James+Tate

//Lauren Taylor//


 * James Tate**
 * (December 8th, 1943)**



James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri in the year of 1943. His father was a pilot in World War II, but he was killed when Tate was five months old. Twenty-three years later, in 1963, Tate published his first poetry book (The Lost Pilot). It was included in the Yale Series for Younger Poets, making Tate the youngest poet ever to receive such an honor. It influenced many poets in the sixties and the seventies. Including 'The Lost Pilot', he has published 12 poetry books over the course of his years.

Tate has won many awards for his poetry over the years. Some of them are the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, a 1995 Tanning Prize, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Some of the more notable awards that Tate has received are the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was also elected Chancellor of the Academy of Poets in 2001.

I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel  in the center of the road and that's when  the deer came charging out of the forest  and forced me to hit the brakes for all I  was worth and I careened back to the other  side of the road just as a skunk came toddling  out of Mrs. Bancroft's front yard and I swung  back perhaps just grazing it a bit. I glanced  quickly in the rearview mirror and in that  instant a groundhog waddled from the side  of the road and I zigzagged madly and don't  know if I nipped it or not because up ahead I  could see a coyote stalking the Collier's  cat. Oh well, I said, and drove the rest  of the way home without incident.
 * Thinking Ahead to Possible Options And A Worst-Case Scenario**

for my father, 1922-1944
 * The Lost Pilot**

Your face did not rot like the others--the co-pilot, for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life, that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.