Poem by James Tate to Anime
James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 8, 1943. His father was an American pilot killed in the Second World War in 1944, when Tate was five months old.
His first collection of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967), was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, making him one of the youngest poets to receive the honor.
The collection was well-received, and influenced a generation of poets in the late sixties and seventies with its use of dream logic and psychological play. In a 1998 radio review, the critic Dana Gioia said about the debut: “Tate had domesticated surrealism. He had taken this foreign style, which had almost always seemed slightly alien in English—even among its most talented practitioners like Charles Simic and Donald Justice—and had made it sound not just native but utterly down-home.”
“Celestial blueness”…umm. The poem starts out violently real and traumatic but gravitates quickly toward the dreamy and symbolic.
Poet’s voice has good dub on this animation which was quite astoundingly colorful and complementary to words and images.
‘Search for lost lives’ could mean a swell of things–it elicits many emotions in me. Our lives are an encyclopedia of possible tangents. Are we really at the place in our life where we’re supposed to be? Are there no mistakes? Is everything as it should be? I know one could spend years of days pondering upon it and in the meantime let life pass by. But certainly a wayward thought can sometimes get us back on track and give us perspective.
Interesting media piece here! thx.