James Tate (writer)

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

Life

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.

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.

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.

Published works

Full-Length Poetry Collections

• The Ghost Soldiers (Ecco Press, 2008)
• Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004)
• Memoir of the Hawk (2002)
• Shroud of the Gnome (Ecco Press, 1997)
• Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Ecco Press, 1995) (National Book Award)
• James Tate: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991) (1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams Award)
• Distance from Loved Ones (Wesleyan University Press), 1990)
• Reckoner (Wesleyan University Press, 1986)
• Constant Defender (Ecco Press, 1983)
• Riven Doggeries (Ecco Press, 1979)
• Viper Jazz (Wesleyan University Press, 1976)
• A Sip for Gabrielle (1974)
• Absences: New Poems (Little, Brown & Co., 1972)
• Hints to Pilgrims(Halty Ferguson, 1971)
• The Oblivion Ha-Ha (Little, Brown & Co., 1970)
• The Torches (1968)
• The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967)

Chapbooks

• Lost River (Sarabande Books, 2003)
• Land of Little Sticks (Metacom Press, 1981)
• Just Shades (Parallel Editions, 1985, illustrated by John Alcorn)
• Apology for Eating Geoffrey Movius’ Hyacinth (Unicorn Press, 1972)
• Amnesia People (Little Balkans Press, 1970)
• Wrong Songs (H. Ferguson, 1970)
• Shepherds of the Mist (Black Sparrow Press, 1969)
• Torches (Unicorn Press 1968)

Prose

• Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories (Verse Press, 2002)
• The Route as Briefed (University of Michigan Press, 1999)
• Hottentot Ossuary (Temple Bar Bookshop, 1974)

Collaborations

• Lucky Darryl (Release Press, 1977, a novel co-written with Bill Knott)
• Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy??? (Cloud Marauder Press, 1970, poems co-written with Bill Knott)

Honors and awards

• Pulitzer Prize
• William Carlos Williams Award
• National Institute of Arts and Letters Award
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry
• National Book Award
• Wallace Stevens Award
• Yale Series of Younger Poets

Sources

• Library of Congress Online Catalog > James Tate

External links

• Charles Simic (Summer 2006). "James Tate, The Art of Poetry No. 92". The Paris Review.
• James Tate's Author Page at Wave Books
• Audio: James Tate reading 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
• James Tate on PennSound
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