Selected Poems
by James Tate
Summary
Selected Poems draws from across James Tate's career up to 1991, gathering poems built around solitary, faintly bewildered characters trying to make sense of situations the poems themselves refuse to fully explain. A man discovers something impossible in his backyard, a stranger arrives with an unaccountable request, a routine errand turns sideways into something closer to a fable, and Tate's speakers respond to all of it with the same deadpan, slightly baffled persistence, treating the absurd as simply one more thing to get through.
Tate's poems favor casual, conversational diction that can swerve without warning into pure surreal logic, closer in feeling to a shaggy dog story than to conventional lyric confession. Comedy and grief sit unusually close together in his work; a poem that opens as a joke can end on real loss, and one that opens in sorrow can tip suddenly into the ridiculous, without either mode canceling the other out. The critic Tony Hoagland compared Tate's speakers to Candide, wandering through an absurd world and trying, against the evidence, to hold onto some workable idea of how it is supposed to make sense.
Reading Selected Poems means accepting a poetry that treats confusion itself as a legitimate subject, comic on the surface and often quietly devastating underneath. It suits a reader who enjoys narrative strangeness, poems that behave more like very short, off kilter stories than like traditional lyric statements, and who does not need a poem to resolve its own premise to find it moving. The book rewards reading in sequence rather than picking single poems at random, since the accumulation of these bewildered speakers across three decades of work becomes, taken together, its own kind of argument about what it feels like to live inside a world that keeps refusing to explain itself.
Tate discovered poetry almost by accident, during his first year of college, after a childhood that gave him little reason to expect a literary career, and something of that discovery, the sense of stumbling into a private place where the ordinary rules did not quite apply, stays with the poems even decades later. Selected Poems is often the book new readers are pointed toward first, precisely because it gathers work from across his whole career rather than committing to any single collection's narrower range.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave James Tate the 1992 Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, which had already won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award the year before, over finalists Robert Creeley's own Selected Poems and Adrienne Rich's An Atlas of the Difficult World. Tate had lost his father, a B-17 copilot, in the Second World War before his first birthday, and was raised by his mother and grandparents in Kansas City, discovering poetry almost by accident during his first year of college.
He went on to study at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where he encountered the surrealist poets who shaped his mature style, and taught for more than four decades at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was married to the poet Dara Wier. Fellow poets including John Ashbery and Dana Gioia praised his work across his career; Tate died in Amherst in 2015 at seventy one.