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Distance from Loved Ones
Clear and insightful poetry on our relationship to the given world.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 1990
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81 people want to read
About the author
James Tate
176 books129 followersJames 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 9, 2011
James Tate is a poet like no other I have ever read: equally profound and unfathomable. That is to say, I am deeply moved reading poems I can barely make sense of. Also, I often can't tell if what I'm feeling is closer to joy or grief. The only transparent poem I found in this book, "The Expert," is a send-up of the academic, who ...
talks on and on.
At times he seems lost
in his own personal references,
to be adrift in a lonely pleasure craft.
He has spent his life collecting evidence,
and now it is oozing away down the aisles
of indifferent eavesdroppers.
...
talks on and on.
At times he seems lost
in his own personal references,
to be adrift in a lonely pleasure craft.
He has spent his life collecting evidence,
and now it is oozing away down the aisles
of indifferent eavesdroppers.
...
December 6, 2009
Better than any illegal substance I've ever smoked or ingested. After a couple of collections I thought were so-so, this book struck me as quintessential Tate, simultaneously wild and elegant, violent and wistful, passionate and laugh out loud absurd.
I started reeling in this wildcat beautyfarm,
it was a big one. Her ledger of love was a blur,
her helmet was full of holes. "O Marcel," she said to me,
"O Marcel, there's a doorbell in your head. Don't touch it!"
Again and again Tate creates an unreal little cosmos that inexorably expands the verbal space inside your head--and then explodes.
from Under Mounting Pressure.
They took out our brains and hurled them
into the reefs. I'm holding a crust of bread
in my palm, I see our initials rising
from the lithosphere, a couple of pinpoints
of utility needed elsewhere, and I remember
how to cry, and I remember you, my last kin.
from You Are My Destination and Desire, Fading
I started reeling in this wildcat beautyfarm,
it was a big one. Her ledger of love was a blur,
her helmet was full of holes. "O Marcel," she said to me,
"O Marcel, there's a doorbell in your head. Don't touch it!"
Again and again Tate creates an unreal little cosmos that inexorably expands the verbal space inside your head--and then explodes.
from Under Mounting Pressure.
They took out our brains and hurled them
into the reefs. I'm holding a crust of bread
in my palm, I see our initials rising
from the lithosphere, a couple of pinpoints
of utility needed elsewhere, and I remember
how to cry, and I remember you, my last kin.
from You Are My Destination and Desire, Fading
December 7, 2009
This is a book of poetry that I am re-reading. Tate has a gift for weaving sarcasm, sensibility, realism, and the surreal in such a way that he pulls me directly into his world. I love the bite in his poems, and I connect with the bizarre that he finds in every day life. When I say bizarre, one could even push his poems toward a label of magical realism. Not one to quick to label, I see that I have given many to Tate's work. He grabs hold of the creative impulse, and gets into the thick of it.
February 8, 2013
Geez, this was fantastic. I got The Eternal Ones of the Dream, which is the selected poems for 1990-2010 and so I'm reviewing the collections as individual books, because why not. Just finished this one and it's a really fun collection with a lot to dig into. Very accessible Tate. I'd recommend it to anyone.
July 28, 2008
Another favorite! I think this is the fifth time I've read this.
August 18, 2020
This is on the cusp of where Tate starts to write in a more narratively accessible way - like in his later collections Memoir of the Hawk and Return of the White Donkeys [the later Tate seemed to be writing prose-poems, or what Ashbery called "anti-poetry", whatever the hell he meant by that... The poem Mimi in this collection might be a good example of Tate's increasing generosity to the reader.
Still transparency is not really on the cards. All that aside, it might work as a good entry point for Tate - and for the awkward influence of surrealism capital S on a certain strain of mid-20th Century American poetry.
If you can accept the surrealist dictum that nothing is what it seems, and that what it might have seemed may no longer be relevant or interesting, then there are much pleasures of language and voice.
The element of left-field surprise and puckish tone pulls you through throughout even when you may end up in bogs too murky, or ones where the dirt just wasn't worth the trek.
Still transparency is not really on the cards. All that aside, it might work as a good entry point for Tate - and for the awkward influence of surrealism capital S on a certain strain of mid-20th Century American poetry.
If you can accept the surrealist dictum that nothing is what it seems, and that what it might have seemed may no longer be relevant or interesting, then there are much pleasures of language and voice.
The element of left-field surprise and puckish tone pulls you through throughout even when you may end up in bogs too murky, or ones where the dirt just wasn't worth the trek.
April 27, 2024
I didn't connect with this one like I did with Riven Doggeries. There was some of the making-language-new and the strange zones, but a lot of it felt kind of flat. It was still good smelling salts before I started writing for the day, but I think my fervor for Tate has run its course.
I'm getting back into an old favorite, the master: Donald Barthelme.
I'm getting back into an old favorite, the master: Donald Barthelme.
November 8, 2021
Tate brings his trademark excellence to forming verse
May 4, 2022
Great book.
October 14, 2024
Glad I finally read a full collection of his. I wish I could write this surreal and not get questioned in a workshop.
March 4, 2013
At first, I had a hard time making sense of most of these, but I found something unusual that happened in the middle of my reading that finally allowed me to appreciate their beauty full bore.
While reading, I decided to put on some Miles Davis. I believe it was the album, "In a Silent Way". I was trudging along at first, and then when I added music, the poems came to life. Poems like "Mimi" seem destined to be read to music. The poetry itself is musical, and I would be intrigued to find out if they were written with this in mind. I don't typically enjoy music when I'm reading, especially poetry, but in this case, it all came together and was really almost necessary.
While reading, I decided to put on some Miles Davis. I believe it was the album, "In a Silent Way". I was trudging along at first, and then when I added music, the poems came to life. Poems like "Mimi" seem destined to be read to music. The poetry itself is musical, and I would be intrigued to find out if they were written with this in mind. I don't typically enjoy music when I'm reading, especially poetry, but in this case, it all came together and was really almost necessary.
October 16, 2007
This collection of poems is less whimsical than other Tate works I've read and consequently somewhat more compelling both in depth and in those moments of whimsy that do punctuate the more brooding tone.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews