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James Tate

1943–2015
Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Tate poses for a portrait at his home on May 26, 2011 in Pelham, Massachusetts.
Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Tate poses for a portrait at his home on May 26, 2011 in Pelham, Massachusetts. (Photo by Ann Hermes / The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)

James Tate was born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned a BA from Kansas State College and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was the author of over 20 poetry collections, including the posthumously published The Government Lake (2018); The Ghost Soldiers (2008); Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems (1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; Distance from Loved Ones (1990); Constant Defender (1983); Viper Jazz (1976); and The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970).

Tate’s poems have been described as tragic, comic, absurdist, ironic, hopeful, haunting, lonely, and surreal. Tate said of his own poems in a Paris Review interview, “There is nothing better than [to move the reader deeply]. I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.”

His first major collection, The Lost Pilot (1967), was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets when Tate was just 23 and still a graduate student. The title poem is dedicated to Tate’s father, a B-17 copilot killed on a bombing mission during World War II when James was five months old. However, as poet and critic Dana Gioia noted in a 1998 essay, Tate’s subsequent work “revealed his dreams and nightmares, his fears and desires—but he never shared further details of his waking life.” Over the decades, Tate honed his distinctive writing style, in which, as poet Donald Revell describes it, “The tender phrase is subordinated by an absurdity. A crazily surreal passage is broken off and followed by a painfully simple realization of ordinary, unqualified grief.”

Many of Tate’s poems are character driven, featuring a narrator’s various encounters with a gnome, a goat, an insurance agent. In a 1998 interview, he pointed to one unifying element in his work: “My characters usually are—or, I’d say most often, I don’t want to generalize too much—but most often they’re in trouble, and they’re trying to find some kind of life.” Of Tate’s characters in The Ghost Soldiers, critic Richard Wirick writes, “They are stick people but their language—fleetingly glimpsed—gives them the fullness of crushed spirits, Nietschean sheep, Republican wives.”

Tate’s honors included an Academy of American Poets chancellorship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Tanning Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Emerson College, and for five decades, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He died in 2015.

Poems by James Tate
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Bibliography

POETRY

  • Cages, Shepherd's Press (Iowa City, IA), 1966.
  • The Destination, Pym-Randall Press (Cambridge, MA), 1967.
  • The Lost Pilot, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1967.
  • Notes of Woe: Poems, Stone Wall Press (Iowa City, IA), 1968.
  • Camping in the Valley, Madison Park (Chicago, IL), 1968.
  • The Torches, Unicorn Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1968, revised edition, 1971.
  • Row with Your Hair, Kayak Press (San Francisco, CA), 1969.
  • Is There Anything?, Sumac Press (Fremont, MI), 1969.
  • Shepherds of the Mist, Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1969.
  • Amnesia People, Little Balkans Press (Girard, KS), 1970.
  • (With Bill Knott) Are You Ready Mary Baker Eddy, Cloud Marauder Press (Berkeley, CA), 1970.
  • Deaf Girl Playing, Pym-Randall Press (Cambridge, MA), 1970.
  • The Oblivion Ha-Ha, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1970.
  • Wrong Songs, Halty Ferguson (Cambridge, MA), 1970.
  • Hints to Pilgrims, Halty Ferguson, 1971, 2nd edition, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1982.
  • Absences, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972.
  • Apology for Eating Geoffrey Movius' Hyacinth, Unicorn Press, 1972.
  • Hottentot Ossuary, Temple Bar (Cambridge, MA), 1974.
  • Viper Jazz, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1976.
  • Riven Doggeries, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1979.
  • Land of Little Sticks, Metacom (Worcester, MA), 1981.
  • Constant Defender, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1983.
  • Just Shades: Poems, Parallel Editions, 1985.
  • Reckoner, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1986.
  • Distance from Loved Ones, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1990.
  • Selected Poems, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1991.
  • Worshipful Company of Fletchers, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1994.
  • Shroud of the Gnome: Poems, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1997.
  • Memoir of the Hawk, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 2001.

BROADSIDES

  • Mystics in Chicago, Unicorn Press, 1968.
  • Nobody Goes to Visit the Insane Anymore, Unicorn Press, 1971.
  • A Dime Found in the Snow, Little Balkans Press, 1973.
  • Marfa, University of Connecticut Library (Storrs, CT), 1974.
  • Suffering Bastards, Hearsay Broadsheets, 1975.
  • Who Gets the Bitterroot?, Rook Press, 1976.
  • The Rustling of Foliage, the Memory of Caresses, Massachusetts Review (Amherst, MA), 1979.
  • If It Would All Please Hurry, Shanachie Press, 1980.

OTHER

  • (With Bill Knott) Lucky Darryl: A Novel, Release Press (Brooklyn, NY), 1977.
  • The Route as Briefed, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1999.
  • Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (short stories), Verse Press (Amherst, MA), 2002.

Work represented in numerous anthologies, including Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, edited by Lucien Stryk, Northern Illinois University Press, 1967; The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair, Norton (New York, NY), 1973; and English and American Surrealist Poetry, edited by Edward B. Germain, Penguin (New York, NY), 1978. Contributor to Paris Review, Transatlantic Review, New Yorker, Nation, Atlantic, Poetry, Quarterly Review of Literature, Shenandoah, and other publications. Poetry editor, Dickinson Review, 1967- 76; trustee and associate editor, Pym-Randall Press, 1968-80, and associate editor of Barn Dream Press.