James Tate

James Vincent Tate (December 8, 1943 – July 8, 2015) was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer 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.

Biography Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lived with his mother and his grandparents in his grandparents' house. His father, a pilot in World War II, had died in combat on April 11, 1944, before Tate was a year old. Tate and his mother moved out after seven years when she remarried. The eventual poet said he belonged to a gang in high school and had little interest in literature. He planned on being a gas station attendant as his uncle had been, but finding that his friends to his surprise were going to college, he applied to Kansas State College of Pittsburg (now Pittsburg State University) in 1961.

Tate wrote his first poem a few months into college with no external motivation; he observed that poetry "became a private place that I was hugely drawn to, where I could let my daydreams—and my pain—come in completely disguised. I knew from the moment I started writing that I never wanted to be writing about my life." In college he read Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and was "in heaven". He received his B.A. in 1965, going on to earn his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's famed Writer's Workshop. During this period he was finally exposed to fellow poets and he became interested in surrealism, reading Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, and André Breton; for Benjamin Péret he expressed particular affection. Of poets writing in Spanish, César Vallejo "destroyed" him but he was not so taken by the lyricism or romanticism of Pablo Neruda or Federico García Lorca.

He was married to Dara Wier. Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of 71.

Career Tate taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, His work has captivated other poets as diverse as John Ashbery and Dana Gioia. Regarding his own work, Tate said, "My characters usually are—or, I’d say most often, I don’t want to generalize too much—but most often they’re in trouble, and they’re trying to find some kind of life."

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).

Some of Tate's additional awards included a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Published works

Full-length poetry collections The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967) The Oblivion Ha-Ha (Little, Brown & Co., 1970) Hints to Pilgrims (Halty Ferguson, 1971) Absences: New Poems (Little, Brown & Co., 1972) Viper Jazz (Wesleyan University Press, 1976) Riven Doggeries (Ecco Press, 1979) Constant Defender (Ecco Press, 1983) Reckoner (Wesleyan University Press, 1986) Distance from Loved Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award Worshipful Company of Fletchers: Poems (Ecco Press, 1994) — winner of the National Book Award Shroud of the Gnome (Ecco Press, 1997) Memoir of the Hawk (Ecco Press, 2002) Return to the City of White Donkeys (Ecco Press, 2004) The Ghost Soldiers (Ecco Press, 2008) The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Ecco Press, 2012) Dome of the Hidden Pavilion (Ecco Press, 2015) The Government Lake: Last Poems (Ecco Press, 2019) Hell I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate (Ecco Press, 2023)

Chapbooks Cages (Shepherds Press, 1966) Notes of Woe (Stone Wall Press, 1968) The Torches (Unicorn Press, 1968) Row with your Hair (Kayak Press, 1969) Shepherds of the Mist (Black Sparrow Press, 1969) Wrong Songs (H. Ferguson, 1970) Amnesia People (Little Balkans Press, 1970) Apology for Eating Geoffrey Movius’ Hyacinth (Unicorn Press, 1972) Land of Little Sticks (Metacom Press, 1981) Just Shades (Parallel Editions, 1985, illustrated by John Alcorn) Bewitched: 26 poems (Embers Handpress, Wales, illustration by Laurie Smith.) Police Story (Rain Taxi, 1999) Lost River (Sarabande Books, 2003) The Zoo Club (Rain Taxi , 2011)

Prose Hottentot Ossuary (Temple Bar Bookshop, 1974) The Route as Briefed (University of Michigan Press, 1999) Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories (Verse Press, 2002)

Collaborations Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy??? (Cloud Marauder Press, 1970, poems co-written with Bill Knott) Lucky Darryl (Release Press, 1977, a novel co-written with Bill Knott)

In anthologies Tate's work has been included in The Best American Poetry series numerous times, including in 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2010; his work was also in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

Honors and awards In 2004, Tate was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pulitzer Prize for Poetry National Institute of Arts and Letters Award Guggenheim Fellowship National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry National Book Award for Poetry Yale Series of Younger Poets