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5 Things I Learned About Writing From the Poetry of James Tate
Great poetry can teach writers of all genres lessons
I mentioned here how I became a fan of the American poet James Tate in college. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943. He taught at my university. I never got to study with him but I was lucky enough to see him read a few times. According to the Poetry Foundation:
Tate’s poems have been described as tragic, comic, absurdist, ironic, hopeful, haunting, lonely, and surreal.
I would agree with all of this, but also his work was many things. He was hard to pin down. He was inarguably a pioneer in post-modernism, but also flew under the radar, for all of his achievements, compared to some of his peers.
His work was surrealist and experimental, with a nudge and a wink. Later work often has a cornfed folksy Americana veneer that descends into absurdism, or existential quandary. Saying that I have mostly found his poetry accessible — it is never too prosaic, or too lofty.
Some might see the depth of his vocabulary and twists and turns of his work and disagree with me But I never felt like he was being willfully obtuse. His humor is often silly, and I laugh at his poems often. His poems are whimsical but also earthbound somehow.
