Absences: New Poems

by James Tate

One of Tate's earlier books. Absolutely among his very best work.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published July 1, 1972

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

[Steve]

James Tate (1943-2015)


James Tate died last Wednesday after a long struggle with cancer. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a National Book Award in 1994, Tate was one of the USA's best known and influential poets, but, as is usual in this day and age, he taught for a living.

Characteristic of his poetry is a unique mixture of surrealism, absurdism, humor and emotion, where a moment of sentiment is distanced with absurdity and a surrealistic image is tempered with real feeling. As John Ashbery wrote: “Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere."

I'm not in a position to provide an overview of the more than twenty books of poetry he has published, so I shall focus on the volume that first convinced me of Tate's literary qualities, Absences (1972). Tate's third book of poetry, Absences is divided into five parts, two of which consist of mutually echoing, developing, reinforcing poems in cycles. The first, eponymous cycle employs a highly distilled, intense diction - almost violent at times - suggesting loss, insufficiency and, yes, absence. One of the less extreme sections:

5.

People behaving like molecular structures
with pins in them.
This is what feels best,
as if to say you have grown old
to endless slights of hand.
Yes, ashes fall upward.
You are an extremely ordinary man,
a scarf riding the warm cold wind
in a closet of rags
vampires have abandoned.

The second, called "Cycle of Dust", is terse, laconic and carries even less connective tissue:

3.

Men get down on their knees
and search the toy river

it is daytime
the carnation is bubbling

the owls are sleeping
on a distant black planet

A scarf is pulled quickly
through the veins

of a covered bridge

The other three parts contain individual poems on many topics, including the darkly humorous and well known

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
'You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?'

And just one more:

Wait for Me

A dream of life a dream of birth
a dream of moving
from one world into another

All night dismantling the synapses
unplugging the veins and arteries . . .

Hello I am a cake of soap
dissolving in a warm bath

A train with no windows and no doors
a lover with no eyes for his mask
—inside is the speed of life

Who can doubt the worth of it
each letter written is obsolete
before it finds its friend

Our life is shorter now
full of chaotic numbers
which never complete a day

It will be the same
as it has always been
and you are right to pack

Your heart in ice
if you believe this.


Another of the poets from my youth gone. Yet we have something to look forward to. The New York Times informs us that "Shortly before his death, Daniel Halperin, Mr. Tate’s editor at Ecco Press, gave him a finished copy of “Dome of the Hidden Pavilion,” his new collection of poems. It is scheduled to be published in early August." Count me in.

() Here is a brief film on Charles Wuorinen's Cantata, It Happens Like This, based on seven of Tate's prose poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkC-c...

[H]

"I existed in the wrong hour of dawn,/ that kind of beauty/ so no miles from anything" (30)

"I think I remember myself/ poised at the end,/ holding something/ or pushing something away./ What else could I do?" (34)

"So close I came to you/ each moment I was alive" (36)

"Then I swiftly pierced my Bible/ with an icepick &/ slept in a field of general blur" (45)

"I am sorry I ate your hyacinth,/ but it was so cold and lonely" (58)

"So spring has come to the blue canyon,/ it seems "natural" and "pleases me" (76)

"A cloud of buttercups/ burst open a fence/ Down the road/ a man in a large silver car/ disappeared" (88)

"Brushfires all around;/ I always say that is living... The tentative colors/ shrink inward,/ a lilac is stuffed into the air;/ the last leaves of night/ are ripped out/ of this blind world/ by a still breeze" (101)

"A scarf is pulled quickly/ through the veins/ of a covered bridge" (103)

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not much here that aligned with what I like in a poem.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially like these beginning lines from the poem by the same name as the book:

"I was confused
then I got used to it
as I got used to whiskers."

It's not obvious where these poems are headed from reading their beginning lines. There's sometimes a dark hilarity by the end. I enjoyed the movement in these poems, often a slight connection from one line to the next until the end where Tate brings it together and makes it work.

[Christina M M Rau · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first lines of the first poem I read in Absences are: When I drink / I am the only man / in New York City. / There are no lights, / but I am used to that.

That made me fall in love with Tate again. I seriously want to steal every other line and make it mine.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only have my own mind and experience to go on but this book is one which I return to from time to time and read with greater pleasure
with each visit. Most poetry (if you can get past the first few lines)
is dead. But these poems are alive and interesting.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

In retrospect, one of my least favorite collections by Tate. But it's still James freakin' Tate!

[Mills College Library]

811.54 T216a 1972