James Tate: Showing and Telling

For a person who is mostly unacquainted with modern poetry, James Tate’s poems provided me with a glimpse into the peculiar direction that poetry has taken. By masterfully incorporating the idea of “surrealism” into his poems, images and concepts in his poems are brought to life, even when the reader does not know exactly what to make of them. Sure, usually poems are supposed to convey a specific meaning to its readers; the notion of surrealism, however, professes that the “nonsense” of these unique poems reflects the subconscious of its author. Instead of merely delivering a message, it can also demonstrate the creativity of the author. Understandably, surrealism is a difficult concept to explain in of itself, and it is even more difficult to explain its significance within a poem. Readers like myself may be baffled by their lack of understanding within these poems, but this short essay will argue that this lack of understanding is precisely what makes these poems delightful to read. Unburdened by the need to seek meaning from the depths of these poems comes the realization that the written word can be a pleasure onto itself. Using a personal selection of my favorite “surreal” poems from the “Selected Poems” of James Tate, I will attempt to describe the unexplainable satisfaction that I have been able to attain within Tate’s poetry.

           "Sensitive Ears” is a short poem that describes a person using his ears to discover small sensations that are not necessarily heard. The poem states, “only this time it enters/ through the ears/what a strange odor!”- as if the person is “hearing” the strange odor. Similarly, Tate describes: “It’s a tiny noise/… like a twenty-year-old smell coming back.” Though these lines do not make complete logical sense, there is some sort of mental connection that my brain makes between the small changes that occur within a person because of certain, perhaps unrelated, sensations. Tate also uses other illogical expressions to unite unrelated details into a cohesive form: “like an entire New Year’s Eve Party/shoved down a laundry chute.” Though a non-tangible “party” cannot actually be thrown down a chute, the line seems to conjure tension between these two objects, which are purposely unrelated and therefore cannot be sensed together. The final line highlights the speaker’s sensitivity to sensations by stating, “’I’m a flea with a thousand microphones/for eyes.” The speaker has a sensitivity and can experience sensations unrelated to that specific sense. These sensations are indescribable and unexplainable, yet so powerful, especially by the images the author uses.

“Lewis and Clark Overheard in Conversation” is another example of a poem which uses surrealism, though in a different way than “Sensitive Ears.” The poem consists of twenty-three lines which all state the same thing: “then we’ll get us some wine and spare ribs.” As a conversation between two people, the choice of dialogue of this poem seems peculiar, as Lewis and Clark seem to be repeating each other’s lines. Though I still do not know what the poem means or why the author chose to repeat these specific twenty-three times, the poem stood out to me as a playful artwork that demands its acceptance as a poem without further questions. There has been scholarship criticizing the “nonsense” aspect of this poem (and other “surreal” poems in the Tate collection), but for me as a new poet striving to break through the barriers of formal poetry, Tate’s symbiosis of “nonsense,” wit, and abstract imagery went beyond what is usually “allowed” in poetry and creates room for exploration and poetic evolution. 

            “Storm” is another poem by Tate that exemplifies the idea of surrealism, this time by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated idea into one cohesive poem. The poem begins by discussing snow and then quickly merges into filing taxes, searching for a lost paper, the smell of stew, an unheated study, unfed birds in a cat farm, and an “airplane… lost in a storm of fitting pins.” Many of the connections between these ideas were lost on me, perhaps purposely so, but the poem’s return to the idea of snow in the last stanza and the beautiful images the author creates within those random ideas suggests a creative cohesion that can only be seen if a poet has the freedom to allow ideas to flow freely.

            In my own poetry, I have had a hard time describing abstract ideas in a concrete way- “showing, rather than telling.” In a sense, Tate took the “showing” to the point where his readers are not sure anymore of what he is “telling.” Even though this defies some of the purposes of poetry, as a tool to convey meaning, the explorative aspect of this method will continue to influence my poetry so that I can build up my own skills of “showing.” One particular poem in Tate’s collection that showed me this ability to concretize abstract, or hard-to-describe ideas, is “Stella Maris.” The poem is a narrative, but by using metaphorical language, repetition of certain phrases, as well as alliteration, the poem conveyed a deep sense of self-discovery for the speaker living on a lonely island. The most illustrative line in this poem is in the second stanza: “And always the sound of the sea, like an overtone of eerie applause, the clapping of the palms of the palmettos.” Tate picked up on one of the smaller scenic details of the island and managed to convey the sense of loneliness, while also using musical language to unite the poem as whole. For me, “the sound of the sea” would have seemed sufficient as a description of the scene, but Tate masterfully follows that abstract idea with two rewarding metaphors. In my own poetry, I strive to use such musical tools to create narratives which are so descriptive.

            Though this short essay did not discuss some of the even more famous works of Tate, the poems described here were illuminating for me as a new writer, a new writer open to ideas and inspiration. Though I did not use a consistent definition of the idea of “surrealism” in my appreciation of Tate’s poetry, each poem added new layers to what surrealism can and should mean. Whether, by writing poetry that does not seem poetic, juxtaposing random ideas, conveying ideas using illogical sensations, Tate has introduced me to new methods of exploring the avenues of poetry.