Hell, I Love Everybody E-Book

James Tate

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 78

Beschreibung

Hell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems by James Tate re-introduces the poet, providing a poem for every week of the year, every mood and season. It includes work from his first publication, The Lost Pilot, a Yale Younger Poets selection (1967) and all his subsequent books. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming, absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. All Tate's poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate was described as a surrealist. If he is, that surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by candour. John Ashbery wrote of 'his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting'.

Leseprobe

Hell, I Love Everybody

52 Poems

James Tate

Edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, and Kate Lindroos

CARCANET POETRY

Contents

Title PageForewordEditor’s NoteAcknowledgmentsGoodtime JesusThe Blue BoobyThe PromotionConsumedRaptureRead the Great PoetsHow the Pope Is ChosenThe RulesMy FelisbertoNeighborsThe Painter of the NightThe CowboyWorshipful Company of FletchersI Am a FinnI Am Still a FinnThe Formal InvitationUneasy about the Sounds of Some Night-Wandering AnimalDear ReaderI Left My Couch in TatamagoucheMy Great Great Etc. Uncle Patrick HenryTeaching the Ape to Write PoemsThe List of Famous HatsDistance from Loved OnesGo, YouthLoyaltyWhere Babies Come FromNever Again the SameToads Talking by a RiverTortureThe BookclubOf Whom Am I Afraid?A Largely Questioning Article Offering Few AnswersThe RulesRoscoe’s FarewellShroud of the GnomeFinding Out Something in a CafeSuffering BastardsThe RallyLewis and Clark Overheard in ConversationWild BeastsThe Ice Cream ManThe War Next DoorEverything But ThomasIt Happens Like ThisThe Eternal Ones of the DreamStray AnimalsPastoral SceneThe Lost PilotQuabbin ReservoirDream OnI Sat at My Desk and Contemplated All That I Had AccomplishedRescueAbout the AuthorAlso by James TateCopyright

Foreword

The ideal annual reading of James Tate’s Hell, I Love Everybody begins with die-hard fans volunteering wide-ranging accounts of their James Tate encounters. Readers recall where they were and what they felt hearing lines of the fifty-two poems in Hell, I Love Everybody. Most refer to the late poet as “Jim.” Only familiarity with the defamiliarizing feel of a Tate poem prepares a newcomer for one of these annual readings. Someone once read “I Left My Couch in Tatamagouche” over the beat of A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” at an event. Someone else claims to have heard Bill Murray read “The Blue Booby” under Brooklyn Bridge in the rainy season.

When the book event occurs in an abandoned zoo or bus depot, a policeman with a goat named “the Prince of Peace” usually makes a cameo. Some readers insist Tate appears disguised as the policeman or goat. When the book event happens near a river, some readers come dressed as toads. Marguerite Farnish Burridge and her husband, Knelm Oswald Lancelot Burridge, claimed to have attended a library reading where when Tate said, “A book can move from room to room without anyone touching it,” all the spines on the shelves and chairs shuddered. (The two agree they also saw Muhammad Ali levitate in a Four Seasons hotel hallway.) I tell the reader next to me that I found Tate all by myself in a Hartsville, South Carolina, bookstore in 1991. “I Am a Finn,” the reader replies, knowing.

Four muscular readers grab the corners of the portable stage, carrying it from the riverbank to the barn while the elderly woman on the stage recalls hearing Tate read “Where Babies Come From” at her sister’s baby shower. Who was the baby? “David Berman,” I shout from the crowd. The woman looks to see who said this and makes an unreadable face. “When Jim said our parents almost always stood on the wrong shore, we heard waves crashing though we were indoors,” she says, nearly toppling from the stagehands. Stan, a grizzled community college creative writing professor, claims to have organized a minor junior faculty rebellion after Tate read “How the Pope Is Chosen.” At some events two readers stage a reading of “The Rules,” standing at opposite sides of the event space shouting lines through bullhorns while readers in the audience repeat them.

The subtextual pang you find in a Jim Tate line, a deadpan panic, creeps into the echoes.

Tate seemed always to be saying someone else is saying something in his poems. He was a ventriloquist and witness. Somewhere there is voice-over bootleg footage of Jim Tate saying, “I’m just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich.” The Tate poem makes the dark and unknown as illuminating as the enlightened and logical. In a poem, “Just as many things exist in the dark as they do in the light.”

When Tate said to a team of junior gymnasts snowed in at a diner, “My felisberto is handsomer than your mergotroid,” there was, according to Jemma, one of the gymnasts, an outbreak of laughter so contagious, Mr. Tate could not finish his poem. Jemma who was so moved by Tate’s unfinished reading, she began the Jim Tate Reading Club for Gymnasts and Fans. Fans, coaches, opponents and their coaches and fans, and anyone in attendance with interest may join Jemma’s Jim Tate Reading Club for Gymnasts and Fans, now in year three and going strong.

The Tate poem is full of comedic timing and obsessive timekeeping. The Charlie Chaplin–like poet displaced to contemporary middle American ennui and deluded, denuded delight. Like the deadpan voice-over of a Charlie Kaufman high school hooky movie. Tate appears disguised as Charlie Brown or Charlie Parker. Tate appears disguised as a candy store shopkeeper impervious to ill will, a blue antelope, a woodpecker tapping Morse code into a dead oak tree, a pink-eyed extraterrestrial infatuated with John Ford Westerns. Tate’s poems induce imaginative fortitude. Events can happen in a mind, a mine, or a minefield, ideally when the temperate outdoors and indoors are the same.

When a reader contemplates leaving the book party, the reader who notices must say, “I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you.” The Jim Tate poem normalizes the bizarre, the dream-songy, the mythic, the absurd, the quotidian, the diurnal, surreal, and occasionally nightmarish feeling of life. “This is a house of unwritten poems, this is where I am unborn,” Tate tells readers in a room below a falling darkness, and then for years and years someone reads him saying it at a book party or alone at home. It’s truly wonderful to read in a James Tate voice alone or at public, private, or secret reading. Adjust your tongue so that it can hold a small key underneath. Adjust the ear at the back of your neck and the eye at the tip of your nose. Speak like a lost pilot in a lost key. Everyone is expected to read.

—Terrance Hayes

Editor’s Note

We began with the usual apprehension over eliminating poems and pages. “We” being Kate Lindroos, poet, essayist, and historian; and Emily Pettit, poet, artist, and James Tate’s stepdaughter; and me. We wanted to assemble a book that serves the elemental purpose of a love for keeping poetry nearby. We looked for a book matching as much as possible the big openheartedness throughout James Tate’s life-long dedication to poetry.

We understood the word essential, while inviting assurances of decisiveness and comprehensive selection, did not require us to focus on exclusion over inclusion. Once we realized this, the pleasure of thinking of what to include resembled the pleasure poetry provides when it helps us feel how open our minds can be, how pleasing thinking along with another’s mind can be, and how poetry lends us opportunities to think through what otherwise might not have occurred to us to explore.

A poem in Tate’s first book says … I would have lent you sugar … and this is what we hope to do, as well, in spirit. We invoke the generosity of Tate’s poems.

We took three years to read Tate’s books, consider selections, talk about purposes, arrive at potential tables of contents, propose new selections, come at selections from different angles, try out new tables of contents, and settle on the book you may be about to read. Sometimes we agonized. Many times we remembered how magical it felt to read one of the poems for the first time. We went from around 180 poems selected, to 90, to 52. It sometimes felt like a betrayal to leave out a poem so many of us have loved. But we wanted to make an intimate book. A comprehensive or complete collection of Tate’s poems, when one comes, will be another kind of book, valuable in other ways.

We’ve put together a book of beloved favorites. We imagine someone saying as they give or lend the book to a friend, a stranger, a beloved, an acquaintance: Here, take this book, read these poems, you’ll love this poet.

We thank the openheartedness of other readers who contributed to our considerations, namely Rachel B. Glaser, Lesle Lewis, Guy Pettit, James Haug, Jamie Thomson, Brian Henry, John Emil Vincent. A special section at jamestate.net includes the names of others who chose Tate poems to highlight and for our consideration. We thank all these and others and all our friends and family who let us know some of their favorite poems. We also thank Gabriella Doob of Ecco and Cora Markowitz of the Georges Borchardt Agency for their guidance and enthusiasm. To everyone who reaches for poetry for their own reasons, this book is dedicated to you.