James Tate
1943- , Kansas City , MO
Chancellor 2001-2007

Photo credit: Andrea Holland
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On December 8, 1943, James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. 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.”

Tate published prolifically over the next two decades, including The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970); Hints to Pilgrims (1971); Absences (1972); Viper Jazz (1976); Constant Defender (1983); Distance from Loved Ones (1990); and Selected Poems (1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award.

Since then, he has published several collections of poems, most recently The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990 - 2010 (Ecco Press, 2012); The Ghost Soldiers (2008); Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004); Memoir of the Hawk (2001); Shroud of the Gnome (1997); and Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), which won the National Book Award.

Tate has also published various works of prose, including a short story collection Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (Wave Books, 2001), a collection of critical prose, The Route as Briefed (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and a collaborative novel (with poet Bill Knott), Lucky Darryl (Release Press, 1977). He also served as editor of The Best American Poetry 1997.

About his work, the poet John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times: “Local color plays a role, but the main event is the poet’s wrestling with passing moments, frantically trying to discover the poetry there and to preserve it, perishable as it is. Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere... I return to Tate’s books more often perhaps than to any others when I want to be reminded afresh of the possibilities of poetry.”

Tate’s honors include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, a 1995 Tanning Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

The Lost Pilot (1967)
The Oblivion Ha-Ha (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1970)
Hints to Pilgrims (Halty Ferguson, 1971)
Absences (Little, Brown and Company, 1972)
Viper Jazz (Wesleyan University Press, 1976)
Riven Doggeries (Ecco Press, 1979)
Constant Defender (1983)
Reckoner (1986)
Distance from Loved Ones (1990)
Selected Poems (1991)
Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994)
Shroud of the Gnome (1997)
Memoir of the Hawk (2001)
Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004)
The Ghost Soldiers (2008)

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/james-tate

The Lost Pilot
BY JAMES TATE
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,***
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,***
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.***
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,***
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,***
read your face as Dallas,***
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads***
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.***
However frightening, I would***
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make***
you face your wife, or Dallas,***
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy***
orbiting, and I would not try***
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know***
is this: when I see you,***
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,***
spin across the wilds of the sky***
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were***
the residue of a stranger’s life,***
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,***
I cannot get off the ground,***
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling***
to tell me that you are doing***
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune***
placed these worlds in us.
James Tate, “The Lost Pilot” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1991 by James Tate. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991)

a few words about The Lost Pilot by James Tate
BY JEFFREY MCDANIEL
About 6 months ago, on Facebook, I was looking for ways to engage my nearly 1000 friends (many of whom I* had never met). One day I posted a provocative question as my status update to see what kind of response I would get: “Jeffrey McDaniel wonders if you consider the poem The Lost Pilot by James Tate to be confessional or not.”
I received over 20 comments, most of them quite thoughtful. The overall social-networking verdict leaned towards the poem not being classified as confessional (an ambiguous term I realize). I was and am aware of how absurd it is to call anything written by James Tate confessional. So I was surprised a few months later to stumble upon Gregory Orr’s essay, The Post-Confessional Lyric, where he lists several dozen poems from the 60′s and 70′s as being “post-confessional” (another ambiguous term), including The Lost Pilot. This emboldened me to take another look at the poem through a confessional lens.* http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=177311
Certainly the space between speaker and author is collapsed, and the reader is privy to an extremely intimate address from a young man to his dead father. In reality, the father was shot down during World War II and literally gave his life to protect his country. Many people would consider it a very noble death. But the speaker projects a confessional narrative onto his father’s absence. In reality, his father can’t be with the family, but in the speaker’s heart/mind, the father doesn’t want to be with family. In the speaker’s transformative imagination, the father has run away, is playing hooky. His orbiting is “compulsive” and “crazy”. He’s having a grand old time up there, in the sky. The father could return, but he doesn’t want to. What makes the poem even sadder is how numb the speaker is, how he feels almost nothing, and how longing to make a connection with his orbiting father, he cannot get off the ground.
Perhaps I should add that this is a poem I fell in love with when I first read it as a freshman in college, that I loved the combination of imagination and feeling.
Whether or not we think of the poem as confessional (for the record, I would not categorize it as such), maybe we can agree that the poem functions like an emotional pin in Tate’s oeuvre, A single autobiographical poem, played expertly at the very beginning of his career that alleviated the need for him to ever be so direct again. Some of us may feel the poem’s presence when we read the rest of Tate’s work, like the poem is an emotional anchor, looking in the background, keeping his wild, non-referential, intuitive poems from floating up, up, and away.

Posted in Uncategorized on Monday, April 19th, 2010 by Jeffrey McDaniel.

تعليقات حول القصيدة

Nadine Gallo (11/19/2011 300 AM)
The poet idealizes his lost father who crashed during WWII in the company of his buddies who are imagined to suffer decomposition. For the poet, Dad is forever orbiting and never landing. He is immortal in his mind. The urgent, certain voice of the narrator convinces the reader that his father is immortal regardless of what really happened. Heroes who die young give up their lives with their families in exchange for immortality. That is the traditional hero myth. Yeats wrote a poem about an Irish airman who died in WWI from a less personal POV. This one won the Yale prize and set Tate up for his long career in poetry. (Report) Reply

Marina Gipps (7/20/2007 600 PM)
I love this poem dearly. This is probably my favorite contemporary poem of all time. This poem should be on every poetry list in every school. Tate's 'The Lost Pilot' and Simic's 'Butcher Shop' are two poems that inspired me to read more poetry and to write more poetry. Another great Tate poem is 'Who Can Tell if He Is Awake' (I think that's the title...I might be off one or two words...but it has all kinds of magical stuff going on in that poem. That's what I love about Tate. There is a definitely a suspension of disbelief when you read him. Even when something seems silly there is a serious undertone to it that just breaks my heart. Everyone should read Tate, Simic, and Strand...their poetry...all Pulitzer prize winners and all poets that will be remembered long after they are gone. (Report
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وهذه قراءة للقصيدة
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-lost-pilot/

The Lost Pilot
by James Tate

Themes and Meanings (Critical Guide to Poetry for Students)
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“The Lost Pilot” is a poem about bereavement and the many improvisations that the heart performs as it seeks a way to hope and to live again after a shattering loss. The poet confronts a literal and figurative void as he mourns the disappearance of a father he never knew. Denied, by the unique and violent circumstances of his pilot-father’s wartime death (1944 was the most terrible year of World War II), the consolations of a conventional funeral ritual, he is also denied the consolations of fond memory, as he has virtually no memories of his father at all. (The poet was less than one year old when his father was lost.) Without memories, the poet is forced to the abstract extreme of grief, an extreme at which his actions become the most vivid imaginable representations of the uncertainties and anxieties of human grief. One wonders in what ways every individual is an orphan. To what extent is every human being diminished by the universal and individual reality of death? The bargaining into which the poet enters with his orbiting father could be seen as emblematic of the ways in which all religions and philosophies seek to question and to cajole the unknown. Because his father cannot step down from the sky, the poet can only continue to state his case to the silence. In this, the poet suggests to the reader that everyone must find means to accept limitations to their individual lives and happiness which, though inevitable, are not necessarily endurable.

James Tate and American Surrealism

James Tate is the perpetual enfant terrible of American poetry. For the past thirty years his strange, provocative, and often disturbing poems have fascinated critics and fellow-poets. Even now, in his mid-fifties, after having won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and most of the establishment's other awards, even now after having been appointed full professor at a major state university, Tate still seems like an outsider–a brilliant, troubled youth who has never settled down.

Tate came to prominence very early. In 1967 his first collection, The Lost Pilot, won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets competition. Now, in America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension. (I recently read one avant-garde anthology of "younger" poets in which the average age of the contributor was 61 & 1/2.) But James Tate was perhaps the youngest writer ever to win the Yale competition in the 8 decades of its existence. When the book appeared, he was only 23 and still a student in the University of Iowa's graduate writing program.

Tate's debut made an enormous impression–at least on other writers. The Yale Younger Poets series had not yet lost its editorial cachet. The Ivy League series was then still the most influential–and mainstream–introduction a new American poet could have. In the late Sixties American poetry was ostentatiously reinventing itself. Experimentalism was the sign of artistic authenticity, and ambitious writers were eagerly exploring new avenues of expression.

With The Lost Pilot Tate struck an unmistakably new and original note. He had, in fact, successfully accomplished something that many other poets had been trying–mostly without conspicuous success. 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.

One of the provocative ironies of twentieth century literature is that during the Thirties and Forties when surrealism was transforming the landscape of European and Latin American poetry, it never took root in the United States. Surrealism changed poetry from Sweden to Bolivia, from Greece to Costa Rica. It even found a foothold in England. But in America it initially created no significant body of work. Why did the self-proclaimed style of the future make such a minimal impression in the land of the modern?

There were, of course, many reasons why surrealism was so slow in coming to America–not the least of which was that the U.S. already had a thriving Modernist movement. With Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, and William Carlos Williams all active, who needed Andrè Breton to be modern? But there was, I suggest, another, more curious reason that no one ever mentions. My own guess for the main reason that American poetry–and painting and sculpture–did not initially pounce on surrealism was that Hollywood got there first. And not just Hollywood–it's worse than that–it was the animated cartoon.

America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took–quite literally–the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic? No, American surrealism had to wait until the Fleischer studio had gone bankrupt, Tex Avery had died, and an older, safer Walt Disney began hosting a Sunday evening family TV hour.

American surrealism also had to wait for another generation–a generation that had grown up on cartoons and movies. It required writers who did not necessarily see high culture and popular culture in opposition. This shift in sensibility finally arrived in the Sixties. The new surrealism also reflected a growing internationalism in American poetry, an interest in modern poetry outside the English-speaking world. Sophisticated poets like James Wright, Robert Bly, and Donald Justice studied and translated foreign modernists. They explored surrealistic techniques as a way of broadening their own imaginative range. A generation younger, Tate (who was a student of Donald justice at Iowa) approached the new style in a less intellectual and scholarly way. Neither a translator nor a critic, he worked by instinct and obsession.

In The Lost Pilot Tate usually created a clear narrative line in his poems. Only as the details of the story and situation unfolded in an increasingly bizarre fashion, did one realize that the speaker inhabited some private landscape of dream or hallucination. Although Tate claimed he often wrote in a trance, his poems gave no hint of automatic writing. The poems were tightly constructed. The language clean and sharply chiseled. The style was not from the cafes of Paris or Barcelona but from the workshops of Iowa City. What Tate borrowed from surrealism was the use of dream logic and free association. Often he would incorporate these principles into something very similar to the standard confessional poem as in the title poem of his first collection, "The Lost Pilot." This poem was dedicated to Tate's father, an American pilot who was killed in the Second World War at the age of 22–the same age, significantly, that the poet was when the book had been accepted for publication.

طب ياله انترجم القصيدة



The Lost Pilot
BY JAMES TATE
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,***
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,***
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.***
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,***
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,***
read your face as Dallas,***
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads***
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.***
However frightening, I would***
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make***
you face your wife, or Dallas,***
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy***
orbiting, and I would not try***
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know***
is this: when I see you,***
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,***
spin across the wilds of the sky***
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were***
the residue of a stranger’s life,***
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,***
I cannot get off the ground,***
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling***
to tell me that you are doing***
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune***
placed these worlds in us.
James Tate, “The Lost Pilot” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1991 by James Tate. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991)