r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal
summer 2008 book review
by richard wirick
JUXTAPOSITIONS
GHOST SOLDIERS
JAMES TATE
NEW YORK: ECCO (215 pgs.)
Is there an American poet more immune to classification than James Tate? He
began with searching lyrics like 'So this is the dark street/Where only an angel lives/
I never saw anything like it,' and moved through less formal, personal structures to
the diffuse prose poems of the last few books. The narrative itself-squirrelly as it
always is---is the driving force in these pieces. But not only is the narrator
unreliable, he sometimes seems to have, say, no molecular structure. As Charles
Simic says of these vignettes: "A poem out of nothing . . . .is Tate's genius . . . just
about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction." In
Ghost Soldiers, Tate's newest and largest group, he may have finally moved the
form up onto the high, open ground of greatness.
Part of what Tate does on this ground, and hence his singularity, is to solo-face
and plant by himself the Surrealist flag in American verse. (Others have preceded
and followed, but, as we shall see, brought their own treatments to the "waking
dreamscape".) From 1916 to the period between the wars, Surrealism moved from
the plastic arts into literature with a vengeance. From Breton's Paris to Latin
America's Vallejo (and even in stodgy England), poetry especially embraced
Surrealism's unsettling objects, human grotesques, and menacing features of
nature. Not so in America. Man Ray was from Brooklyn, but no Man Ray-nothing at
all like him-showed up in the New World's poetic landscape.
Maybe this was because America had its own kind of Modernism and was already
overloaded with experimentation. There was Eliot's "senses of meaning" as opposed
to meaning itself; Faulkner's ornate but dreamless associational segues; Pound's
montages of divergent histories and languages; and Stevens' atmospherics of pure,
sometimes senseless sound (or sense from pure sound). Who needed a Tristan
Tzara or a Mayakovsky in America's homespun, already bustling hothouse?
After World War II, and in the midst of the academics like Lowell, Berryman and
Bishop, I count three Surrealists tiptoeing out onto the domestic stage. The
Canadian Mark Strand and Serbian-born Charles Simic threw up a host of Surrealist
props, but all buffed them with a polished sheen, the odd and unsettling ambered
over with formalist shellacks. (In fact, Tate's first collection, The Lost Pilot, awarded
the 1965 Yale Younger Poets Prize when he was still at the Iowa Writers Workshop
[!], fits squarely into this 'formalist Surrealism'.)
But then Tate, who wasn't just American-born but was from the heart of the
heart of the country-Kansas City-let loose with a whole new stage full of squeaky,
squawking, shrieking horns, just like the ones he heard for nights on end as a high
school student in the KC bars. Charlie Parker and Bix Bierderbecke showed him how
improvisation in prose poetry could be structured like a sax chorus---note clusters
multiplying from one another in uncertain directions, the form and the form alone
becoming the body, the vestment of composition.
This method stood Tate in good stead through the 70s and 80s in collections like
The Oblivion Ha-Ha and Riven Doggeries. A narrator, often no more than a
solipsistic, self-contained eye, would sit abashed as creatures, concepts, and flea
market thing-a-ma-jigs floated like Thanksgiving parade balloons into his field of
attention. They were burlesque comic "types;" compressions of high mimetic and
low-brow phrases ("Frivolous Blind Death Child"); characters who were usually
collectors of abuse and subsequent resentments; and pure
ciphers---animal-vegetable-mineral mixtures who talked back, took a few steps,
then turned into something else.
In subsequent collections (Worshipful Collection of Fletchers) these "small
movies" (as one critic called them) became monochromatic and repetitive. Narrators
and observations seemed much too interchangeable. If you'd read one poem you
hadn't read them all, but you could skip the next three or four. This doesn't make
for energized poetry, even cutting some slack to prose poetry.
And as with some Surrealism and all highly stylized, "clever" forms, these pieces
drew far too much attention to their outward features, leading to suspicions there
was little below the dazzling surface water. Like Borges' Ficciones, Tate's "dreams of
a robot dancing bee," however lovely, however delicate, seemed highly cerebral and
gamey, emotionally vacant, empty-hearted. The interplay between observer and
observed was that of two constructs, reciprocal machines. It was hard for themes to
develop in such poetry: yearning, searching and finding were substituted by
laughter at such endeavors. This hyper-irony was summed up in one of his brilliant,
heartless lines I used as an epigraph for a book of my own: "Of course it's a tragic
story; that's why it's so funny."
Not so with Ghost Soldiers. And Simic, however observant, is wrong if using the
foregoing "out of nothing/anti-poetry" quote to describe this new collection. For all
the undirected meanderings, for all the chattering, squiggly spins of the radio dial,
rich and topical themes emerge out of these hundred-plus pieces. Two arise in
particular abundance. First, the relation of parents to children. Second is what could
be seen as at least one of this bond's destroyers: wars and their aftermath. In
'Father's Day,' the narrator watches the ladder of bonding opportunities---hard
work, but graspable with determination---slip finally out of his hands forever:
My daughter has lived overseas for a number of years
now. She married into royalty, and they won't let her
communicate with any of her family of friends. She lives
on birdseed and a few sips of water. She dreams of me
constantly. Her husband, the Prince, whips her when he
catches her dreaming. Fierce guard dogs won't let her
out of their sight. I hired a detective, but he was killed
while trying to rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters
to the State department. They have written back saying
they are aware of the situation. I never saw her dance.
I was always away at some convention. I never saw her
sing. I was always working late. I called her my Prin-
cess, to make up for my shortcomings, but she never
forgave me. Birdseed was her middle name.
The war poems are the masterpieces here. Too widely spaced to be a 'cycle,' they
throb and beam their tropes of senseless loss off one another. Parades of the dead
march by like figures in a Bosch canvas, leaving the speaker to pass through their
chilly wakes and putrid, standing air. Dialogues are filled with ambiguities of security
and protection, what counts as a "mission" and how it would be "accomplished":
There were some bald men in a field pushing a huge all,
but the ball wasn't moving. . . . A woman walked by and
stopped beside me. "What are those men doing down there?"
she said. "It's a warrior thing," I said. "They're working out
some technical problems. They're protecting us from evil,
but the plan is still in the stages of development." "Does
that big ball represent evil" she said. "It's either evil or good.
They're still trying to work that one out," I said. "Some men
live on such an exalted plane, it's a wonder anything ever
gets done, " she said. "I meant that as a compliment of course.'
('Special Operations')
It doesn't get any more Pure Tate than this. The herd ends up following whatever
the half-assed philosopher kings say they are doing; if anything remains to be
understood, it is all outside of the little peoples' ken, as only the wise men can judge
their own actions. The freedom-fearing woman, like a serf out of Chekhov ("What is
it about us that fears liberty?"), catches and checks her own incipient skepticism
brilliantly, sadly: "I meant that as a compliment, of course." They are stick people
but their language-fleetingly glimpsed---gives them the fullness of crushed spirits,
Nietschean sheep, Republican wives.
Samuel Johnson (or was it Eliot?) criticized Chaucer for lacking a "high
seriousness," and Tate has been a magnet for similar charges. But while keeping all
of his zaniness and verve, Tate has really written in Ghost Soldiers a book of subtle,
softly echoing anti-war poetry. "Sure it's a tragic story; that's why it's so funny."
But still it is tragic, first and foremost. The farces of the world don't make the world
a farce; it still cries out to be made better.
summer 2008 book review
by richard wirick
JUXTAPOSITIONS
GHOST SOLDIERS
JAMES TATE
NEW YORK: ECCO (215 pgs.)
Is there an American poet more immune to classification than James Tate? He
began with searching lyrics like 'So this is the dark street/Where only an angel lives/
I never saw anything like it,' and moved through less formal, personal structures to
the diffuse prose poems of the last few books. The narrative itself-squirrelly as it
always is---is the driving force in these pieces. But not only is the narrator
unreliable, he sometimes seems to have, say, no molecular structure. As Charles
Simic says of these vignettes: "A poem out of nothing . . . .is Tate's genius . . . just
about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction." In
Ghost Soldiers, Tate's newest and largest group, he may have finally moved the
form up onto the high, open ground of greatness.
Part of what Tate does on this ground, and hence his singularity, is to solo-face
and plant by himself the Surrealist flag in American verse. (Others have preceded
and followed, but, as we shall see, brought their own treatments to the "waking
dreamscape".) From 1916 to the period between the wars, Surrealism moved from
the plastic arts into literature with a vengeance. From Breton's Paris to Latin
America's Vallejo (and even in stodgy England), poetry especially embraced
Surrealism's unsettling objects, human grotesques, and menacing features of
nature. Not so in America. Man Ray was from Brooklyn, but no Man Ray-nothing at
all like him-showed up in the New World's poetic landscape.
Maybe this was because America had its own kind of Modernism and was already
overloaded with experimentation. There was Eliot's "senses of meaning" as opposed
to meaning itself; Faulkner's ornate but dreamless associational segues; Pound's
montages of divergent histories and languages; and Stevens' atmospherics of pure,
sometimes senseless sound (or sense from pure sound). Who needed a Tristan
Tzara or a Mayakovsky in America's homespun, already bustling hothouse?
After World War II, and in the midst of the academics like Lowell, Berryman and
Bishop, I count three Surrealists tiptoeing out onto the domestic stage. The
Canadian Mark Strand and Serbian-born Charles Simic threw up a host of Surrealist
props, but all buffed them with a polished sheen, the odd and unsettling ambered
over with formalist shellacks. (In fact, Tate's first collection, The Lost Pilot, awarded
the 1965 Yale Younger Poets Prize when he was still at the Iowa Writers Workshop
[!], fits squarely into this 'formalist Surrealism'.)
But then Tate, who wasn't just American-born but was from the heart of the
heart of the country-Kansas City-let loose with a whole new stage full of squeaky,
squawking, shrieking horns, just like the ones he heard for nights on end as a high
school student in the KC bars. Charlie Parker and Bix Bierderbecke showed him how
improvisation in prose poetry could be structured like a sax chorus---note clusters
multiplying from one another in uncertain directions, the form and the form alone
becoming the body, the vestment of composition.
This method stood Tate in good stead through the 70s and 80s in collections like
The Oblivion Ha-Ha and Riven Doggeries. A narrator, often no more than a
solipsistic, self-contained eye, would sit abashed as creatures, concepts, and flea
market thing-a-ma-jigs floated like Thanksgiving parade balloons into his field of
attention. They were burlesque comic "types;" compressions of high mimetic and
low-brow phrases ("Frivolous Blind Death Child"); characters who were usually
collectors of abuse and subsequent resentments; and pure
ciphers---animal-vegetable-mineral mixtures who talked back, took a few steps,
then turned into something else.
In subsequent collections (Worshipful Collection of Fletchers) these "small
movies" (as one critic called them) became monochromatic and repetitive. Narrators
and observations seemed much too interchangeable. If you'd read one poem you
hadn't read them all, but you could skip the next three or four. This doesn't make
for energized poetry, even cutting some slack to prose poetry.
And as with some Surrealism and all highly stylized, "clever" forms, these pieces
drew far too much attention to their outward features, leading to suspicions there
was little below the dazzling surface water. Like Borges' Ficciones, Tate's "dreams of
a robot dancing bee," however lovely, however delicate, seemed highly cerebral and
gamey, emotionally vacant, empty-hearted. The interplay between observer and
observed was that of two constructs, reciprocal machines. It was hard for themes to
develop in such poetry: yearning, searching and finding were substituted by
laughter at such endeavors. This hyper-irony was summed up in one of his brilliant,
heartless lines I used as an epigraph for a book of my own: "Of course it's a tragic
story; that's why it's so funny."
Not so with Ghost Soldiers. And Simic, however observant, is wrong if using the
foregoing "out of nothing/anti-poetry" quote to describe this new collection. For all
the undirected meanderings, for all the chattering, squiggly spins of the radio dial,
rich and topical themes emerge out of these hundred-plus pieces. Two arise in
particular abundance. First, the relation of parents to children. Second is what could
be seen as at least one of this bond's destroyers: wars and their aftermath. In
'Father's Day,' the narrator watches the ladder of bonding opportunities---hard
work, but graspable with determination---slip finally out of his hands forever:
My daughter has lived overseas for a number of years
now. She married into royalty, and they won't let her
communicate with any of her family of friends. She lives
on birdseed and a few sips of water. She dreams of me
constantly. Her husband, the Prince, whips her when he
catches her dreaming. Fierce guard dogs won't let her
out of their sight. I hired a detective, but he was killed
while trying to rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters
to the State department. They have written back saying
they are aware of the situation. I never saw her dance.
I was always away at some convention. I never saw her
sing. I was always working late. I called her my Prin-
cess, to make up for my shortcomings, but she never
forgave me. Birdseed was her middle name.
The war poems are the masterpieces here. Too widely spaced to be a 'cycle,' they
throb and beam their tropes of senseless loss off one another. Parades of the dead
march by like figures in a Bosch canvas, leaving the speaker to pass through their
chilly wakes and putrid, standing air. Dialogues are filled with ambiguities of security
and protection, what counts as a "mission" and how it would be "accomplished":
There were some bald men in a field pushing a huge all,
but the ball wasn't moving. . . . A woman walked by and
stopped beside me. "What are those men doing down there?"
she said. "It's a warrior thing," I said. "They're working out
some technical problems. They're protecting us from evil,
but the plan is still in the stages of development." "Does
that big ball represent evil" she said. "It's either evil or good.
They're still trying to work that one out," I said. "Some men
live on such an exalted plane, it's a wonder anything ever
gets done, " she said. "I meant that as a compliment of course.'
('Special Operations')
It doesn't get any more Pure Tate than this. The herd ends up following whatever
the half-assed philosopher kings say they are doing; if anything remains to be
understood, it is all outside of the little peoples' ken, as only the wise men can judge
their own actions. The freedom-fearing woman, like a serf out of Chekhov ("What is
it about us that fears liberty?"), catches and checks her own incipient skepticism
brilliantly, sadly: "I meant that as a compliment, of course." They are stick people
but their language-fleetingly glimpsed---gives them the fullness of crushed spirits,
Nietschean sheep, Republican wives.
Samuel Johnson (or was it Eliot?) criticized Chaucer for lacking a "high
seriousness," and Tate has been a magnet for similar charges. But while keeping all
of his zaniness and verve, Tate has really written in Ghost Soldiers a book of subtle,
softly echoing anti-war poetry. "Sure it's a tragic story; that's why it's so funny."
But still it is tragic, first and foremost. The farces of the world don't make the world
a farce; it still cries out to be made better.
