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Return To The City Of White Donkeys -- Poems by James Tate

James Tate suffers from a crucial problem I myself would kill to have: he's prolific and has published many, many books. Having said that, across his many books, both poetry and prose, he tends to write within the same theme and voice, with the same consistent poetic choices. James Tate suffers from a crucial problem that almost all of us do: he has a comfort zone.

That in and of itself isn't a bad thing per say. At his best, these factors meet in crescendo, creating fresh and inspiring verse. At his most comfortable he comes as off as someone else writing their version of a James Tate poem. Tateiness, you might say, is what ruins Tate's latest volume of poetry. The wonderful Russell Edsonness of the first poem quickly dissipates in a sigh of the same tricks and Tate as you turn the page.

If not for Tate, Edson, Simic, and Knott, the "Boston Surrealists" like I like to say, many folks like myself may never have gotten into poetry. Prose poetry's knack is weighed to its content, but in this book Tate seems to heavy-handedly suggest a meaning larger than the small worlds and moments his characters occupy. He does this mostly in the last lines from poem to poem, leaving us a bit forced into conclusion, or the purposeful absence of one.

In this absence, we tend to search. In this day and age, we've come to expect every poet to be working out an intellectual project in his or her book, a "wire monkey" as Brian Teare often said to me. It reads like a Spoon River anthology in disparate verse, each poem is an interesting through dimensionless new person and place, though that is just my personal projection.

This book is about 1/3rd too long, not necessarily poem wise but word and line wise. Tate's imagination is as odd and amazing as ever, but his editorial choices and eye are the largest question. It's a shame that a smattering of mediocre poems skews the bell curve for the small smattering of brilliant poems. It's worth flipping though, but for Tate at his best pick up Worshipful Company of Fletchers or The Lost Pilot.

Patrick

Labels: Recommended Reading