A Young Poet

Poetry, friends, can be a boon companion, can lead us beside the still waters, can wrap us in its colors to keep us warm. Lately it has fallen out of use, especially modern poetry. In the wake of "The Waste Land," many young folk suppose that all modern verse will be a dead tree yielding no shelter; they assume, perhaps by association, it will be, not only esoteric, but also the voice of old age (or premature age).

Rejoice, perhaps. Last week was published a superb volume by a member of our generation. James Tate, 23, is the Yale Younger Poet for 1967, "one of the youngest" to receive that award, as his editors point out. He is unmistakably the best winner in at least five years, since Alan Dugan; and the Yale award itself, I would argue, is the most significant of our domestic awards, incapable of the antiquarianism to which Pulitzer judges seem so prone, and also (under Dudley Witts's lone and brilliant editorship) unthreatened by the coterie pressures and needs to compromise that seem to sway some National Book Award panels. Of course no prize means much, but I am trying to give some broad definition to Tate's achievement.

Certainly it is more informative to quote him: passages plucked nearly at random demonstrate his quite unique blend of energetic wit and despair, the despair of a young man whose visions of darkness are constantly lit up by lightning-like storms of adrenalin.

You feel like a woman, like a basement tobacco shop, a busted fountain, a sloppy staircase. Dark, damp lists of words, you say them. One will say it all soon. Then you will not have to sweep up in the morning.

This passage from "The Shop Keeper" suggests Tate's interest in empathizing with the aged (though I'm not convinced of its success); more tellingly, it suggests Tate's virtuosity at reading emotions in the physical world, and in organizing physical reality through symbolized emotions. In "Reapers of the Water," he sees an old wisherwoman

whose face describes how three of hers--her husband and those two boys--had not returned.

Clearly Tate has keen eyes that penetrate appearance.

Working behind his eyes, miitgating the sad reports they send, is a mind with surprises, teeming with words that can trick experience out of the troubles it has in store. In "Success Comes to Cow Creek," a poem much concerned with suicide, the poet's friend Gerald approaches and he thinks:

know what he will say: he's the fire hydrant of the underdog.

Many it the time Tate's wild imagination gets him out of a tight corner. It is our good fortune he is such a poet, because in his verse the remotest disparities succumb to his technique, and make his imagination ours. Is it possible that he has done what he seems to have done here in. "The Descent"?

The sky rumbles with televisions . . . . . . None of the little anthracite rabbits with carrot pink eyes are real. I know that now and feel burdened with all the eternal veritles. The ground beneath me is as soft as the tongue of an old giraffe. Where are we now, darlings? This suitcase has lost its charm.

Dudley, Fitts says in his introduction that his first note on Tate's manuscript was "a robust amused declarative style." This is a reasonable first impression. Tate has created graceful balances with the potentially disastrous load of fact his senses yield him; and he has done it largely by virtue of his metaphorical muscle. His rhythms and his syntax tend to confirm the analogies he suggests, Thus, in "Pastoral Scene,"

The wind makes a salad of the countryside and ... Nearby, the river is a truck in a hurry.

Not that his rhythm and such even begin to account for Tate's power. He is master of the mot juste. "Epithalamion for Tyler" honors a friend woh has sewn a pig's ear to his sofa, and with it has "spirited" talks; no other word could have attributed to the friend the same aspect of intelligent playfulness. Then, too, Tate never dulls our brains or arouses our distrust by "poeticism," by obsolete ploys. He even lampoons such lapses of tact, as he prepares to hit us: with some genuine midcentury currency, as in, "The Cages".

The insular firebird (meaning the sun) gives up the day, and is tucked into a corner. Order, like a giant janitor, shuttles about naming and replacing the various humanities. I look at you, you look at me -- We wave again (the same), our hands like swollen flags falling, words Marooned in the brain:

Lots of people, I suspect, could find The Lost Pilot a bridge into modern poetry. You should probably read it today. You could read most of it in two hours. Suffering succotash, you could read most of it twice in four hours, three times in six hours.