"When I started the poem, I wasn't sure where it would go. I didn't care, it felt good. So I wrote very roughly, finding myself making images; the poem obviously wanted to express itself in images. . . . I was conscious of having a subject. Many poems, what turn out to be poems, start for me with a kind of free association. I like to start out of the air and then find a subject, if at all, later." This is James Tate speaking about his method of writing poetry.
It is a method that has led to prestigious awards, including the Yale Younger Poets Award of 1966 for "The Lost Pilot." (At the age of 23, Mr. Tate was the youngest poet to receive the award in that series' 73-year history.) Later, Mr. Tate won a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award of Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Then, in 1992, Mr. Tate won the William Carlos Williams Award and the highly coveted Pulitzer Prize for his 10th volume, "Selected Poems." Now, in 1994, Mr. Tate has won the National Book Award for his 11th volume, "Worshipful Company of Fletchers."
Despite these awards, Mr. Tate's poetry has received mixed reviews, with everyone agreeing only that James Tate must be included in any discussion of major contemporary American poets. Many critics find Mr. Tate's work overly surrealistic; some have even called it pointless. Others praise this poetry for its striking imagery and incentive metaphor.
"Worshipful Company of Fletchers" will probably receive similarly mixed reviews. The poems are difficult, partly because of Mr. Tate's style. There's a little bit of everything here: some news stories, some art and literary criticism, a cliche or so, a few oddly mixed metaphors, some dreams, puns, unusual words such as darkle (which means to grow dark), and several non sequiturs. Mr. Tate mixes these together and gives readers collage-like poetry, suggestive of a weird combination of Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Arthur Rimbaud. That poetry doesn't present itself so much as it plays in the mind.
Mr. Tate uses it to make word games. The title poem is a good example. "Worshipful Company of Fletchers" makes one think of a flock of birds, with fletchers suggesting flickers, a kind of bird. But a fletcher isn't a bird. It's one who makes arrows. Then you realize that Mr. Tate uses fletcher as a metaphor for poet, arrow as a metaphor for poem. The book's first poem, "Go Youth," starts the process. Another poem has poetry passing through the room, "brushing past my cheek." The poet listens for "something, someone who was trying to find me." Then he hears "the benighted mumbling,/the sighs and barely audible sliver of song . . . as if some raggedy sense had snuck back into our lives."
Mr. Tate's epigraph, from Emily Dickinson, sets the tone: "I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me./He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none." The poems are full of surprises, following an inductive logic, letting words and ideas lead the poet where they will.
Many poems read as though they were written by a non-native speaker of English or by someone in a daydream: "I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem/with traffic. I felt lonely, like I'd missed the boat,/or I'd found the boat and it was deserted."
The child/boy is the book's central metaphor. Some poems are written in the voice of the boy. He straightens his room (his mind) "so thoroughly that it will be a little frightening./What I thought was infinite will turn out to be just a couple of odds and ends . . ."
Playing "a lute with such purity of sound/streetcars stopped to applaud," the boy is also a metaphor for the poet. He is the poet as perpetual child, the artist's unspoiled other self. The best poems end with the boy inspired and inspiring: "A wraithlike shimmering, ghostly beauty/haunts the memory."
As with most of Mr. Tate's work, these poems walk a thin line between evocation and nonsense. Some lines seems meaningless: "Something I've never seen before: a pig breaking in two./Fingers of lightning flash. The llama looks very much like a sheep with a long neck. Its head/is a cloud of dust and gas located among the stars." Then you realize that the poet is observing cloud formations.
In fact, it's easy to imagine Mr. Tate inspired by the clouds. The clouds suggest a poem. Ironically, the poems have very little shape. Like clouds, they're airy nothings coming together, coming apart, and every once in a while becoming beautiful: "Under moonlight, the senses are bewitched,/a deep sea of fleecy clouds over whose rim/the water spills continually like a veil."
Diane Scharper teaches writing at Towson State University.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Worshipful Company of Fletchers"
Author: James Tate
Publisher: Ecco Press
Length, price: 82 pages, $20