Long pause. (Beckett, “Catastrophe”)

A few weeks ago I finished Geoff Dyer’s Zona—a book about a movie (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) about a room. It’s a book of divine deviations.  Toward the middle of the book, Dyer notes that he first saw Stalker as an undergraduate at Oxford, when he was “at that point of maximum aliveness, when my ability to respond to the medium was still so vulnerable and susceptible to being changed by what I was seeing.” Later he writes, “…even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realize that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard—or saw or read—your personal last word years earlier.”

When I read that I had a strong desire to disagree—but, no.  He’s right.  With poetry, when I think back to the writers that were my last word as undergraduate, they still have a strong hold on me.

Many of my last words were written by James Tate.

Here’s an excerpt from a bit I wrote about Tate for The Boston Globe:

On Aug. 21, my wife, Charlotte, gave birth to beautiful twin girls, Stella and Beatrix. We had each taken travel bags to the hospital, packed from lists provided by our obstetrician. My list was lean - change of clothes, toothbrush, a flask, and a book. That last item required weeks of anxious deliberation. Should I bring my bootleg copy of Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson's new novel, bought on eBay? Or perhaps a book from my fall classes at Emerson? Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy our new poet laureate's prose poems on Joseph Cornell's magnetic, elusive boxes? Something for my children? Wittgenstein? Beckett? Just kidding.

We just moved into a larger home, and for the first time I have a bookcase dedicated to poetry. No more must Robert Desnos rub spines with Don DeLillo! One day as I tried to stare the bookcase into submission, I was struck by the hold James Tate has on my collection. Tate has always meant the cosmos to me. His seminal first collection, The Lost Pilot, was the book that gave me permission to write poetry. These were not grandpa Thomas Stearns's poems. They were fresh, irreverent, heart-broken, and funny. Poems could be funny? At 20, that was news to me. Life-changing news.

So, for the hospital, I grabbed his 1997 collection, Shroud of the Gnome (Ecco). The first poem? “Where Babies Come From”:

            Many are from the Maldives,
            southwest of India, and must begin
            collecting shells almost immediately.
            The larger ones may prefer coconuts.
            Survivors move from island to island
            hopping over one another and never
            looking back. After the typhoons
            have had their pick, and the birds of prey
            have finished with theirs, the remaining few
            must build boats, and in this, of course,
            they can have no experience, they build
            their boats of palm leaves and vines.
            Once the work is completed, they lie down,
            thoroughly exhausted and confused,
            and a huge wave washes them out to sea.
            And that is the last they see of one another.
            In their dreams Mama and Papa
            are standing on the shore
            for what seems like an eternity,
            and it is almost always the wrong shore.

Almost always? Beatrix? Stella!

The Globe had asked me to comment on the devaluation of the Mongolian tugrik. In retrospect, perhaps I misunderstood their question?

Here’s what Tate said about the poem in a raucous Paris Review interview conducted by Charles Simic:

 

Charles Simic: What about poems like “Where Babies Come From,” where the title is a cliché or a colloquial expression that you take as the starting point?

James Tate: Well, in that particular case, you take an idiomatic phrase and you just get very literal. OK, where do babies come from? Well, let’s see . . . how about the Maldives? They’re all made there. And then what happens? Do you see what I mean by implications? You take the next step and say, What do they do there? They float out on the ocean and, you know, ninety percent of them sink and ten percent of them manage to float on. 

Simic: Now this is what interests me, how something that at first sounded like a flight of fancy ends up being about real things, things that are important to us. Do you become aware at some point as you’re writing this poem of serious and philosophical implications? 

Tate: They become apparent in the writing of the poem. I can’t know entirely what’s at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. 

And that’s what we love, we who read poetry—we don’t know what’s at stake and we find out as we go, almost always, to the wrong shore.

The poem is also included in Tate’s most recent book, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990 – 2010 (Ecco).

Illustrator?

This poem needs pop-ups—it needs the 3^rd dimension, waves and babies splashing us in the face.  Yes, we need Marion Bataille (ABC3D, Roaring Book Press) a contemporary master of paper engineering.