Selected Poems

by James Tate

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, 20th Century, Classics, American, Literature

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

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

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tejt je važan pesnik i kamo lepe sreće da se ovde, među najmlađim pesničkim generacijama, više čitao jer upravo bi tu mnogi pronašli dovoljno pristupačan i umereno inovativan glas, koji bi bio dobar sagovornik, bliži od, na primer, Čarlsa Simića, bučniji od Luiz Glik, trezveniji od Ginzberga, distanciraniji od Džeka Gilberta, a stišaniji od Bernstina. Što se poetske lične karte tiče, Tejt je svugde: malo lično iskustvo, malo bit, malo nadrealizam, malo eksperiment, malo humora, dosta ironije i ništa ne preovladava. Ukratko, odličan pesnik za neradikalne duhove i one koji poeziju ne čitaju često, što ne znači da u stihovima neće uživati i oni koji su u poeziju uronjeni, naprotiv. I divno je kad se vidi napredak ili, ako ne napredak, onda disanje ideje, od knjige do knjige, samo što bih ja ovu Pulicerom ovenčanu knjigu unekoliko skratio, bila bi još efektnija. 

[Ken]

The late James Tate (who taught right down the Pike from me, and who knew?) grew to be a wild and wooly sort of poet. You know. Knightly. The kind of poet who hangs with Sir Real.

These "Selected" poems, culled from chronological books, show his pilgrim's progress. It's always interesting to compare a respected poet's early work with his or her later work. Here we have some early Tate:

"Epithalamion for Tyler"

I thought I knew something
about loneliness but
you go to the stockyards

buy a pig's ear and sew
it on your couch. That, you
said, is my best friend -- we

have spirited talks. Even
then I thought: a man of
such exquisite emptiness

(and you cultivated it so)
is ground for fine flowers.


Pretty straight-forward fare, no? And interesting, yes? Let's jump the time machine when no one's looking and take a gander at work from a much later book. See if you notice the change:


"On the World's Birthday"

There's so much good in a face, such hope!
If I pulled all of the daggers out of my forehead
could I breathe like a jet in an exemplary way,
like a bean?

I belong to a special section of the Gnat Squad,
we are quite busy just now trying to convince ourselves
that ours is the most special squad
(what a yawn on stilts!).

The theory of fusion has fallen short, it's over-
dark victory. If only I were allowed to say,
then it is your recovery that counts...
Bunny!

And I will go along with you just this far:
He forgot his hat. Happy, happy,
I mean really a knocked-out feather,
that sharing,

that love-disease and courtly fear,
that erasure that nearly reaches you
stops and tilts toward other worlds
and the tiny hour of two.

Got that, Bunny? Thus my rating. I admire most his use of precise language and his playfulness, but whew, half the time I was in the bunny dark. Thus the highlights (5s) and the lowlights (1s) and I accept all the blame if you get late Tate and I don't.

Mea culpa.

[Mza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Racing through this one in a couple days probably didn't do myself or the author a favour, but it's a library book, I had to. Tate's a favourite poet of some of my favourite poets -- it was fun to hear bits of their voices in his voice and, as an inexperienced reader of poetry, to speculate more generally about the lineage of poetic influence that has led to what I think of as the modern sound of poetry in the Internet Age. In my make-believe lineage, James Tate's an important giant. Whatever the actual conditions were for the production of these poems, they all sound easy, they all look like a medium-size cardboard box full of packing peanuts that, it turns out, are bullets painted to look like packing peanuts. Now visualize moving a couple hundred of those boxes in a row. That's exactly what the Internet's like nowadays, and that's what reading this book in two days was like. I don't recommend my approach, no matter how many brilliant poems I probably read in a relatively short time, the names of some of which I wrote down for future (Internet) reference:

Goodtime Jesus
Neighbors
The Motorcyclists
Five Years Old
Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
First Lesson
The Soup of Venus
Stella Maris

The poems on this list are short, which is the way my lazy taste normally runs, due to a character deficiency, superior breeding, and early exposure to Popeye 'toons. "The Motorcyclists" reminded me of Shannon Burns. Anything longer than a page got me thinking about private languages, such as those spoken between twins, and how I would never presume to learn a language that is spoken only between the genetically identical. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression, Nick Land said, and I kept having a gut feeling that you can't win a big invasion. However, many little invasions?

I like how conversational Tate is, and then drunk conversational, and then back to normal conversational. I like how writing a poem's no big deal, and how if Muhammad Ali'd said some of these things that James Tate said, virtually everybody around the world would have known them by heart. I like being surprised by a particular, personal sequence of things. I like the surprise of density of meaning. Poems do these things better than stories, it's true. I don't like being surprised so many times in a row, I start to think it's my fault. It's not my fault that these total fucking strangers can't stop writing.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any collection with a wonderful poem called "Fuck the Astronauts" is the one you're gonna keep returning to. Tate is a nice heir to Wallace Stevens and some of the more absurd, hilarious poets of the 20th century. He's got a fine, grim sense of humor and he isn't afraid to let lightning strike a man's clitoris or have pinball machines rape pianos.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killer. Pg. 122

“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?’”

Killer part 2 opposite side, facing:
pg 123

“Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison

Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg.”

[Gregory Duke]

I love a lot or these poems, but selected collections continue to make me sick, ESPECIALLY if I really enjoy the poetry. I always wonder: Are these really the best of the best? Am I missing a sense of duration? Too much fomo.

[sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

STORM, p. 238

The snow visits us,
taking little bits of us with it,
to become part of the earth,
an early death and an early return—

like the filing of tax forms.
And all you can say after adding up
column after column: "I'm not myself."

And all you can say after the long night
of searching for one certain scrap of paper:
"It never existed."

And when all the lamps are lit
and the smell of the stew
has followed you upstairs
and slipped under the door of your study:
"The lute is telling the story
of the life I might have lived,
had I not—"

In my study, which is without heat,
in mid-January, in the hills
of a northern province—only
the thin white-haired volumes
of poetry speak, quietly, like
unfed birds on a night visit

to a cat farm. And an airplane is lost
in a storm of fitting pins.
The snow falls, far into the interior.

[Andy Kristensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

All I can say for first impression is...yikes?

Maybe I need to read more Tate to understand him. But, from this collection alone, he is my least favorite poet of the ones I've read recently. His style is weird and clunky to me, the imagery he evokes not that great, and the exact words and phrases and way he formats his poems just don't do it for me. The poems seem to have interesting subjects, touching on everything from the Vietnam War to loneliness to love, but they all come out as abstract and half-diluted versions of what I feel like Tate was trying to convey. I'll give him another shot, but this collection was not my cup of poetic tea.

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection which traces the ebb and flow of a poet across time. Watching his style shift to a gradually more narrative and surreal style was a real pleasure. I wish this included some of his later releases but our lack of time travelling capabilities sort of prevents that. Ultimately I think Tate is a poet that resists selection and collection because his style lends itself to a wide selection of tastes. But, this is the most rewarding collection I have come across, even more-so than the new one released in 2020, Hell I Love Everybody.

As a side note, I love the minimalist covers of academic releases like this one. I was lucky enough to find a copy of a first printing at the Montague Book Mill for a few measly bucks and immediately snatched it up.

[Eilidh Fyfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunning ! brilliant man ! one of the very few ! go James what a nice tate

[Myhte]

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.


We never thought anyone would come. We were not the first
to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows,
it may all turn out for the best. And who
really cares about such special days, they
are not what we live for.

In time I will heal, I know this, or I believe this.

What do you think he was painting? Johnson
looked bemused and said, "The dark, stupid.
What else could he have been painting?

your mergotroid elaborates the silent concert
that is always and always about to begin.

Serenity has triumphed in its mindless, atrophied way.


I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.


And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.

more later, less the same

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across James Tate's poetry in an anthology of Prose Poems, and immediately fell in love with his style. That has spurred me on to get a representative collection of his writing, and by and large I have not been disappointed. This is a wonderful book, with some of the most imaginative use of images and language that I have come across. However, I believe that Tate's prose poems are superior to the rest of his writings, and would really like to read a collection of those. Overall, however, I do recommend this book to anyone interested in more modern poetry.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of these poems ZOOM over my head, just some futuristic spaceship shit that I see screaming in the sky, only a spaceship isn't the right word or concept, it's like if you looked up in the sky and instead of a plane it's some giant miscellania (a floating pen a mile high, a crumpled receipt as a meteor), and shit, have you seen the sky? It doesn't make sense! It's beautiful! Some of these poems are sublime.

[Cellophane Renaissance · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Mother on Father's Day

You never got to recline
in the maternal tradition,
I never let you. Fate,

you call it, had other eyes,
for neither of us ever had
a counterpart in the way

familial traditions go.
I was your brother,
and you were my unhappy

neighbor. I pitied you
the way a mother pities
her son's failure. I could

never find the proper
approach. I would have
lent you sugar, mother.





Why I Will Not Get Out of Bed

My muscles unravel
like spools of ribbon:
there is not a shadow

of pain. I will pose
like this for the rest
of the afternoon,

for the remainder
of all noons. The rain
is making a valley

of my dim features.
I am in Albania,
I am on the Rhine.

It is autumn,
I smell the rain,
I see children running

through columbine.
I am honey,
I am several winds.

My nerves dissolve,
my limbs wither—
I don't love you.

I don't love you.




The Mirror

She tells me
that I can
see right through
her, but I
look and can
see nothing:

so we go
ahead and
kiss. She is
fine glass, I
say, throwing
her to the
floor. . . .




The Trap.

Inside the old chair
I found another chair;
though smaller, I liked
sitting in it better.
Inside that chair
I found another chair;
though smaller, in
many ways I felt
good sitting in it.
Inside that chair
I found another chair;
it was smaller and
seemed to be made
just for me.
Inside that chair,
still another;
it was very small,
so small I could
hardly get out of it.
Inside that chair
I found yet another;
and in that, another,
and another, until
I was sitting in
a chair so small
it would be difficult
to say I was sitting
in a chair at all.
I could not rise
or fall, and no one
could catch me.




Deaf Girl Playing

This is where I once saw a deaf girl playing in a field.
Because I did not know how to approach her without startling
her, or how I would explain my presence, I hid. I felt
so disgusting, I might as well have raped the child, a grown
man on his belly in a field watching a deaf girl play.
My suit was stained by the grass and I was an hour late
for dinner. I was forced to discard my suit for lack of
a reasonable explanation to my wife, a hundred dollar suit!
We're not rich people, not at all. So there I was, left
to my wool suit in the heat of summer, soaked through by
noon each day. I was an embarrassment to the entire firm:
it is not good for the morale of the fellow worker to flaunt
one's poverty. After several weeks of crippling tension,
my superior finally called me into his office. Rather than
humiliate myself by telling him the truth, I told him I
would wear whatever damned suit I pleased, a suit of armor
if I fancied. It was the first time I had challenged his
authority. And it was the last. I was dismissed. Given
my pay. On the way home I thought, I'll tell her the truth,
yes, why not! Tell her the simple truth, she'll love me
for it. What a touching story. Well, I didn't. I don't
know what happened, a loss of courage, I suppose. I told
her a mistake I had made had cost the company several
thousand dollars, and that, not only was I dismissed, I
would also somehow have to find the money to repay them
the sum of my error. She wept, she beat me, she accused
me of everything from malice to impotency. I helped her
pack and drove her to the bus station. It was too late to
explain. She would never believe me now. How cold the
house was without her. How silent. Each plate I dropped
was like tearing the very flesh from a living animal. When
all were shattered, I knelt in a corner and tried to imagine
what I would say to her, the girl in the field. What could
I say? No utterance could ever reach her. Like a thief
I move through the velvet darkness, nailing my sign
on tree and fence and billboard. DEAF GIRL PLAYING. It is
having its effect. Listen. In slippers and housecoats
more and more men will leave their sleeping wives' sides:
tac tac tac: DEAF GIRL PLAYING: tac tac tac: another
DEAF GIRL PLAYING. No one speaks of anything but nails
and her amazing linen.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's the fire hydrant
of the underdog.
-- "Success Comes to Cow Creek"

O when all is lost,
when we have thrown our shoes in to the sea,
when our watches have crawled off into weeds,
our typewriters have finally spelled perhaps
accidentally the unthinkable word,

when the rocks loosen and the sea anemones
welcome us home with their gossamer arms
dropping like a ship from the stars,

what on earth shall we speak or think of,
and who do you think you are?
-- "Images of Little Compton, Rhode Island"

In a weird, forlorn voice
he cries: it is a mirage!
Then tosses a wreath of scorpions
to the children,
mounts his white nag
and creeps off into darkness,
smoking an orange.
-- "The President Slumming"

What manner of me are these
I hate airports too many airplanes
what could I ever do but love her

Brother of the unknown ancient man
he forsook all earthbound vanities
throw the dirt gently onto his grave.
-- "Brother of the Unknown Ancient Man"

I am the canary that strangles
itself with joy and you my widow
floating through this mirror.
-- "Poem"

skein of lightning
memory's dark ink in your last smile
where the stars have swallowed their train schedule
where the stars have drowned in their dark petticoats
like a sock of hamburger
receiving the lightning
into his clitoris
-- "Fuck the Astronauts"

The center of the earth
is a ravenous magnet,
it's hard work
to keep anything away from it.
-- "Absences"

The room is bugged,
it sucks off energy.
I don't care for its windows anymore,
as if this piece of earth had the right,

to tear up the darkness in search of night.
It's the days when nothing happens,
not a word is spoken,
those are the ones that can be saved.
-- "Awkward Silence"

In the offering pit of the apparitional body
the fuel of evil tendencies of normal forms
the fuel of dream tendencies
that have been heated up
in the lamasery of the sharp knife
a heavenly tree with which the corpse fans himself.
-- "Autumn"

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little rid eon my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
-- "Goodtime Jesus"

The mountains had long ago crumbled away,
erased by some soft artillery on the radio.
I thought I saw my twin, limbless on the desert,
drowning near a herd of angels; I reached out the window
and killed him with a single blow.
-- "Mystic Moment"

They ply their shuttles in the roaring loom
of time, in the inaccessible regions.
-- "Yonder"

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems were variously amusing, perplexing, and impenetrable. Some of the humorous and improbable scenarios - plus incongruous clusters of words that formed delightful or puzzling images - reminded me of Donald Barthelme's short stories, which also operate on levels I never fully comprehended as I simply experienced them the best I could. Tate, like Barthelme, seemed to be enormously bright and odd, tinged with sadness yet still very much given to play. The long poem "Amnesia People" bears reciting again, some future afternoon, when I want to magically and beneficially rearrange my brain in ways I never could on my own without its extraordinary combinations of words.

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 4 out of 5]

Encontré a este tipo por unos comentarios de Ashbery en los que dice que le gustaba mucho su poesía, y tiene sentido, las imágenes y la forma de mezclar una cotidianeidad americana con un surrealismo casi autóctono son maravillosas, hay muchas cosas que me gustan de su forma de ver el mundo (hay cosas que parece que tuvieron que afectarle necesariamente a David Lynch aunque ni idea de esto igual es un salto muy arriesgado), el único problema es que al venir de Ashbery creo que su poesía falta de esa plasticidad e inteligencia que hay en los versos de Ashbery y al venir leyendo ese hilo, su imagen lastra mi lectura, tal vez sea un problema mío de leer muy pegado a otros textos.

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's all fine, but there's few poems that jump out for me. The absurd imagery could be striking, but it just keeps coming and I'm struggling to get the humour, or the meaning, or the voice behind it. This may be my fault rather than his, I think I can agree to go our separate ways.

I struggle to remember why I was interested in reading more James Tate ... possibly a later poem? Possibly he just stands out more when read as a single poem in an anthology.

Having said that, "Fuck the Astronauts" is a great title for a poem.

[Rick Seery]

Impossible to rate...I'm not sure "selected" works best for Tate. Very uneven, and not-quite drastic changes in tone and voice.

Hmmm. I found a lot of it puzzling, and obscure. Though at least a decent chunk of engaging, or blinding ones.

It would be good to track down some of the original volumes these appeared in.

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surrealist poems are often hard to pull off, but as John Ashbery also once suggested about Tate, the latter's poetry somehow makes me feel like a better human after I've undergone a whole barrage of his crazy, prose-poem scenarios.

[Andreas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Often funny, always witty and insightful, sometimes obscure - it don’t know whether Tate is being hermetic or surreal at times. Filled with characters that are cluelessly and aimlessly stumbling through life. Beautiful losers, but strong characters brought to life by a truly original poet.

[Glenn Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Hans Ostrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of surrealism and wit.

[Ben Haines]

I must have a ceiling fan, I can't postpone twirling blades.

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 5 out of 5]

finished reading this - Tate is a strange, impossible master and some of his finest work is right here. Love it.

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to like him a lot, but I fear I don’t understand poetry well enough :(

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real treasure trove of a book. I keep it by my couch and dip in whenever I need strong doses of wonder.

[R. Cooper Eberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

My heart sings

[Walter Joachim-DelPoio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yea, I mean, this is one of the best things I’ve ever read. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s actually that good. But that’s my take.

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Tate was at one time the only living American poet who would make me laugh uproariously as I was reading his work.