MARK HALLIDAY

The Wise Guy in the Back Row
on On James Tate, edited by Brian Henry

     Suppose you were teaching a poetry workshop and a bright undergraduate turned in this poem:
 
TAXIDERMY

The pastel bees I found in my mattress
really belong to the gravedigger. I was swallowing
my pencil down at headquarters when a meatloaf
crept out of the encyclopedia; it was shaped
like a chicken wearing a tiara but sinking in quicksand.
I hate this job, it’s murder. The profile of a horse,
even a champion, can get rabbity, if the knitting needle
slips just a little. Thereupon my tranquilizer takes effect
and wrinkles disappear as if on a sailboat,
a twelve-inch one, and waterspouts bicycle around
like rodents plowing trenches, their equipment
concealed at night under the stairwell.
I’m all thumbs now. I get pregnant
squeezing my thumbs through buttonholes.
I’d like an atrocity to happen
just so I could enjoy the autumnal spice.
Everything is dead anyway, this mouse.
The squad on the beach stuffs my laundress.
Hitherto, the cameras of perdition crackling
as at an auction: How much for that one?
Will it last my lifetime?
Will it fade?

Would you be amazed? You might be startled—most undergraduates can’t use the word “hitherto” (then again, is it cleverly used in this poem?), and such itchy verbal energy can be found only in, say, 10% of undergraduate poems. But I don’t think you’d salute the young student at the start of a great career; I don’t think you’d predict a Pulitzer Prize; I don’t think you’d anticipate writing an essay in praise of “Taxidermy” and hundreds of poems quite like it.
     I think you’d feel called upon to try to help the young poet write more significant poems; this would not be a question of writing less imaginatively but of writing more imaginatively—since it takes no real imagining to generate blankly odd phrases like “pastel bees” and “a chicken wearing a tiara” and “a meatloaf crept out of the encyclopedia.”
     But suppose I tell you that “Taxidermy” is not a real James Tate poem but a parody of a James Tate poem. If you’re in sympathy with the admiration that governs Brian Henry’s gathering of essays On James Tate (University of Michigan Press, 2004), then you’ll be inclined to think the parody is rather shoddy, too obviously a cheap shot—with its bicycling rodents and rabbity horse and shruggy reference to atrocity.
     Suppose you’ve enjoyed for many years the wiseass sad-clown semi-surrealism of James Tate, and you’ve decided to write an essay celebrating Tate’s ways “of pushing past the temptations of false stops” (William Matthews), and how “Dissociation has become his mirror of words for the contemporary chaos of fragments and gobbets, and his means of suggesting how momentary, slender, and fragile are the islands swimming in it” (Frank Moritz), and how “This poet’s answer to authority is to present the inept and the softheaded—and to allow revelry in the pleasures of inventive error” (Lee Upton). You’ll certainly be ready to make the case for a poem like “Nine Minutes.”

NINE MINUTES

One Sunday my orchards were flipping
in a fuzz-coated silence. My deepest roosters
walked like Captain Bligh into his launch.
Invidious ravens circled above each sprightly postcard I penned.
When Sylvia appeared with her bag of humane intentions
I said “What would you recommend for
the silence of fruit trees that spin like Romanian gymnasts?
Is it healthy to be striped? There’s no taxi
in the bathtub.” Sylvia sighed
and then replied at great length. Too bad I’d left my ears
at my hometown high school
in my locker under Pageant of Democracy.

You could say about that speaker what Lee Upton says about the speakers of hundreds of Tate poems:

They pose in comic opposition to representations of self-aware, self-consistent, and responsible authority. Tate’s poetry actively upends identities, retaining the curiousness of assuming selfhood, the perversity of the self to the self, including its shifting mood states and ineffective solutions. The actual work of the poems in their demasculinizing of male characters and caricaturing of heterosexual desires, in the voicing of need, weakness, and contingency, boldly counters patriarchal posturings of expertise.

      Most of the critics collected in On James Tate are happy to offer generalizations like that, in a laudatory spirit. Brian Henry in his Preface claims that he was looking for “critics who would engage Tate’s poetry with an open mind” and that one thing the collection is meant to combat is “vacuous praise” for Tate. But actually there is a good deal of verbosely vacuous praise in On James Tate, and in the nine essays (seven of them written for this volume) and thirteen reviews collected here there is remarkably little tough-minded criticism. The presiding assumption is that Tate is a poetic genius whose poems are always interesting and often profoundly meaningful. This is not surprising in view of the opening paragraphs of Henry’s Preface, where he laments that Tate’s poetry has received too much “misguided” and “shoddy” criticism over the years—criticism that fails “to approach Tate’s poetry on its own terms.” (That’s a phrase that would be worth exploring: could it be that everyone’s poetry—including yours and mine!—is very good when approached on its own terms?) Henry quotes nine critics whose error of approaching Tate’s work on other terms has led to scornful dismissals. These critics include Calvin Bedient, Mark Jarman, Adam Kirsch, William Logan, and William Pritchard. Now, I’m sure I disagree with those gentlemen about many things (and I’m sure they don’t especially like my own poetry), but I doubt that they are all complete fools. Brian Henry could have invited one of them to attempt a thoughtfully argumentative essay for On James Tate, but what he wanted was to counteract their reviews, so they are scornfully dismissed, along with (evidently) anyone likely to share their skepticism about Tate.
     Well, if James Tate is a good and important poet, then a volume of pieces by critics sympathetic to his work could, of course, be an excellent thing. You might expect the critics to show why they admire the poems so much. Such showing, in literary criticism, can never become proving, but it is very different (as we’re always telling our students) from merely pointing toward a poem and then declaring—however elaborately—that it exhibits certain delightful virtues. Cogent showing requires examining of words, phrases, lines, sentences, sections; it requires many acts of analysis and comparison. It is not efficient labor, and it tends to make essays long. It is not very common in the big world of literary commentary. We ask our students to do it, and when they fall short we can give them a B—“Good ideas, but not enough argument.” As professors, we tend to feel we’re past the sweaty work. Indeed, as I write this review I’m aware that I’m not writing the even longer version of it in which I would try to show my reasons for judging certain paragraphs of criticism, and certain Tate poems, as I do.
     On James Tate contains far more pointing than showing. It contains amazingly little judicious comparing. (I say amazingly, but I’m not really amazed, because of certain qualities in Tate’s work, qualities which he shares with John Ashbery; more on this soon.) To show that a poem has a certain good quality you need to compare it with poems that don’t have this quality, or have it differently. Compare the poem at hand with poems by others that are similar in some ways—then you can isolate the quality you’re praising. To show the relative success of the poem in a certain respect, contrast it with poems that in this respect wobble, sag, ring hollow, or botch themselves. If your project is an essay firmly focused on one poet, compare one of his poems with other poems of his. They’re not all equally splendid, are they? Your admiration for X can be vastly more persuasive if you show why it’s better than Y and Z.
     I address the above little lecture to myself as well as the rest of us who pretend to have outgrown the obligations we impose on our students. We don’t do enough showing.
     Beyond this usual professorial laziness, there’s a more particular reason why earnestly developed analysis and comparison are so scarce in On James Tate: much of Tate’s poetry is designed to embarrass any serious intellectual commentary. Or if “designed” sounds itself too serious, let’s say Tate’s poetry is shaped by an impulse to embarrass intellectual response, to cast doubt upon the value of logical sequences of thought. You could almost believe that around 1970 Tate entered into a secret pact with Ashbery (sixteen years older than Tate, but not yet nationally famous in 1970) in which they’d compete to see who could most make all clearly logical writings (narratives, explanations, arguments, analytic meditations—whether in essays or in poems) seem ridiculously stodgy and out of touch with contemporary experience. The two poets have kept up this campaign with impressive facility for more than thirty years. Countless other poets have joined in the game; but among poets younger than Ashbery, Tate is the debunker of clear paraphrasable discourse (until his two most recent collections, at least) whose commitment has been most charismatic and influential.
     Imagine a high school English class in eternity. Let the teacher be Samuel Johnson, or Matthew Arnold, or I. A. Richards, or Yvor Winters, or Lionel Trilling, or Reuben Brower—choose the one you have most admiration for. Who is the boy in the back row, constantly fidgeting and wisecracking? It’s Jim Tate. He is burning the textbook with a cigarette lighter. Next to him sits John Ashbery, writing a pantoum in French. Tate talks without raising his hand, and makes the class giggle. Ashbery raises his hand and says things that sound very smart but no one understands them. Both boys are terribly bored, but Ashbery is amused by his boredom, whereas Tate is enraged by it. The teacher knows that they are brighter than most of their classmates, but gives Tate a D (Tate’s homework is written in orange ink on Walt Disney cartoon gift-wrap), while Ashbery gets an A- (it’s too much trouble to figure out whether his papers make sense or not).
     Ashbery is a poet for people who were brilliantly bored in English classes. Tate is a poet for bright people who felt oppressed in English classes.
     If so, then you want to be nimble if you’re going to write a critical essay on his poetry. Better not be caught thinking too soberly! Carolyne Wright reviews Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994) with a glance back at Tate’s Selected Poems (1991):

As in that volume of golden oldies, these new poems proffer no earnest, nerdy responses to the eternally veridical questions of Truth, Beauty, and the American Way. Indeed, they deliver the typical Tate-esque trope de grace to all sanctimonious poses and stodgy cogitation, all verdigris-encrusted mental statuary.

Now, I can imagine composing those sentences, in an effort to summarize a Tate book for a review. (And we can imagine an intelligent person composing very similar sentences about Byron in 1820.) In the context of On James Tate, though, what strikes me is how blandly untroubled the critic seems to be. Carolyne Wright does not pause to consider whether some cogitation—or may we call it thought?—is not stodgy, and whether some earnest responses are not nerdy, and whether some poses—or may we say positions, stances?—are not sanctimonious, and whether some answers to questions of Truth or Beauty (or even the American Way) are not only veridical (in a nonpejorative sense) but intensely desirable. The reviewer dismisses all these questions as if they were rudely inappropriate; the only task is apparently to have fun describing the fun of Tate. Well, short reviews are hard to be thoughtful in.
     But essays? Several of the nine essays in On James Tate offer interesting ideas about Tate’s sense of life, his intentions, and his style—ideas that would be much more interesting if tested. Brian Henry’s own essay on Tate’s first book, The Lost Pilot (1967), quite effectively notices Tate’s devotion to an Emersonian rejection of stasis, his yearning to escape “monumentality,” and his anxious use of the subjunctive mood for this purpose. It’s a decent essay, though it makes no attempt to specify how Tate is different from other tensely anti-static poets (Whitman, Stevens, Crane, Fearing, O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery—any one of these, among others, could prompt pointed comparisons), nor does it worry about whether some Tate poems are much more “transitive” than others.
        Lee Upton’s essay (from which I quoted earlier) is the most broadly useful piece in On James Tate, providing a series of suggestive ideas: Tate’s aversion to the entrapment of identity, his sense that the self can’t be defined, his hostility to patriarchal authority, his sense that “The expert mounts his evidence … above an abyss of primitive need,” his affection for “ineffective, baffled, and histrionic amateurs,” his fascination with childlike perspectives “undomesticated by cultural ideology,” his suspicion that all destinations are illusory; and also (Upton’s best insight) Tate’s ineradicable underlying sympathy with individual longings.
       Like most of the commentators in this volume, Upton takes for granted that Tate’s work reacts to a terribly confusing world, that we endure “a frenetic culture,” “cultural mayhem,” “the dispiriting consequences of the dizzying multiplicity of contemporary life.” I’d like to read a critic of Tate who would not simply take this as a given, the way we usually do. Our capitalist America—we all know it’s confusing, right? But is it terribly confusing? Are we desperate and shattered and utterly bewildered? It is convenient to say so, sometimes; it justifies some easy gestures (and I too, dear reader, have written the bewilderment poem often enough). You can get tenure at a university if you learn to say “We are totally screwed” in complicated enough ways. Are we not perhaps remarkably comfortable, most of the time, as we publish our countless evocations of our frantic postmodern discomfort?
       Tate’s oeuvre—Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004) is his fourteenth collection—cries out for that question to be asked. How unhappy are we, really? How unhappy is James Tate? Several writers in On James Tate find darkness underlying Tate’s comedy. Donald Revell (writing in 1984) declares that throughout his first seven books “Tate’s voice has been that of a grief unable either to find or forge any consolation.” Revell says that Tate’s animating grief should keep us from seeing frivolity in him.

The protean abruptness, however comic it may seem, and the beauties of Tate’s voice arise from one source: a desperate impatience with the failure of every kind of ritual—public, private, solemn, or absurd—that society or the imagination can devise to assuage grief. And this impatience is moving because it is not only poignant, but exemplary. It represents, through the terrible occasions of one life, the frantic conversions and vacillations common to our time.

        Now, Revell’s conviction is impressive; and I can agree that the word “impatience”does offer a key to Tate’s poetry; but I’m afraid the assertion that Tate’s poetry pervasively expresses or reveals grief does not pass the Whiff-of-Baloney Test. Revell supports his view the way other critics in On James Tate (and in many another tome, God knows) support their views: through slyly selective quotation. They almost never deal with an entire poem, commenting responsibly on the whole of it as built of all its parts (Lee Upton on the delightful prose poem “The List of Famous Hats” and Mark Rudman on “River’s Story” are rare exceptions). One of the similarities between Tate and Ashbery is that both poets quite reliably provide quotable bits for the critic who is eager to generalize about the poet’s meanings; if you don’t require yourself to deal with whole poems you can produce an impressive essay about the poet’s heroic postmodern sensibility (or whatever) quite efficiently.
       For example, Revell quotes the last five and a half lines of “A Jangling Yarn” (Constant Defender, 1983), and although they don’t convey grief, they do seem genuinely felt and they seem (like many Ashbery passages) to crystallize Tate’s sense of life and artistic motive:

                     I must wake now
into masquerade and particle, act out
my fluffy monologue behind the parrot green
tapestry, lisp some sparkling caprice:
It is Carnival again in the world, and I must try
to harmonize with its proud or shabby downfall.

You can imagine making a good case for that passage, phrase by phrase. (You might even make it sound earnest and nerdy!) But what if you had to praise, or make sense of, the entire 28-line poem? Shortly before the “I must wake now” ending of “A Jangling Yarn” we get these lines:

My landlady, with toothpicks in tune,
sweeps this alarming leaf into her gutter,
her waist crumbling in large blocks,
which a hired truck will collect later.

Are you ready to argue for the rightness of those lines? Oh, I know: alarming leaf—mutability; crumbling waist—mortality; hired truck—heartless capitalism! We are professionals, we can do it if we have to. (Even those toothpicks? I’ll get back to you.) But I think an effort to argue that all 28 lines of “A Jangling Yarn” are wonderfully right would be extremely fatiguing, and the fatigue would flow partly from one’s sense of being a charlatan.
       I say that, but I haven’t thoroughly shown it. Full discussion of a poem is hard whether the poem is good or not, and takes lots of space. In the case of Tate, as in the case of Ashbery (not to mention their many imitators and heirs), there are two particular reasons why thorough analysis of whole poems is scarce. First, an honest commentator will be forced to admit, uncomfortably often, “I don’t quite know why this metaphor appears here.” Second, the “protean abruptness” of Tate, like the more lubricated protean quality of Ashbery, will lead the diligent (and less ingenuous) commentator to say over and over: “The phrase or image at hand seems outlandishly random, flagrantly irrelevant—but that’s the point, see? Because he’s escaping bad certainties!” Or, as Richard Jackson puts it:

for the poet who wishes to write a poetry of discovery rather than a mimicry or recitation of fixed forms of thinking, metaphor must subvert cultural and aesthetic expectations, unravel the expected results. For James Tate, this has meant a poetry whose language is based increasingly on non sequiturs, contradictions, literalized figures of speech, episodic detail from partially erased narratives, false causalities, associative leaps, askew parallelisms, and a whole tangle of other dismantling strategies.

To write that defense once is not onerous, in fact it’s rather invigorating. But how many times can you write it without getting bored?
       James Tate has published nearly eight hundred poems. It’s true there is an alarming teeth-gritting tension, an edginess that can seem hostile or self-disgusted, and a shadow of dismay in a significant number of them (especially in books before Reckoner in 1986). Nevertheless, if you read any bunch of the poems in a row, you can’t escape the sense that he has had a lot of fun. What’s wrong with fun? I love it when a poet having fun makes me have fun too—as in some of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, where the playfulness and pastiche and zest seem cheerfully open, not claiming to be anything else. Meanwhile, there is also (of course) the possibility of dark fun, or humor noir, which can be excellent in Kenneth Fearing, or Weldon Kees, or (earlier) some of Robert Frost, or (recently) Mary Ruefle or Dean Young. And in James Tate! But whether the humor is light or dark or striped, the reader (or this reader) needs to feel that the poet is bringing us along, including us in the laughter; the opposite is when you feel that a given poem was much more fun to write than it is to read. That’s what I feel about the weaker zany productions of Koch and O’Hara. And it’s what I feel about a large proportion of Tate’s large oeuvre. My intuitive response often is, “This guy is entertaining himself, not me.”
       That’s harmless enough, let him do it. Well, okay, but then if I’m asked to recognize that what looks like extreme casualness is actually an important artistic achievement in what Jackson calls “a realism of the imagination,” an achievement that “allows for and even welcomes, in Artaud’s words, ‘the innermost recesses of loss’” (Katy Lederer), an “achievement suffused with grief” (Revell), “dissolving the self in order to embrace humanity in its fullness by representing it” (Andrew Zawacki)—when I’m invited to agree to all this, I grow impatient and sarcastic, like the bright naughty boy in the back row of that eternal classroom.
        You might suppose that the inveterately naughty Tate would hold himself wryly or slyly or grimly apart from such serious claims as are made for him by some of the critics Brian Henry has gathered. But in fact Tate sounds rather earnestly ambitious on the rare occasions when he writes prose about poetry. In a 1982 interview with Jackson, for instance, he speaks of his faith in language: “I think I approach poetry with the idea that there is an inexhaustible mine there, that if we could only get the right combinations of words we would grow in our understanding of our place in the world.” Ah, the right combinations! So there can be wrong combinations. I’d like to hear about that. In his Introduction to Best American Poetry of 1997, Tate writes:

One of the things that matters is the relationship of all the parts and elements of the poem to each other. Is everything working toward the same goal? Is there anything extraneous? Or if there is some kind of surface disunity, can that be justified by some larger purpose?

When you turn from those cogent remarks and look at any typical series of Tate poems, you have to blink. Can this be the same guy? Here are some lines from the middle of an early poem, “I Take Back All My Kisses” (Hints to Pilgrims, 1971):

They got me because the neighbors have wings
They got me because deer are hopeless in more ways than one
Because lights are turning on and off in my knees and I can be spotted through a yard of brick
They got me yesterday because I wore a see-through skullcap in the gymnasium of sudden deaths
Because I spit in the eye of the corner guillotine
Thunder Guggenheim got me today the fourth horseman
They got me today because a subway wrecked on your lifeline
They got me in kindergarten when I dropped the atomic bomb
J. Edgar Hoover got me for inventing the milkpod
The Preacher got me for eloping with a snail

Justified by some larger purpose? Well, sure—it’s all about the individual spirit oppressed by culture… But isn’t it hard to imagine a surreal or semi-surreal line that wouldn’t fit just as casually into this series? Or if I’m being obtuse, let a critic show me. (The same question could be asked about parts of Ginsberg’s Howl, but less tellingly, I think, because Howl is more convincingly fueled by its speaker’s continuous emotional intensity than “I Take Back All My Kisses”.)
       Since Distance From Loved Ones (1990), Tate’s style has foregrounded an in-your-face goofiness, and there’s an appealing candor about this. This has emerged, in the last five collections, along with more and more narrative continuity (albeit still with many jangling shots of surrealism or nonsense). Poems tend to sustain some sense of situation and plot in the experience of a speaker or protagonist, so that the enjoyably zany imagery is more immediately enjoyable than in the earlier books, because it seems more humanly voiced. At the same time, the recent style places the issue of Tate’s apparent casualness—what Ashbery (in a phrase applied to Tate by Christopher Benfey) calls acceptance of “the tentative, the whatever-happens-along”—right in front of us.
       Wouldn’t it be fun to write poems that start with these lines? “From the quagmire, several heathens / were tooting their investment plans.” “It was a foggy day anyway, / and my cockatoo was scorched, / and my bikini was moping in the ruins…” “A woodpecker is duplicating hell-bent stitches / and, in the ravine, a ballet dancer is slithering toward a bunch of onions.” “She has one good bumblebee / which she leads about town / on a leash of clover.” “The children ate battered fish wedges / and then started to swim around / a kind of island which turned out to be / the Dowager Empress of China.” “A glowworm drove by / on its way to a Philosophy Department meeting.” “Think of your absent friend — / and I say, pig iron! / The bumbershoot has departed for the desert…”
       Fun to write those poems. And fun to read them, too, but less fun, I feel. And, if you want to write an essay saying those poems mean a lot, you should avoid playing Mad Libs while writing the essay.
       In retrospect, the last poem in Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), “Happy as the Day is Long,” seems to announce Tate’s shift away from discontinuity as dominant mode and from the alienation or anger or depression or grief that allegedly generated all that discontinuity. Most of the poem presents the typical Tate-jangle of metaphors, but then come these two startling lines, which should give pause to any critic stressing the psychological depth of Tate’s imagery: “The locker room of my skull is full of panting egrets. / I’m saying that strictly for effect.” Is this a brave confession? But of course, in a sense everything we say is “for effect.” The effects Tate contemplates in the remainder of the poem seem to be health for himself, and readability for his readers who will eventually find him non-enormous.

In time I will heal, I know this, or I believe this.
The contents and furnishings of my secret room will be labeled
and organized so thoroughly it will be a little frightening.
What I thought was infinite will turn out to be just a couple
of odds and ends, a tiny miscellany, miniature stuff, fragments
of novelties, of no great moment. But it will also be enough,
maybe even more than enough, to suggest an immense ritual and tradition.
And this makes me very happy.

I find that passage remarkably sweet. You can imagine discussing it alongside Stevens’ “The Planet On the Table.” You wouldn’t be saying it subverts cultural and aesthetic expectations.

        In the two newest collections, Memoir of the Hawk (2001) and Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004), the easygoing comedy is entirely wedded to narrative. As I’ve said, I like the out-frontness of this. There’s a feeling of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. (Perhaps behind this style there may indeed be sadness, a calmer sadness than the grief Revell finds in earlier Tate; a sense that in art we can’t ever get beneath the surface, and that in life too, alas, what you see is finally what you get.) There is also a kind of candor in Tate’s prolificity—Hawk contains 172 poems, Donkeys contains 109 poems. The sheer number invites you to suspect that the poems come into being easily. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how the composition of a poem could take more than nine minutes. Here is the whole of one poem in Hawk:

SNAKE CHARMING SECRETS OF THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

I was seated at the bar having my usual
five o’clock cocktail, a martini. It had been
a hellish day at the office and I was trying to
shake off some of the tension. “Can I have your
olive?” the stranger sitting next to me asked.
“Hell, no,” I answered testily. “Well, then, can
I have a sip, I’ve never tasted a martini.”
“Get your own,” I said. That shut him up. I
went back to my thoughts. The boss was driving
me too hard, maybe looking for an excuse to
let me go. I wouldn’t be the first. I stared
into the mirror behind the bar. The man next
to me looked truly wretched. “What’s your
problem, pal?” I said to him. “You’re not
eating your olive,” he said.

What does the critic say about that poem? Alienation in the capitalist wasteland? Three responses come to mind.
1) It’s friendly. You certainly couldn’t call it difficult or pretentious. Nor is it bitter and dark. It offers a gently accessible momentary amusement.
2) But wait—it’s insulting! Because it’s so weightless; we can’t feel the poet (“Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize” as the book cover reminds us) is trying hard; he must be mocking our desire for seriously interesting poems. (This response blossoms when you read ten such poems in a row.) And the title is pretentious because it proposes to add a metaphorical meaning which the poem doesn’t support.
3) It’s essentially parodic—or essentially reactive—reacting against the weightiness of all ambitious or difficult poems. (Most good poets react against something in the prevailing contemporary culture and literature, true. This is especially true about Ashbery, even if at the same time you feel he’s a Zeitgeist coaster; and, I admit, about Koch and O’Hara too.) But, are we really oppressed by a surfeit of ambitious or difficult poems? Seriously ambitious, seriously difficult? If you don’t feel poisoned, you won’t need as many sips of antidote as Tate offers.
       Another thing to say about “Snake Charming” and the other poems in Hawk and Donkeys is that they abjure any interest in significant line breaks. It’s as if Tate has realized that line breaks are inherently pretentious. But Philip Levine started rejecting significant line breaks decades ago, and the artistic payoff from this rejection has been slight. Anyway, Tate’s recent work emphasizes lack of difference between prose and poetry. The prose poem has long attracted him, with some successes (“The List of Famous Hats,” “Same Tits,” “Goodtime Jesus”); Marjorie Perloff argues that it’s a form in which Tate is especially likely to give poems a vital texture of experience, and she writes persuasively about a prose poem entitled “What It Is.” Tate’s recent hyper-casual lineation lures Charles Simic (in a review included in On James Tate) into bizarrely calling Hawk a collection of prose poems, though they are clearly lineated. Tate must be intrigued by the disorientation that comes when we see a lineated poem on the page and then find all the line breaks to be pointedly pointless. It’s a kind of relaxation experiment from which art will have to rebound somehow.
       I enjoy dipping into Hawk and Donkeys; especially in the longer poems (mostly two pages) of the newer collection, Tate’s nutty-chatty storytelling can be beguiling; good for reading on public transportation! For instance I like the evocation of routine all-day paranoia in “Bounden Duty” and “The Survivalists.” You have to wonder, though, where can a poet go after lowering the pressure as much as Tate has recently done? It will be interesting to see. I do think it will be interesting. (Simic says, “if America ever gets a comic epic it will sound like this.” Uh oh…)
        Reader, I think some of James Tate’s poems are very good. It would have been politic for me to emphasize this much sooner, but I was too commoted about the glibnesses and omissions of On James Tate. There is of course the famous haunting title poem of The Lost Pilot. “Flight” in that volume is a good poem about love as an escape from depression. “The Blue Booby” (The Oblivion Ha-Ha, 1970) is a charmingly wishful Stevensesque poem about imagination as refuge. “Shadowboxing” in that volume is a good poem about the maddening relationship with one’s muse or talent or with Truth. “Tell Them Was Here” (Constant Defender) is a clear, bleak, spooky poem about radical lack of a sense of identity. “A Wedding”(Reckoner) is a good clear narrative poem that finds a way out of depression at the end. “Where Were You?”(Fletchers) is a moving poem about the yearning for epiphany or inspiration. “Back to Nature” in the same book is a good sardonic poem about how we are very far from being Natty Bumppo or Tarzan. “Of Two or Three Minds”(Shroud of the Gnome, 1997) is a good comic self-portrait expressing ambivalence toward oneself. “Dream On” in the same book is a startlingly openhearted ode to the spiritual value of poetry.
       The poems mentioned in the above paragraph are all rather un-Tate-like in that they are readily paraphrasable and free from the trademark discordances. But, I also like “A New Beginning”(Fletchers) if I take it as a satiric distillation of a novel about Searching For America’s Meaning. And I love “Certain Nuances, Certain Gestures”(Distance) as a poem about how romantic desire is caught in a world that won’t let it reach fulfillment. And there are other good poems by James Tate. I’d like to read critics who would try hard to say why certain poems are good poems in their artistic intactness. This happens a few times in On James Tate (Perloff on “What It Is,” Upton on “The List of Famous Hats”) but there’s much more to do.
Meanwhile, I should remember that a poet can be interesting and important without writing very many good poems. Robert Lowell is, I would argue, a striking example. A poet’s idiosyncratic effort through many volumes can be stimulating and provocative and helpful even if you still think most of the individual poems are flawed. Such a poet can teach you to realize how a flawed poem is more interesting in light of the poet’s ongoing oeuvre than it would seem if taken by itself. Let me conclude with this admission: When I chose “Taxidermy”(Distance) to quote at the beginning of this essay, I thought I was choosing a prime example of Tate’s goofy non sequiturs not amounting to much. But after drafting the essay I can reread “Taxidermy” as a poem about the endless frustrations and disappointments of trying to be a poet. Poems such as “Where Were You?” and “Shadowboxing” prepare me to read it this way—and now I’m almost ready to call “Taxidermy” a good poem. But you should want me to explain why.

 

MARK HALLIDAY's newest books are Jab (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Selfwolf (University of Chicago Press, 1999).