Matthew Zapruder on James Tate's Last, Last Ones

Matthew Zapruder contributes a great introduction to the work of the late James Tate at the Paris Review. Zapruder explains that "[w]hen James Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind more than twenty collections of poetry and prose, including Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, published right around the time of his death. Most of us assumed that this was his final book." From there:

But it turned out there were more poems, which have been assembled into a truly final volume, The Government Lake, to be published by Ecco in July of 2019. One of those poems, “Elvis Has Left the House,” appears in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue.

Over the course of his career, Tate won every imaginable award available to American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He was revered by poets of virtually every aesthetic persuasion, from stern formalists to wild experimentalists. He had a legion of poor imitators, whom my friends and I called “lost pilots” after the legendary, eponymous poem of Tate’s first book, which won the most prestigious prize for young poets of its time, the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets award. When he wrote that book, he was only twenty-two, a kid from a deeply religious Pentecostal family in Kansas City, who somehow found his way to poetry and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The legend goes that he just showed up, showed them his poems, and was admitted on the spot by the director of the program, Donald Justice. If that story’s not true, I don’t want to know.

I was never a lost pilot, but I was a student of Jim’s in the nineties at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1971 until his death. As a teacher, Jim was pleasurably, respectfully distant yet astoundingly perceptive. He had great patience. He would wait and wait, for weeks and weeks, in vaguely kind ambivalence until a student finally did something truly magical, at which point he would come alive and praise that moment in the poem so precisely and with such great generosity that we all understood this was bigger than personality or ego. These moments were powerful, and not only the poet but everyone in the class learned something about what it meant to go beyond the ordinary. He somehow managed to avoid the pitfall of making us feel we were writing for him, probably because he so caustically discouraged any poetry that seemed like a bad imitation of his own. After I graduated, we became friendly, in the way two people from different generations can be when they love and have committed their lives to the same thing. He was kind and funny, and I never had any desire to forget that he was a master and I was privileged to be in his presence. He and his wife, the poet Dara Wier, also my teacher and mentor, always treated me with immense kindness. Privately, I considered them my poetry parents, or maybe (given the not-quite-parental age gap) my very cool poetry older brother and sister.

Learn more at Paris Review.