The Lost Pilot

by James Tate

The experiences, personal relationships, and emotions of the author are explored in his poems

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late Harvest

I look up and see
a white buffalo
emerging from the
enormous red gates
of a cattle truck
lumbering into
the mouth of the sun.
The prairie chickens
do not seem to fear
me; neither do the
girls in cellophane
fields, near me, hear me
changing the flat tire
on my black tractor.
I consider screaming
to them; then, night comes.

I include this poem not because it’s the best (or my favorite), but because, of the shortest, it’s one of my favorites, and because it exemplifies so much of what’s so good about this collection – the flat, distinctly American, diction; the touches of surrealism; the comic and the melancholic tightly inter-coiled; and the exquisite and surprising music.

Much of the poetry I like to read I like to read because it makes me want to write poems of my own. But Tate's poems don’t (though this one almost does). The poems that make me want to write are generally not as “prosy” as Tate’s generally are, and generally foreground the language itself (as material) more than his (Tate clearly strives for glassy transparency of language). Nevertheless, I have now read this collection a good dozen times and will surely read it many more.

My focus on this collection of his is partly due to my initial dislike of his later collections (this is his first). No one who is at all attuned to contemporary poetry can deny the pervasive (even insidious) influence of James Tate. I am keenly aware of it and hated the work of his I’d read before turning to this collection. His is a type of poetry that seems easily mimicked, and so has been. And as is often the case with successful artists as they age, Tate seems to have started mimicking himself in his later books. I say this having read only a sampling of his work, so I welcome refutations. The later work of his I’ve read also lacks… something that his early works have. A few layers of ambiguity? A complexity of tone? A certain fire of the seeking spirit? Maybe it’s just youthful energy. There is something basically childlike about his poetry in its clear-eyed appraisal of the world and of human emotions, its curious focus on simple objects as if seen by someone new to this planet, and its preternatural clarity of language, primer language. It is very difficult to maintain this stance in any authentic way as one ages, as the muddy complexities of life crowd upon the perceiving mind. I don’t know what is missing in his later work, but I do know that some of his later poems focus far too much on the “surprise” ending, and so have a quality of one-off jokes that are difficult to enjoy (as the surprise no longer surprises) upon a second reading.

So I just stick with this collection, and his second, The Oblivion Ha-Ha. These two contain all the Tate I feel I need to read (again, I welcome refutations).

Tate’s poetry is remarkably home-grown. Demotic. It is surrealism wedded to Robert Frost, and is not dependent on the French as the poets of the New York School (Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara) were. And this American surrealism (I say “surrealism” only for convenience sake to denote a surprising weirdness in the mundane) actually ended up influencing the later Ashbery (along with a million young poets). Tate’s poetry was also fully formed from the beginning, as if newly birthed, Athena-verses from the young poet’s head.

Reading James Tate does not make me want to write, nor does it draw me into its lingual interstices where interior regions open up and I feel as if I’m swimming in language while mentally arranging my own water words into temporary word worlds – it is far too glassy and stand-offish for that – but reading it does help to hone and clarify my mind, and actually rests it as upon springtime grasses as cool rain cleanses in melancholic sunlight, with tiny shadows pressing round.

[Momo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to cry each time I read the beautiful and powerful title poem of James Tate's first collection, a Yale Series Younger Poets winner published when the poet was in his early 20s. This is a wonderful, funny, playful, hallucinatory, and moving book that clearly looks forward to the profound body of work to come. Here's another favorite of mine from this volume:

"Violins"

She knew how to make a moment famous.
Heifetz plucked a marvelous Sibelius.
Meanwhile, a thunderstorm made sounds
metastatic, like who said God
couldn't beat a mean bass drum?
She even brought me flowers and the rain
slapped and shattered through the screen
making music, more music, far too much--
you get the picture? Violins.
We wrote a dozen poems
before the rainbow came.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't read this since my 20s. In a sense it's ground zero for me; it was my first dive into contemporary poetry, and I fell in love. This, Tate's first book, still astonishes.

[Jon P]

Wow so good!!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two Poems from The Lost Pilot by James Tate:

Success Comes to Cow Creek

I sit on the tracks,
a hundred feet from
earth, fifty from the
water. Gerald is
inching toward me
as grim, slow, and
determined as a
season, because he
has no trade and wants
none. It's been nine months
since I last listened
to his fate, but I
know what he will say:
he's the fire hydrant
of the underdog.

When he reaches my
point above the creek,
he sits down without
salutation, and
spits profoundly out
past the edge, and peeks
for meaning in the ripple it brings. He
scowls. He speaks: when you
walk down any street
you see nothing but
coagulations
of shit and vomit,
and I'm sick of it.
I suggest suicide;
he prefers murder,
and spits again for
the sake of all the
great devout losers.

A conductor's horn
concerto breaks the
air, and we, two doomed
pennies on the track,
shove off and somersault
like anesthetized
fleas, ruffling the
ideal locomotive
poised on the water
with our light, dry bodies.
Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination. I swim toward shore as
fast as my boots will
allow; as always,
neglecting to drown.


* * * * *

Manna

I do remember some things
times when I listened and heard
no one saying no, certain
miraculous provisions
of the much prayed for manna
and once a man, it was two
o'clock in the morning in
Pittsburg, Kansas, I finally
coming home from the loveliest
drunk of them all, a train chugged,
goddamn, struggled across a
prairie intersection and
a man from the caboose real-
ly waved, honestly, and said,
and said something like my name.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lost Pilot is one of my favorite poems.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top 3 favorite poetry book ever.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just dipped back to re-re-re-read the Tate books I have with me (Lost Pilot, Viper Jazz, Oblivion Ha-Ha). This nods to Stevens, then goes elsewhere quickly.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that got me hooked.

[Allyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, James Tate, I love you.

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is some of my favorite Tate, lyrical and surreal, more focused than his middle, and less flash fiction-ish than his late period. Each poem unfolds and blossoms as you read through it. There is a definite psychedelic quality to some of the imagery, but not in some overt Lucy in the Sky sort of way. I love when the natural world makes its way into his work, it feels almost more true than life. This being his first published collection, it is quickly obvious that his skill to strike right through you with a line has been fully developed from the very start. Read through on Internet Archive (a fantastic resource), it's almost impossible to find an affordable copy elsewhere.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't chasing David Berman through his teacher. Having read only Tate's last poem, the one found in his typewriter upon his death, I figured it best to start with his first small collection. The poems in the first section were enjoyable but in sections II and III, they really shone. Finding a humor and a melancholy, occasionally absurd, that hit me just right. Occasionally a bit stilted in their language, but more often fluid and specific in just the right way.

[Joshua Gonsalves · Rating 5 out of 5]

concisely cryptic and madcap. how this was his first book of poems I cannot begin to fathom; he arrives on the scene with this fully formed metaphysical comical style. confidently challenging, otherworldly poems grounded in the pain and pleasure of human relationships.

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gen X avant la lettre. My most fatal flaw as a poet is constantly mixing up James Tate, Allen Tate, James Wright, Charles Wright, and James Dickey.

[Stephen Kowalkowski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to get much out of the first two sections, but the third started to speak to me.

Favorites: One Dream of Indians, The Tabernacle, Today I Am Falling, Miss Cho Composes in the Cafeteria

[Christina M Rau]

James Tate's The Lost Pilot makes me feel like a fraud. He wrote this collection, had it picked up, and then published when he was still in his MFA program in Iowa. (Iowa is huge in the creative writing world--I know someone who's happy about that). You know what I did while I was in my MFA program? I got ossified.

Storytelling bordering prosey but skillful enough that it all comes out poetry. That's Tate's collection. Much of it starts with a blunt You; his speaker is straightforward, talking to whomever the subject is at that time--a lover, a father, a friend. One of the best parts of the collection is the haunting echo created with the last two lines of Why I Will Not Get Out Of Bed: "I don't love you. / I don't love you." How about THAT for a love poem? Yeah, that's right. I'm now addicted to James Tate.

I figured I had to own the book so I went onto Amazon. Apparently, it's hard to find. Amazon has it for over 100 bucks--that's crap. That's someone trying to fake out a buyer. Mostly, there are a few copies available for 25--40 bucks, which is too expensive for a hard copy. I'm going to have to get over to The Strand and then shop around in every used bookshop possible to find it.

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Tate, and there are many wonderful, funny, warm, and life-affirming things in this book, but it is really hard to get around poems like "One Dream of Indians" and "Ms. Cho Composes in the Cafeteria"—the one in which the titular Cho "counts on [her] tiny//bamboo fingers," and the end of the "The End of the Line."

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection, filled with wonderful lines and images.

[Mills College Library]

Coll.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Favorites: "The Lost Pilot," "Flight"