James Tate has published a book of short stories, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee. When a major poet chooses to publish prose, it usually seems a happy occasion to essay what is uniquely poetic in his or her writing to begin with–to wit, this trip to the hinterlands gives us a chance to snoop around the writer’s workshop, understanding for the first time what techniques have been left behind, perhaps even what obsessions are left behind. But unlike e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room or John Ashbery’s A Nest of Ninnies (co-authored with James Schuyler), books that truly let their authors step outside their own currents, Tate’s collection of prose is more an extension of his poetic project than any break in the action. Indeed, this collection becomes an occasion more fit for an epiphany on the reader’s behalf: the trajectory of James Tate’s development has over the years led him to more comfortably plug his existential concerns into a calculus of prose than one of poetry. For a major poet, this is a rather strange arrival.
           Of course, strange arrivals are the lone thing that any long-time reader of Tate can expect. Hints that the poet was dissatisfied with any hidebound notion of the poem have been cropping up since, well, The Oblivion Ha-Ha. This book contained "A Prose Poem," a peculiar poem about a man’s nightly cathartic dives into the lubed-up puzzle pieces of his life–a poem whose lines were kept from contact with the right margin, ironically enough, by line breaks, seemingly the exclusive province of poetry, but a poem whose appearance was in fact more prose-looking. It was not until the exquisite corpse-titled Hottentot Ossuary that the right margin was regularly touched. Why did a poet who would receive plaudits from all corners of a divided po-world worry at age 23, while reading the galleys of his first book no less, that he was aging into a conservative formalist that would be recognized by his peers as that "triadic-syllabic fellow"? The best sense can be made of this question in the context of Tate's outspoken debt to the French: from the efforts of Rimbaud and Baudelaire to conjure a hybrid form, to the surrealist logic-revolution of Apollinaire, Aragon, and Breton, he early on learned a restlessness with received poetic forms.
           If it’s to be tenably held that Tate has increasingly abandoned poetic means as he’s evolved, it might be useful now to take a stab at what poetry is, or what a poet is. A huge and arbitrary question; as such, we might arbitrarily defer to the French for an answer. Jean Marais, in Cocteau’s Orphée, when queried by death’s tribunal, answers (and I cite this loosely) that the poet is one who writes without writing. Without deeper explanation, he gnomically offers this. By procedure of inference, Cocteau has directed us to a traditionally rehearsed definition of poetry: that the poet finds lodging in the marrow of phenomena, that from some intestinal seat of experience the poet coaxes the world into speaking itself, without the customary writerly appurtenances. This poetics of the old guard is the mere starting thesis that Tate introduced to W.C. Williams’s demotic-idiom antithesis to arrive, strangely, at the synthesis an early critic referred to as his "conversational surrealism." Tate was worried, at 23, that his poems looked too much like poems, and not enough like speech–the material function of language that would, long-run, be Tate’s true inheritance from Williams, not the triadic stanza.
           No one should bat an eye, then, that with Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee Tate has more liberally relaxed his lines into the "thought entities" of paragraphs and found space for his concerns in the formal packages of short stories. After all, Tate’s interrogation of language has all along been led more by the example of Russel Edson’s yarns than Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. What is somewhat surprising is the manner in which Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee divides so cleanly into two types of stories: half of which comes off as writing program-enforced Ray Carverisms, while the other half are the proud products of Tate’s growth–a surrealism around the cracker barrel. The effect of the Carver-like stories of emotional stagnancy and disconnection, such as "Despair Ice Cream," "Robes," "Diane and Miriam," "Suite 1306," and "Our Country Cousins," is disquieting: Tate can’t locate the lyricism that Carver so routinely found. Tate finds himself on terra firma, however, in the plots that go the way of surrealist logic and in the language of Middle America turned absurd. One such plot is "The Invisible Twins," wherein an apparently normal plot is made retroactively surreal by a mother’s suspicion that her son never had actual human twins, as he’s claimed, believing instead that her son had "twins of money." A Tate twist, which unnerves the otherwise normal. And the instances of common language tweaked into something a little left of common are frequent: "I would have preferred she had ordered me to cross the street and cut the throat of the neighbor’s dog." "I guess sometimes ‘peace’ can be the dirtiest word in the English language. ‘Lasagna’, on the other hand, is a very beautiful word." Even, "They don’t care that I have gargled dirt since this day began."
            Beyond the use of colloquialism that can lead each quintessentially American sentiment into a reductio ad absurdum, and beyond the formula of the quotidian story being upended by the surrealist punch-line, Tate finds a higher ground of artistic success with several stories. As often has been the case for Tate, Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant disquisition on uncertainty furnishes a bright engine for a kind of self-enacting surrealist narrative: true to a foundational uncertainty, Tate at times writes in such a way that his own surprise with each successive line seems equal to, if not greater than, his reader’s surprise. These narratives yield a nearly Tate-specific delight-unto-sublimity. Dudley Fitts glommed onto such a narrative early when he suggested that Tate change the order of the prize-winning The Lost Pilot to make "Coming Down Cleveland Avenue" the introductory poem, so that the world’s first experience of Tate would be of him in mad conductor mode, careening between known and unknown territories, with a paradoxically tight control. Tate finds the je ne sais quoi of his special surrealism in "The Vacation," "The Stove," and the title story, "Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee"; and when he does, the reader’s only response is to respect him with a silent reverence, which is, of course, made impossible by the need to laugh maniacally.
           The curious thing about this collection is that even when Tate’s Carver and Edson modalities are at cross-purposes, his stories are joined thematically by a fact that accounts for a career-long jones: Tate’s best, most characteristic suggestion is that at the center of what elsewhere earns the handle "Life’s Mystery" is a vacuity that, if dwelled on obsessively, will destroy a person’s life. This is the pith of "Deaf Girl Playing." This is why the volume was called Absences. This is the cause of despair for the characters of "Raven of Dawn," "Welcome Signs," and "Mush." Tate himself seems obsessed by this, but rather than despair, he has become our emergency comedian, to avoid what he considers his otherwise fate: "The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives." Instead of such foundation-rattling, Tate tends to opt for absurd lists of attention-grabbing activities, in absurd sequence, as per "The Journey West"–"…we like the same things–Prairie Dog Towns, Reptile Gardens, two-headed anything, houses covered with old license plates, good steaks and good bourbon"–or as per Constant Defender’s "The Motorcyclists"–"I like ping-pong and bobcats,/ shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene,/ the crunch of carrots."
           Tate’s theme has remained intact over the years. The argument that might be waged at another time is whether his formal development went in the right direction. Only in several stories in Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee does the reader glimpse what could be found in such abundance from The Lost Pilot down to Absences. The future argument, then, might cling to this axis: Do these diminished glimpses of Tate’s genius result from the aging artists’s familiar Achilles heel of a lost capacity for self-editing, or, on the contrary, do we secretly wish that Tate would return to being the "triadic-syllabic fellow"?