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Overview
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819574503 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 250 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
JAMES TATE grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of The Lost Pilot (1967), The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), Hints to Pilgrims (1971), Absences (1972), Viper Jazz (1976), Riven Doggeries (1979), Constant Defenders (1983), and Reckoner (1986). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
from The Lost Pilot (1967)
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 really waved, honestly, and said,
and said something like my name.
The Book of Lies
I'd like to have a word with you. Could we be alone for a minute? I have been lying until now. Do you believe
I believe myself? Do you believe yourself when you believe me? Lying is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone forever? Forgive us all. The word
is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying even now. Can you believe that? I give you my word.
Coming Down Cleveland Avenue
The fumes from all kinds of machines have dirtied the snow. You propose to polish it, the miles between home and wherever you and your lily of a woman might go. You go, pail, brush, and suds, scrubbing down Cleveland Avenue toward the Hartford Life Insurance Company. No one appreciates your effort and one important character calls you a baboon. But pretty soon your darling jumps out of an elevator and kisses you and you sing and tell her to walk the white plains proudly. At one point you even lay down your coat, and she, in turn, puts hers down for you. And you put your shirt down, and she, her blouse, and your pants,
and her skirt, shoes —
removes her lavender underwear and you slip into her proud, white skin.
Reapers of the Water
The nets newly tarred and the family arranged on deck — Mass has started.
The archbishop in his golden cope and tall miter, a resplendent
figure against an unwonted background, the darting silver of water,
green and lavender
of the hyacinths, the slow movement of occasional boats. Incense floats
up and about the dripping gray moss and the sound of the altar bell rings out. Automatically all who have stayed
on their boats drop to their knees with the others on shore. The prelate, next taking up his sermon,
recalls that the disciples of Christ were drawn
from the fishermen of Galilee. Through the night, at the lake, they cast in vain.
Then He told them to try once more, and lo!
the nets came heavily loaded. ... Now
there will be days when you, too, will cast your nets without success — be not
discouraged; His all-seeing eye will be on you. And in the storm, when
your boat tosses like a thin leaf, hold firm. ...
Who knows whose man will be next? Grandmère
whose face describes how three of hers —
her husband and those two boys — had not returned,
now looks toward
her last son —
it is a matter of time.
The prelate dips his gold aspergillum
into the container of holy water and lifts it high. As the white and green boats
pass, the drops fall on the scrubbed decks, on the nets, on the shoulders of the nearest ones, and they move up
the long waterway.
The crowds watching and waving:
the Sea Dream, the Normandie,
the Barbara Coast, the Little Hot Dog, the God Bless America, the Madame of Q. —
racing past the last tendrils of the warm pudding that is Louisiana.
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.
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.
In a Town for Which I Know No Name
I think of your blind odor too long till I collide with barbers, and am suspected.
The clerk malingers when I nod. I am still afraid of the natural. Even the
decrepit animals,
coveting their papers and curbs, awake and go breathing
through the warm darkness of hotel halls. I think that they are you coming back from the
colossal obscurity of your exhausted passions,
and dash to the door again.
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.
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.
Graveside
Rodina Feldervatova,
the community's black angel —
well, we come to you,
having failed to sink our own webbed fingers in the chilled earth where
you hang out. I think you are doomed to become symbols for us that we
will never call by name.
But what rifles through our heads is silence, one
either beyond or below whatever it is that we do know. We know by heart,
don't we? We've never learned. And we bring what we have known to you, now,
tonight. Open your home to us, Rodina. Kiss our brains. Tell us that
we are not drunk, and that we may spend our summers with you.
The Lost Pilot
for my father, 1922–1944
Your face did not rot like the others — the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him
yesterday. His face is cornmush:
his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare
as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot
like the others — it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their
distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive
orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,
with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested
scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not
turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You
could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what
it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least
once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god,
I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.
My head cocked toward the sky,
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.
Intimidations of an Autobiography
I am walking a trail on a friend's farm about three miles from
town. I arrange the day for you. I stop and say,
you would not believe how happy
I was as a child,
to some logs. Blustery wind puts tumbleweed
in my face as I am pretending to be on my way home to see you and
the family again,
to touch the orange fingers of the moon.
That's how I think of it.
The years flipped back last night and I drank hot rum till
dawn.
It was a wild success and I wasn't sad when I woke past noon
and saw the starlings in the sky.
My brain's an old rag anyway,
but I've got a woman and you'd say
she's too good for me. You'd call her a real doll and me a goof-ball.
I've got my head between my paws
because it's having a damn birthday party. How old do you think I am?
I bet you think I'm
seventeen.
It doesn't matter. Just between us, you know what I'm doing
now? I'm calling the cows home.
They're coming, too.
I lower
myself to the ground lazily,
a shower of avuncular kisses issuing from my hands and lips —
I just wanted to tell you I remember you even now;
Goodbye, goodbye. Here come the cows.
The End of the Line
We plan in partial sleep a day of intense activity —
to arrive at a final bargain
with the deaf grocer,
to somehow halt a train;
we plan our love's rejuvenation
one last time. And then she dreams another life altogether. I've gone away.
The petals of a red bud caught in a wind between Hannibal and Carthage,
the day has disappeared.
Like a little soap bubble the moon glides around
our bed. We are two negroes lugubriously sprawled on a parched boardwalk.
The Move
... you are alone with the Alone,
and it is His move.
Robert Penn Warren
The old buccaneers are leaving now. They have had their fill. A blue halo
has circled the imitation gold, and the real, and they are bewildered. All
is shimmering. The sea is shimmering like a marvelous belly viewed from the outside
during a blizzard in the mountains.
For each other they are shimmering.
They do not know what splendor is balanced atop the foresail now, what
it is that is moving, moving toward them, down.
They rub their bodies.
The skin is a fine lace of salt and disease,
and something is moving
just under the skin and they know that it is not blood.
Flight
for K.
Like a glum cricket the refrigerator is singing and just as I am convinced
that it is the only noise in the building, a pot falls in 2B. The neighbors on
both sides of me suddenly realize that they have not made love to their wives
since 1947. The racket multiplies. The man downhall is teaching his dog to fly.
The fish are disgusted and beat their heads blue against a cold aquarium. I too
lose control and consider the dust huddled in the corner a threat to my endurance.
Were you here, we would not tolerate mongrels in the air,
nor the conspiracies of dust.
We would drive all night,
your head tilted on my shoulder.
At dawn, I would nudge you
with my anxious fingers and say,
Already we are in Idaho.
Grace
The one thing that sustained the faces on the four corners of the intersection
did not unite them,
did not invite others to join.
Their inner eyes as the light
changed did not change,
but focused madly precise on the one thing until
it scared them. Then they all went to the movies.
I was just beginning
to understand when one who represented the desperate shrunken state came toward
me, bisecting the whole mass of concrete into triangles;
and handed me a package.
I carried it with me for the rest of my life, never opening it, telling no one.
The Last Days of April
Through the ceiling comes the rain to cool my lover and me. The lime carpeting
darkens, and when we cross to retrieve our glasses of gin from the mantle, our
feet sink as into drifts of leaves. We have a deep thirst, for it is the end
of April, and we know that a great heat is coming soon to deaden these passions.
Uncle
Homer was a ventriloquist;
so drunk, one day he projected his voice so far it just
kept going and going (still is).
Joe Ray insisted Homer was afraid of work, but he's
had 130 jobs or more just recently, he didn't think in terms of careers.
The family never cared for Homer even after
he ginned himself into a wall and died balling with a deaf-mute in an empty Kansas City hall.
Joe Ray insisted Homer would have made a fine dentist had he kept his mouth shut; that is,
had he lived. Still is heard about the house jiggling glasses,
his devoted astral voice coming back.
How the Friends Met
So what do you do? What can you do? Leave the room altogether? Crazy.
Your eyes are the wallpaper;
makes it tough, doesn't it?
Peel them away. You call that pain? It's not. It's insane.
You make it. Keep going.
Confront a lightpole. Smoke a mythopoeic cigarette forever.
Mark a spot with your mysterious shoe; scratch Hate in the sidewalk.
A man will come along and there will be reason enough to knife him. Sure enough, there comes along a worse-than-Bogart....
There you are, smoking the lightpole. The spot
you marked appears between your eyes, and then becomes a sidewalk, and the man walks right up the sidewalk into your room, looks at the wallpaper, and laughs.
So what do you do? What
can you do? Kick him out?
Hell, no. You charge him rent.
Tragedy Comes to the Bad Lands
Amnesic goatherds tromboning on the summit, the lazy necklaces of their own breath evanesce into the worst blizzard since Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores blessed Medora, North Dakota with their rugged presence. Look! I implore, who's sashaying across the Bad Lands now — it's trepid riding Tate (gone loco in the cabeza) out of his little civilized element — Oh!
It's bound to end in tears.
Aunt Edna
Aunt Edna of the hills comes down to give her sisters chills;
she wears the same rags she wore seven years ago,
she smells the same, she tells the same hell-
is-here stories.
She hates flowers,
she hates the glory
of the church she abandoned for the glory
of her Ozark cave.
She gave her sons to the wolves.
Rescue
For the first time the only thing you are likely to break
is everything because it is a dangerous
venture. Danger invites rescue — I call it loving.
We've got a good thing going — I call it rescue.
Nicest thing ever to come between steel cobwebs, we hope
so. A few others should get around to it, I can't understand
it. There is plenty of room,
clean windows, we start our best
engines, a-rumm ... everything is relevant. I call it loving.
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 Tabernacle
Poor God was always there,
but He was something sinister,
and we worshiped the fear
we had of Him,
we had of the church on Tenth,
near the end
of the whole dark city.
The way the family gathered murmuring on a Sunday,
surreptitious, solemn,
down to the midwest harlem to give our worn
and rusty souls an airing —
grandmother swearing at Ruthanna's hoop ear-rings,
and Uncle Barrington,
hesitant, knowing what would come,
stealing his Sunday swill of rum
invariably. Once there, it was not as bad as we had thought;
it was not God at all, but
Pentecostal joy. A man would wrestle with his soul, and all
the other sinners cheered,
and soon we heard the voices of another tongue —
garbled, and far too inflated for us to understand who
taught them how to sing such songs.
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.
Today I Am Falling
A sodium pentothal landscape,
a bud about to break open —
I want to be there, ambassador to the visiting blossoms, first to breathe their smothered, secret odors. Today I am falling, falling,
falling in love, and desire to leave this place forever.
Excerpted from "Selected Poems"
by .
Copyright © 1991 James Tate.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Heart
Summer
Power in America
Death of a Grandmother
Adoration of the moon
The Talker
Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
The Prophet Announces
Exodus
Aleph
A Short History Feast of the Ram's Horn
Spirit of Rabbi Nachman
Battle Report
News of the World
Monday
Past Time
Sunday Morning
ABC of Culture
Purities
Lines for the Ancient Scribe
The Night
The Six Hundred Thousand Letters
National Cold Storage Company
For WCW
Days and Nights
The Light is Sown
By the Women's House of Detention
Sister
River Side Drive
Ditty
Where I Am Now
A Message From Rabbi Nachman Lines for Erwin R. Goodenough (1893-1965)
Cross Country
For Delmore Schwartz
From Martin Buber
Through the Boroughs
Notes at 46
Riding Westward
Saul's Progress
Veteran
A Gift
Like a Beach
Muse Poem
City Portrait
47th Street
Cry of Small Rabbits
August
Domestic Matters
O Seasons
A Notebook
Musical Shuttle
A Realization
Lines
Things Seen
July
May
City
The Wish
Learning
On a Sunday
Brooklyn Heights
Cummings
Blue Eyes
The End
A Memorial
Saturday
Battlements
A Jerusalem Notebook
Two Cornell Deaths
Cynthia
These are the Streets
Celebrations
Questions
New York Summer
Meditations on a Brooklyn Bench
Lower East Side
Years Ago
Lessons
Lit Crit
Bible Lesson
For Paul Celan and Primo Levi
Loyalty
On Writing
Aubade
How it Ended
The Defense
In Tiberias
History
What It Feels Like
Remembering
Epitaph
Prague
949
Choices
Hart
Generations
The Ticket
Italy,1996
Traveling Trough Ireland
What People are Saying About This
“…allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting.”
"This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate's work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation—John Ashbery. A poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers. A volume not to be missed"—Julian Moynahan
""Anthropologist, editor, critic and translator, Nathaniel Tarn is above all a poet. Poetry is at the center of his personality and his activity. His work, in full growth, reveals a rich temperament, a remarkable linguistic inventiveness and a vision both original and universal.""—Octavio Paz, recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize of Literature
"Ignatow's poems grow right out of the American concrete like ginkgo and ailanthus treesThere is an excitement that grows on one in his sober truthfulness and the beautiful simplicity of his language and rhythms."—Denise Levertov
"allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting."—John Ashbery
""Despite that many have been hard to find, Tarn's books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. Long anticipated, The Selected Poems is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in innovative formal 'architextures,' a language that has no like.""—Forrest Gander, author of Torn Awake
"This volume performs a valuable service by drawing together the best of Tate's work from many individual collections, some of them now quite rare. It allows us finally to take the measure of his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting. Not unexpectedly, it confirms his standing as one of the finest voices of his generation"--John Ashbery. "A poet of mad wit and stunning anecdote. Tate is now in the fullness of his powers. A volume not to be missed"