James Tate

1943 –
2015
Read poems by this poet

James Tate was born on December 8, 1943, in Kansas City, Missouri. His father was an American pilot killed in the Second World War in 1944, when Tate was five months old.

Tate’s first collection of poems, The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967), was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, making him one of the youngest poets to receive the honor. The collection was well-received, and influenced a generation of poets in the late sixties and seventies, due to its use of dream logic, metaphysical and psychological investigation. In a 1998 radio review, the poet and critic Dana Gioia said about the debut:

Tate had domesticated surrealism. He had taken this foreign style, which had almost always seemed slightly alien in English—even among its most talented practitioners like Charles Simic and Donald Justice—and had made it sound not just native but utterly down-home.

During his career, Tate published numerous chapbooks more than a dozen poetry collections, including The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Ecco Press, 2012); Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Ecco Press, 1994), which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; Distance from Loved Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 1990); Constant Defender (Ecco Press, 1983); Viper Jazz (Wesleyan University Press, 1976); Absences (Little, Brown and Company, 1972); Hints to Pilgrims (Halty Ferguson, 1971); and The Oblivion Ha-Ha (Little Brown and Company, 1970). 

Tate also published various works of prose, including the short story collection Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (Wave Books, 2001); The Route as Briefed (University of Michigan Press, 1999), a collection of critical prose; and the collaborative novel (with poet Bill Knott), Lucky Darryl (Release Press, 1977). He also served as the editor of The Best American Poetry in 1997.

About his work, the poet John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times:

Local color plays a role, but the main event is the poet’s wrestling with passing moments, frantically trying to discover the poetry there and to preserve it, perishable as it is. Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere… I return to Tate’s books more often perhaps than to any others when I want to be reminded afresh of the possibilities of poetry.

Tate’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a National Book Award for Poetry, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award (then the 1995 Tanning Prize), as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From 2001 to 2007, Tate served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was married to the poet Dara Wier and taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst until his death in 2015.