RIP James Tate
James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Tate’s poems were “always concerned to tell us that beneath the busyness and loneliness of our daily lives, there remains in us the possibility for peace, happiness and real human connection,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Times.
Tate was born in Missouri but lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1971. “I’ve imagined that every character and every single event takes place in this town, Amherst,” he once confessed. But John Ashbery once opined that Tate is a “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere.”
His poetry is often described as absurdist, and indeed the speakers in his poems come across as bewildered narrators who are as inquisitive as they are clueless—which is all part of their charm. His poetry has also been described as comic, ironic, hopeful, lonely, and surreal; “I love my funny poems,” he said, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.
Amherst has lost another creative soul
James Tate
James emerging
in unrelenting irony
at the very brink
of human consolation
and knowledge
with hungry eyes for beauty
which walks beside rivers
always at the edge
of your time’s consolation.
Saddened by this loss. I read that he got a copy of “Dome” from his editor before he passed away. I am enjoying the book very much. I remember getting “Fletchers” for my tenth birthday from my grandma Winnie. I tell her that I’m thankful she gave me it often. It inspired me at an early age. No one can write like James Tate. When I read the books, it is a resplendence transforming that horseshit that everyone fucking thinks is so fucking trivial. God damn it. 72? God damn it all.