James Tate's posthumous collection of prose poems, "The Government Lake," is officially published by Ecco Press on July 2, 2019. It is a terrific book. I asked Matthew Zapruder to say a few words about it. Take it away, Matthew. -- DL
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It feels so strange to hold Jim’s last book of poems in my hands. I remember standing in the poetry section of the erstwhile Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, in the spring of 1994, holding his Selected Poems. I had been admitted to the MFA program at UMass Amherst, and though I knew Tate’s name, I don’t believe I had ever read any of his poetry. I opened the book (the very same copy which I ended up buying a few minutes later, and which I am now holding), randomly, to page 96, and read a poem with the intriguing and unlikely title “The Distant Orgasm.”
In retrospect it turns out this was an odd choice, because it’s a kind of collage-y shaggy dog narrative that is not at all characteristic of Tate’s poetry. But I liked it so much; it was weird and funny and honest, and I particularly loved how he spent a long time describing, as he was about to step over the threshold of his apartment and into the hallway, his foot:
the foot is becoming
aware of something
the awareness moves
up the ankle
into the calves
the knees and into the thighs
the thighs say
this neighbor of mine
is not dying
no she is not dying
At that moment I probably felt a lot like that foot, gradually becoming aware of something that I would come to feel a lot more of over the many years of reading Jim’s poems. Let’s call it life in all its goofy sublimity, its horrible hilarity, its pathetic surrealism, its grandiose ridiculousness.
After buying that Selected Poems and reading it, I made my decision to study with Jim and colleagues at UMass. It helped that I was going back to the same area where I had studied as an undergraduate, which made leaving my beloved Bay Area a little less of a blow. I also bought books by Dara Wier and Agha Shahid Ali, and read them with great amazement, too. Look at all the things you can do in a poem! Who knew? Not me. I went there and studied and it changed me forever, and I have often looked back with the most immense gratitude for those teachers and my life as a poet.
I write a little more about this wonderful book, The Government Lake, as well as Jim as a teacher, for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/07/james-tates-last-last-poems/ — and about one of my favorite poems from the book, “The Argonaut,” at the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetry-of-america/american-identity/matthewzapruder-jamestate.html
Even though I gave this book a lot of thought already, I was not prepared to hold an actual copy in my hands. It feels quite final. I have the poems, but I still miss Jim a lot, and always will. No one meant more to me as a poet than he did, and no poet did more to change my life. The jacket is a beautiful red, and the art is a perfectly strange and gorgeous rooster by the marvelous Pablo Amargo. It’s a great book if you know Jim’s work, and if you don’t, you can begin here and work your way backwards or any way you want. You too will be changed for the better -- forever.
-- Matthew Zapruder
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