the troubles of war, abuse of power by the law and the police, difficulties in relationships, disappointment, and existential uncertainty (among other themes) by showing them through the lens of absurdity.
I can't quite pick a list of favorite pieces, even though that is usually a big part of these reviews, since they were all very much in the same mold. I did especially like the self-awareness of "The Pandas of Wichita," but beyond that I can't quite single out specific poems. I also loved how he used dialogue attributives as a means of generating musicality and rhythm like in "What Are Worms?"

"The hole was not my intention," I said. "I'm sure it wasn't,"
she said. "Now what are we going to do?" I said" "We can
either try to make ourselves comfortable or try to find
a way out," she said. "A way out would be nice," I said.
"Why don't I climb on your back?" she said. "Why don't I
climb on yours?" I said. "Because you're the stronger,"
she said. "Why don't we just make ourselves at home?" I said.
"There's no television," she said. "We could carve something
into the wall," I said. "But it wouldn't move," she said.
"And neither would we," I said. "That's what I call a restful
afternoon," she said. "Almost dead," I said. "Not quite,"
she said. "Why is that?" I said. "I have a cookie in my head," she
said. "You have a cookie in your head?" I said. "Yes, I have
a cookie in my head," she said. "if we just had a glass of milk we could
have a party," I said. "But I don't have any milk," she said.

This poem is a pretty good example of how most of them go, more or less--although it's one of the less obviously connected to some of the big themes that pervade the book. In all, a highly recommended collection (although I would recommend trying the title poem-- "Dome of the Hidden Temple"--before buying it, as I would imagine that if you don't like that piece, you probably won't like the book)

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I walked
into an alley and sat down. I closed my eyes. A bum holding a
cheap pint of wine walked up to me and said, "It's all rushing
away. Can't you feel it?" "What's rushing away?" I said. "Time,
it got uncorked. There's no stopping it now. It's like the wind
in my hair," he said. "Go to sleep. That will stop it," I said.
"It'll all be over soon. There's no time to sleep. It's magnif-
icent, the waves coming and going, the cockatoos in the trees,"
he said. He took a swig and fell down beside me. He was out
cold. I moved his head onto a pile of leaves.
-- "Cement"

A little man in a suit walked out of the woods.
"Is there a cemetery around here?" he said. "It's just down
the street," I said. "My wife's buried there. She fell out of
an airplane. She was walking on the wing when a gull hit her,"
he said. "Why was she walking on the wing?" I said. "No one
ever explained that to me," he said. "Maybe that was her dream,"
I said. "Could be. She was a wild one," he said. "What were
you doing in the woods?" I said. "Hunting bear," he said.
"But you don't have a gun," I said. "I was hunting them with
my hands," he said. "I see you didn't get any," I said. "Well,
I'm not going to carry a bear all the way to the cemetery, am I?"
he said. "No, of course not," I said.
-- "The Great Wall"

"There are roads everywhere and none
of them will get you out"
-- "The Furnace"

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surrealism was a European phenomenon - Dali, Miro, Picasso, Duchamp, Tanguy, De Chirico, Ernst.
Modernism and Regionalism dominated the American art scene - Benton, Curry, Hopper, Rockwell, Steiglitz, Hartley, Demuth, Sheeler. Which makes me wonder about James Tate, so clearly rooted in the American midwest - how is it that he is a master of the surreal poem? These poems - or brief vignettes -are sparkling gems of weirdness and humor. Tate's bizarre private world is well worth a visit.

[عدنان العبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction:
I was introduced to James Tate through a selection of the ‘best’ American poetry of 2016. The series now is not even worth the paper it is printed on due to their ‘inclusion’ of poems written by professors of English literature, generally understood to be the worst poetry writers, maybe right after postcolonial studies, feminist studies, African studies, and other ‘studies’ in second-rate disciplines. The poems are too ideological, and frankly, unreadable. Completely devoid of that touch of the poet, and cheap in all the artistic ways. Unaesthetic by choice. Good thing the 2016th edition was edited by Ed Hirsch, one of the last good English-language poets alive. I read Dome of the Hidden Temple in a Starbucks in Udailiya (a Kuwaiti city). The poem was just fantastic. I read it to my friend who was with me and translated it sentence by sentence. Then I read it to my aunt, some friends, etc. Until it was the time I read it to my friend, Mubarak, whose taste is the only one I hold in esteem as high as mine. (If Mubarak likes it, it’s good. If he doesn’t, it is sufficiently deficient so as to be disliked.) He was in awe. At that moment, I knew I struck gold. I ordered this volume and sunk myself into it.

The poem that made me get the book is a poem of lasting beauty. A true piece of art, and one that will survive. The book starts with similar poems, very high in quality. However, one slowly gets used to the style of the poems. I thought that the whole volume would be inventive. The same themes keep recurring. No poem is as good as the one enclosed below, Done of the Hidden Temple, which has attracted me so much. When I was two-thirds of the way in, I was so used to the style and themes, I was slugging through it. At some point, I left the volume for a month and returned to it. I finally picked it up to finish it. It’s never as good as that one that makes you buy the volume. With that said, I got to dog-ear ten poems, so I cannot say I am completely dissatisfied. I just got hyped up when I shouldn’t have. It’s a disappointment since what I really wanted was someone who would reinvigorate my faith in poetry. I keep searching for a T. S. Eliot in poetry, and the bar was set too high.

Style and Themes:
The major theme of the book is the strange approach toward life, the world, and normal things. This is one of the most pervasive themes in poetry: To rekindle that infatuation with the world and its objects an adult has lost from his childhood years. Every poem does that. People are simply wacky. Things don’t behave as they do. People die, others just walk by. The dead walk, all the same, the living speak of mundane things, aliens approach asking for milk, cows meow, and cats moo. The book is filled with these strange creatures in the normal structure of the world.

Though this might sound fresh, it grows old very quickly. I do not know if this is intentional, and I would not be surprised if it was. Though this might be considered fallacious reasoning, it might have to do with this volume being published posthumously.

The whole volume adopts the conversational style. There is no poem where at least two persons are conversing with each other. (I really do hope this is not the case for his previous volumes, as well.) The conversations are pretty interesting, and some are unique and interesting. But again, everything about the book gets old. Everything overstays its welcome.

Conclusion
I have hoped for too much and found too little. There are three poems here that I hold in very high esteem, and the other 80 or so poems are good to mediocre at best. The book could have done better. I am not sure that there is hope for poetry. I will continue hoping. Score: (6.3/10)

[edmondegreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book.

[Anastasiia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A liminal journey through vignettes that leave a lot to the imagination. James Tate is a magician 🙌

[Katarina Galagaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Read this.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you happened to have absurdist dreams that you remembered vividly and wrote down as soon as you awoke, you would have James Tate's poems.

This collection drew me through seamlessly, and in almost every prose/poem, there is surrealism and a twist combined with the plainest and most homespun language.

In the last poem, "Plastic Story," for instance, a piece of plastic attacks the writer, choking him. Whether this is supposed to be a metaphor for waste of our natural resources, or the superficial nature of our society or our own lack of authenticity, I have no idea, but I suspect Tate does not have any such larger analogies in mind.

We find out along the way that Tate likes lemonade, walks, sitting on the porch, animals, and small towns, even if they all achieve a slightly sinister form. He also likes streaming dialogue. In "Tenderizer," he notices a man in a doorway. "What are you staring at?" he said to me. "I was just looking at you," I said. "I'm invisible, you can't see me," he said. "I can see you just fine," I said ... and so on, concluding with "Say, would you like to have a bite to eat with me?" I said. "Did you say, would I like to bite you?" he said. "Never mind. I've got to get going," I said. "But I would like to bite you," he said. "Tough," I said. "Oh I have my own tenderizer," he said. "Use it on yourself," I said, and waved good-bye over my shoulder.

If this is your cup of tea, there are dozens of poems like this one. The nerd in my sort of liked the bizarre themes. The realist in me wondered why Tate had won a Pulitzer.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

If these turn out to be Tate's last poems (Tsarnaev's 2011 bombing a preoccupation in section i), then a diffident and querulous last batch they are, three book-length sequences, 108 poems (to The Ghost Soldiers's 94) 20 to 34 lines long, narrative, fabulistic, a man sits down to read, hears a knock at the door, gets up-sort of precipitous modality, not at all unlike a David Sedaris joke, and we get pretty quickly to the problem: there are too many of them. The privacy in the style, the ordinariness that will not but make itself available to commercial pressures among a public ready for a Tate poem, envisions a poetry public that has scaled up to an authority the poetry public doesn't itself -- unlike, say, a David Sedaris bookstore appearance -- have. Sixty poems in, you may feel there's a twenty-poem version of this book whereby the Thoreauvian producer of the poems remains beloved, but the editor, publisher and poet are in cahoots on another process.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection read more like a collection of flash fiction than of poetry which I did not mind, it just took me a while to get accustomed to Tate's writing style. That being said I disliked the way Tate handled dialogue in the poem, the actual dialogue was fine and felt natural, it was the constant use of I/he/she said after everything that became annoying the further into the collection I got.

[Jake · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF to be honest. Checked it out based on Tony Hoagland's admiration of Tate.

The deadpan absurdity is fun at first, but after a while they all feel the same. Still glad I picked it up. It had the Dada silliness of Alfred Jarry's King Ubu with David Mamet's rapid fire dialog and Stephen Millhauser's feel of uncanny amidst the everyday.

If you want something funny and surprising, read a few of these. Just don't expect it to tug any heart strings. They're a different kind of poem.

[Debs · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the third book of Tate's poetry I've read. Why do I keep reading his poetry when I know I'm not going to enjoy it? What is wrong with me?

[Ray Nessly · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Edited 11/6/22. Additional excerpts etc.]

"I came to a lake, which was just a glass of water on an abandoned beach. I dove in anyway."
--J.T.

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems is my fourth collection of James Tate’s work. Previously I read (all in 2019 for some reason) Shroud of the Gnomes (3 stars), Viper Jazz (4 stars), and The Government Lake: Last Poems (5 stars.) I read them in that order. As you can see, I warmed up to this author even more as time went on, the ratings increasing progressively. With Dome, though, that trend has reversed. For me, this is the weakest of the four collections I’ve read. 2.5 stars. It’s average rating is 3.8, so I’m a bit of an outlier. While this collection didn't wow me, I intend to try others. I suspect there are a number of additional four and five star collections amid his great output.

Per the title, this one is marketed as poetry. Most folks seem to call Tate’s work prose poems (the collections I’ve read, anyway). His writing is surreal, absurdist, and sometimes funny and delightfully weird. He takes chances, so sometimes it works, sometimes no. (Other writers, btw, whose stuff to me is sometimes similar to some of Tate’s, include Charles Simic and Russell Edson). For me, this collection resembles flash fiction as much as it does prose poetry. (Altogether now: “Not that there is anything wrong with that.” Me, I’m a big flash fiction fan.) Actually, though? For the most part, they read like transcripts of dreams. Okay, I get that surrealism is dream-like, but perhaps you’ve noticed, most dreams aren’t all that … interesting. Oh you’ll wake up excited about the dream you just had—man, this will make a great story!—and you start to write it down but then realize …. Naw, not so great. Alas, such was my feeling for too many of the pieces in Dome.

Poems, prose-poems, little fictions, or dream screenplays? … Well, how they are categorized isn’t important, I feel. What is important though, is that there is a distracting sameness in the format throughout, which wasn’t the case in the prior collections. Dome’s 108 pieces are almost exactly the same length (about 1 page each); and dialogue isn’t segregated from the rest, nor are the characters’ quotes given any distance from one another. At least they aren’t entirely in block form; the text isn’t right-side justified, thankfully; the right column instead ebbs and flows a bit, adding a bit of white space and visual appeal.

Despite the sameness in format etc., I quite liked 6 of the titles and sort of liked another 20 (listed below). The one I liked maybe best of all is ‘A Largely Questioning Article Offering Few Answers’: A guy’s mother comes home from the hospital, now nine foot tall. He and his wife decide to cram his mother into a car and let her loose in the wilderness. This is a delightfully weird tale; it flows well (unlike most of the pieces), and even has a great finish: “Do you think she’ll be all right?” Roberta said. “She’s at the very top of the food chain. It gets lonely up there,” I said.

Excerpt, the second half approx. of 'Manual for Self-Improvement':
.... I sat there twiddling my thumbs until a large hawk flew over. I
could see that it held a mouse in its talons. "Good-bye, little
mouse,"I said. "I'm just going for a little ride. I'll be
back, trust me," it said. I waved to him and he was gone. I
stood up and walked for a while. I came to a lake, which was
just a glass of water on an abandoned beach. I dove in anyway
and swam around for some minutes until I banged my head on the
side of the glass. I climbed out and shook my head. A bee
buzzed my nose. "Why are you doing that?" I said. "Oh excuse
me, I thought you were a tulip," it said, then flew off. I didn't
know I looked like a tulip. Well, maybe, when wet. I walked a
little further. Nothing looked familiar. I was in a strange
land. There was a bamboo curtain behind which sat a little
mouse. "Hello, friend,"he said. I looked again. He wasn't
there. And, then, neither was I.

So I quite liked or sort of liked 26 of the 120 pieces. That leaves eighty two, the vast majority, that didn’t do much for me. These left me feeling neutral at best. Worse, they too often had a flurry of short sentences in succession, no transitions. An awkward, jagged staccato that wouldn’t pass the read-aloud test.

For a more positive (4 star) review of this collection, I highly recommend the always detailed and terrific s.penkevich. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Someone who held Dome in lower regard (two stars) than I did is Ben Loory, a writer of wonderful flash fiction. His two-word review: “seemingly endless”. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
--------------------
FYI, or maybe more for my benefit, in case I give this collection another try down the road …The following 6 titles I liked a lot (despite the aforementioned sameness in format) : A Largely Questioning Article Offering Few Answers; My Doctor’s Appointment; Toy Soldiers; The Encyclopedia Salesman; The Holman Dairy; The Orchid.

20 others that I liked somewhat: Leaves; My Wife, the Gardner; The Wrong Wedding; The Soldiers’ Rebellion; The Captain; The Invasion; Life’s Game; The Guards; The Lost Army; The Pandas of Wichita; The Long Drive; Possible Suspects; Dangerous at Night; In the Lake; Dome of the Hidden Temple; Manual for Self Improvement; Rats; The Waterfall; The Grandmother.

[RP · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything like these poems by James Tate. I'm really into the absurdity and mystery of many of these, and especially loved the strange communications between the people featured in the poems, always an "I" and some other. This was Tate's last book before his death, so I'm planning on going backwards and visiting with his earlier work, of which there is A TON.

" . . . you have the key to the universe," he said. "It sounds very impressive, but what's it for?" I said. "I'm not sure. Let me read the instructions," he said, putting on his glasses. It was just a little piece of paper, but he read it for quite a long time. "What's it say?" I said finally. "It says, 'Don't forget the pancake mix.'" he said. "What else?" I said. "It says 'Call Charlie,'" he said.

--The Key To the Universe.

[Michael Casteels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being James Tate’s book published in his lifetime, it’s a shame that it’s one of my least favourites. It’s a long collection, and there are a few gems hidden away throughout, but they are hard to find among poems that just feel weak in comparison to some of his great works. There are at least 3, maybe 4, poems that end with “I don’t know”, a rather dull ending, in my opinion.

This was my second time through the collection. The next time I read through it (a few years from now likely) I’ll try to remember to have some sticky notes on hand to mark the best poems, so I won’t have to go through the entire collection a fourth time just to find them.

On the plus side, Tate has such a wealth of incredible work I can always pick up an earlier collection to be reminded of his genius.

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 out of 5 stars

I can say that I truly enjoyed, would recommend and would re-read 41.6% of the poems in this, Tate's final collection, consisting of 108 works. Perhaps too many poems for one collection, but I would much rather have more Tate than less in this world. Some will hit a sweet spot, some will miss, but every poem in here is (obviously) pure James Tate; a commodity that no other poet comes close to delivering. A few favorites from this collection include:

"Mr. Leaves"
"Dome of the Hidden Temple"
"The Oilman"
"The Lost Army"
"Greatness"
"The Aquatic Ape"
"Manual for Self-Improvement"
"The Little Green Man"

[Nik Maack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore James Tate. He makes me laugh. I showed one of his short poem / stories to my wife and asked her to read it. When she reached the end she looked at me, and said, "Yes, that does seem like something you would like."

She is correct.

I find most poetry pretentious and needlessly cryptic. Tate is cryptic but in a fun and crazy way. He is not pretentious. His prose poems feel like they're chasing a feeling. Does he ever capture it? Maybe. But then there's the next one. And the next. And the next.

Highly recommended.

[Tayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Tate is like ingesting some kind of mild domestic hallucinogenic. The kind where you open your pantry to find the mice are talking to you. Or you discover the police have been playing cops and robbers in your house when you weren't looking. Or the President suddenly calls you to ask about the rival armies of ants at war with each other in the yard.

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could write, I would want to write like James Tate. These poems are funny, strange, absurd, unpredictable and refined. For a prose analog see Italo Calvino's short story collection Numbers in the Dark, one of my favorite books.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

dark humor with a light touch--

[George Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

the blob was the best one. a largely questioning article was good too, the video of tate reading this one made me emotional

[Ryan Acosta-Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

As singular as poetry gets.

[Chang Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love his poetry style.