Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry)

Rating:
Summary: The Man stands on the shoulders of Bukowski
Review: (How does he do it?)
(Open letter to James Tate, stalwart UMass prof. :
you won't get any toys this X-mas -- many months away --
because you've leeched off the writings of Ole Buk and this is
funny because you possess the vitality and soul of a
110-pound Alabama sharecropper.)

Rating:
Summary: The Man stands on the shoulders of Bukowski
Review: (How does he do it?)
(Open letter to James Tate, stalwart UMass prof. :
you won't get any toys this X-mas -- many months away --
because you've leeched off the writings of Ole Buk and this is
funny because you possess the vitality and soul of a
110-pound Alabama sharecropper.)

Rating:
Summary: Bukowski is Old and Tired and Sensationalistic
Review: ...and so to equate him w/ Tate is laughable. Your hexes won't work 'round these parts.

Rating:
Summary: LOVE IT!!
Review: I had never even heard of James Tate until we began to study him in my 20th century literature class in college. Now I don't know how I had ever not been aware of this man. I love this book and his overall work. Some of my favorite poems from this collection are: The Pet Deer, Goodtime Jesus, and Neighbors. I was also lucky enough to have Tate come to my college last night and read some of his poems that have not yet been published. They are somewhat different from the ones in this book, but are also wonderful. He is an amazingly funny and talented man in real life, and his poetry and craft is some of the most impressive that I have ever read. Definately check it out!!

Rating:
Summary: LOVE IT!!
Review: I had never even heard of James Tate until we began to study him in my 20th century literature class in college. Now I don't know how I had ever not been aware of this man. I love this book and his overall work. Some of my favorite poems from this collection are: The Pet Deer, Goodtime Jesus, and Neighbors. I was also lucky enough to have Tate come to my college last night and read some of his poems that have not yet been published. They are somewhat different from the ones in this book, but are also wonderful. He is an amazingly funny and talented man in real life, and his poetry and craft is some of the most impressive that I have ever read. Definately check it out!!

Rating:
Summary: A "omnibuzz" of the highest order
Review: Tate's poems pack an extraordinary amount of activity into a very small space. Quite often a stanza, line or sometimes even a single word (e.g. "omnibuzz", a brilliant coinage from "The Life of Poetry", p. 174) can stand alone as a mini-poem on its own merits.

A first read of a Tate poem can be annoying: the queasy feeling generated by a sequence of these (seemingly unrelated) mini-poems that have a disconcerting way of creating new layers of meaning by forming uneasy alliances with each other.

Like Shakespeare before him (yes, he really is that good--you've got to read this guy!), Tate defies linguistic conventions in order raise, affirm, and expand human experience. Of course no one really knows if several centuries from now people will still be reading Tate, but I'd put money on it.