James Tate (writer)

James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is a professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts.

Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to carve, invert, and play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.

Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange. He is now regarded as one of America's best living poets.

He has published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

He has taught poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Emerson College. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has worked since 1971. He is a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.

Tate is the subject of On James Tate (2004), edited by Brian Henry.

Poetry by James Tate

• 1967. The Lost Pilot
• 1970. The Oblivion Ha-Ha
• 1971. Hints to Pilgrims
• 1972. Absences
• 1976. Viper Jazz
• 1977. Lucky Darryl (1977, together with Bill Knott)
• 1979. Riven Doggeries
• 1983. Constant Defender
• 1986. Reckoner
• 1990. Distance from Loved Ones
• 1991. Selected Poems (1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams Award)
• 1995. Worshipful Company of Fletchers (National Book Award)
• 1998. Shroud of the Gnome
• 2002. Memoir of the Hawk
• 2004. Return to the City of White Donkeys
• 2008. Ghost Soldiers

External links

• Audio recording (.mp3) of James Tate reading from his work at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2003
• Interview with James Tate
• James Tate's page at The University of Massachusetts' MFA Program for Poets & Writers