Worshipful Company of Fletchers
by James Tate
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Poetry of the absurd. In Little Poem with Argyle Socks, he writes: "Behind every great man / there sits a rat. / And behind every great rat, / there's a flea. / Besides the flea there is an encyclopedia. / Every now and then the flea sneezes, looks up, / and flies into action, reorganizing history. / The rat says, God, I hate irony. / To which the great man replies, / Now now now, darling, drink your tea."Tags
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This is a pleasantly beguiling book. Imagine Billy Collins's whimsical anecdotes refracted through Ashbery's world of constant verbally adroit disjunction. Tate uses a flexible, graceful line, a simple vocabulary, wondrous images, and a surrealism that constantly teeters on the edge of rationality. Often amusing, usually gentle, occasionally macabre, these are lovely poems, but I wonder if they add up to much more than their immediate surface appeal. I will be intrigued to come back to these poems later to find if they have grown or deepened in import.
Tate is consistency funny, twisting everyday rituals into bizarre dramas. Some of his imagery inhabits my dreams.
This title won the National Book Award. Tate's work is delightful.
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37+ Works 1,594 Members
James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City on December 8, 1943 and erupted upon the poetry scene when, in 1967, at the age of 23, he received the Yale Series of Young Poets award for The Lost Pilot. Within two years of his stunning debut, Tate had another dozen collections in print or accepted for publication. Tate's work earned him the Pulitzer show more Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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 Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Tate's first volume of poetry, Cages, was published by Shepherd's Press, Iowa City, 1966. Tate won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1991 for his Selected Poems. In 1994, he won the National Book Award for his poetry collection Worshipful Company of Fletchers. In addition to many books of poetry, he published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). Tate received his B.A. in 1965, going on to earn his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's famed Writer's Workshop. He died on July 8, 2015 at the age of 71. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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