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Good Letters

james-tateThe poet James Tate died last year. It happened in July. He was seventy-one years old. This, then, is the first Lent and Easter season we’ve been without him. Pity, that.

Back some years ago, The Paris Review published a lovely conversation between Charles Simic and James Tate. Simic opens up the conversation by noting that Tate, in a poem called “South End,” defined the challenge of poetry as the following:

“The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.”

Simic asks Tate to explain what he means by “the ordinary” and “the horseshit.” Tate responds by saying that he means “the ultimate horseshit,” which can be found, he elaborates, “anywhere.” Not, admittedly, the most helpful of elaborations.

Simic then notes that Tate’s line about the ultimate and the horseshit can be boiled down to the well-known idea that the job of poetry is to “find the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary.” Tate responds that he’s well aware he’s mouthing a platitude. But, Tate says, he added the word “horseshit” to “make it a bit more distinctive.”

The conversation between Tate and Simic proceeds more or less along these lines. Tragedy is discussed. Comedy is discussed. Family is discussed. Death makes an appearance.

It should be said that James Tate was an American poet. There is no special methodology for being an American poet. Except that all good American poets tend to do something like what Tate describes in the following comment:

“Sure, you can just walk by somebody downtown and overhear one phrase and it’s a cliché and suddenly you go, Wow, actually that’s very beautiful when it’s taken out of its normal meaning. It’s very stimulating and it gives you a lot to think about. Wow.”

That, to my mind, is the American poetic methodology in its essence. You go downtown. You hear things. You write them down in a different context. Poetry.

I’m not being flip or cynical here. It is a brilliant and beautiful methodology. And not at all easy to do. It is something Wallace Stevens did that one time when he said “the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” Or Williams Carlos Williams when he wrote:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

Empty, otherwise-dumb thoughts and fragments of conversation lifted up by the poet’s ear are made to quiver in the pure ether, the queer spaceless space of language decontextualized and then recontextualized as poetic line. That is what American poets do. The American thing is to go for the ultimate in the horseshit.

All of this is preface to the fact that James Tate once wrote a very good Jesus poem. One of the best, to my mind. I also think of it as a Lenten poem and an Easter poem. Here’s how it goes:

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so
deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead
bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he
wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t
mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love
everybody.

Now, I’m not going to go crazy analyzing this poem, mostly because it doesn’t need it. Instead, let’s just point out a few things. First off, the idea that Jesus was dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. That is good.

And the idea that Jesus was having a nightmare. Excellent. Yes, a nightmare. Why not?

But the nightmare goes away, as nightmares do. The nightmare dissolves into a beautiful day. Then Jesus has a cheeky morning dialogue with himself. He offers himself some coffee. He accepts.

He decides to take a little ride on his donkey. Brilliant. He likes his donkey. More than that, he loves his donkey.

Then the thought occurs to Jesus, he doesn’t just love his donkey. He loves everybody. The donkey—and everybody else.

God, a Gospel writer once opined, is love. Sure. What does it mean, though? What would such a thing look like?

That’s very hard to say. Hard to put your finger on until a sense of it washes over you one day, if only for the most fleeting of fleeting moments. Such a fleeting moment is captured in Tate’s poem.

The first three lines set it up. The final three lines carry it home. “Wake up!” the poem says. Wake up from the nightmare and have some coffee and take a ride on the donkey.

If you won’t wake up, that’s too bad. There’s another task for you, then. We let the dead bury the dead. The nightmare will continue.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Morgan Meis

Morgan Meis is the critic-at-large for The Smart Set (thesmartset.com). He has a PhD in Philosophy and has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com

1 Comment

  1. Peggy Rosenthal on April 6, 2016 at 7:42 am

    Love your delineation of American poetic methodology: “You go downtown. You hear things. You write them down in a different context. Poetry.”
    I’d say it starts with Whtiman.
    It’s consummately egalitarian–since anyone and everyone is downtown uttering the words you hear. And egalitarianism is a prime American value (not that we often live it out these days, alas).



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