James Tate - Of course it’s a tragic story, that’s why it’s so funny

James Tate, The Ghost Soldiers (Ecco Press, 2008)

«Is there an American poet more unique and incapable of characterization than James Tate? He began with ghostly lyrics like “This is a dark street/ Where only an angel lives/ I’ve never seen anything like it,” and moved through less formal, personal structures to the skewered first-person prose poems of the last few books. The narrative itself - squirrelly as it always is - is the driving force in these pieces. Not only is the narrator unreliable, but he sometimes seems to have, say, no molecular structure. As Charles Simic says of these vignettes: “A poem out of nothing… is Tate’s genius… just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction.” In Ghost Soldiers, Tate’s newest and largest group, he may have finally moved the form up onto the high, open ground of greatness.
Part of what Tate does on this ground, and hence his singularity, is to solo-face and plant by himself the Surrealist flag in American verse. (Others have preceded and followed, but, as we shall see, brought their own treatments to the “waking dreamscape.”)
...Simic, however observant, is wrong if using the foregoing “out of nothing/anti-poetry” quote to describe this new collection. For all the undirected meanderings, for all the chattering, squiggly spins of the radio dial, rich and topical themes emerge out of these hundred-plus pieces. Two arise in particular abundance. First, the relation of parents to children. Second is what could be seen as at least one of this bond’s destroyers: wars and their aftermath. In "Father’s Day," the narrator watches the ladder of bonding opportunities -hard work, but graspable with determination - slip finally out of his hands forever:
- My daughter has lived overseas for a number of years now. She married into royalty, and they won’t let her communicate with any of her family or friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband, the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming. Fierce guard dogs won’t let her out of their sight. I hired a detective, but he was killed while trying to rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters to the State department. They have written back saying they are aware of the situation. I never saw her dance. I was always away at some convention. I never saw her sing. I was always working late. I called her my Princess, to make up for my shortcomings, but she never forgave me. Birdseed was her middle name. -
The war poems are the masterpieces here. Too widely spaced to be a "cycle," they throb and beam their tropes of senseless loss off one another. Parades of the dead march by like figures in a Bosch canvas, leaving the speaker to pass through their chilly wakes and putrid, standing air. Dialogues are filled with ambiguities of security and protection, what counts as a “mission” and how it would be “accomplished.” From "Special Operations":
- There were some bald men in a field pushing a huge ball, but the ball wasn’t moving… A woman walked by and stopped beside me. “What are those men doing down there?” she said. “It’s a warrior thing,” I said. “They’re working out some technical problems. They’re protecting us from evil, but the plan is still in the stages of development.” “Does that big ball represent evil?” she said. “It’s either evil or good. They’re still trying to work that one out,” I said. “Some men live on such an exalted plane, it’s a wonder anything ever gets done, “ she said. “I meant that as a compliment of course." -
It doesn’t get any more Pure Tate than this. The herd ends up following whatever the half-assed philosopher kings say they are doing; if anything remains to be understood, it is all outside of the little peoples’ ken, as only the wise men can judge their own actions. The freedom-fearing woman, like a serf out of Chekhov (“What is it about us that fears liberty?”), catches and checks her own incipient skepticism brilliantly, sadly: “I meant that as a compliment, of course.” They are stick people but their language -- fleetingly glimpsed -- gives them the fullness of crushed spirits, Nietschean sheep, Republican wives.
Samuel Johnson (or was it Eliot?) criticized Chaucer for lacking a “high seriousness,” and Tate has been a magnet for similar charges. But while keeping all of his zaniness and verve, Tate has really written in Ghost Soldiers a book of subtle, softly echoing anti-war poetry. “Sure it’s a tragic story; that’s why it’s so funny.” But still it is tragic, first and foremost. The farces of the world don’t make the world a farce; it still cries out to be made better.» - Richard Wirick


«Tate once wrote, in a line sometimes used to illustrate a supposed heartlessness, “Of course it’s a tragic story; that’s why it’s so funny.” But doesn’t that sum up the human condition? We’re all going to die, life is often absurd, and yet every day we find something to laugh about.
That’s the real genius of The Ghost Soldiers. By locating humor in tragedy, by highlighting the false connections by which we mortals construct daily life, Tate distills the sad little details of existence into a potent elixir, at once pathetic and noble.» - Chauncey Mabe


«The improvisational vibrations in these poems tend to arrive flush with their subject matter, as if they too are written purely from powerlessness and confusion, and stand as an experiment; the poet sits as scientist creating hypotheses, looking for something--and somehow maitains his charm throughout. What he finds is what Wallace Stevens found: imagination (incidentally, Stevens supplies the book’s epigraph: “The paratroopers fall and as they fall / They mow the lawn.”). He creates a world and controls it the best he can. Sometimes his findings are insignificant, but in more than a few cases, they are as palpable and meaningful as the sacs in your lungs, as whatever it was you dreamt last night. In the end, the ideal answer to Tate’s challenges is a form of personal responsibility: “What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.” Man, not men, woman, not women. Individuals may seem powerless, but the extent to which they can control their own actions is the extent to which they can control anything at all.» - John Deming


Here’s an excerpt from “The March”:

I was standing next to the captain at the bottom of the mountain. “Shoot them all!” he ordered. “But, captain, they’re our men,” I said. “No they’re not. My men were well-trained and disciplined. Look at this mess here. They are not my men. Shoot them!” he again ordered. I raised my rifle, then turned and smacked him in the head with the butt of it. Then I knelt and handcuffed him. The soldiers gathered about me and we headed for home. Of course, none of us knew where that was, but we had our dreams and our memories. Or I think we did.