‘I have a lot of feelings about Jim Tate, first and foremost having to do with my gratitude for him as a teacher, and poet. Like so many others, I revered and loved him for being a sweet and gentle and stern and brilliant and complicated poetry father. I also have many private feelings, ones intimately bound up with the experiences I had when I was first starting to really write poetry, during those pre-internet years in the mid-1990s when I was studying with him and Dara Wier and Agha Shahid Ali in Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m not sure I can put these feelings into words: they seem to be located in Jim’s poems. I find them there and the poems seem not to express those feelings, but to conjure and enact them, inside and outside of time, in me.
‘No one had a greater influence on me poetically than Tate, though that influence has as much to do with how he worked and thought about poetry as the style itself, which was inimitable. I learned how to be a poet from Jim: how to sit down and work every day and be serious and patient and follow the totally free movement of the imagination as manifest in the material of language. Not because he taught me, but because he showed me. All of us who were near Jim and Dara in those years knew how they were working, and we saw the brilliant results.*
‘I would like to say this: don’t let anyone tell you Jim Tate was a certain “kind” of poet. Especially not a surrealist, which is how he is often described. To call the poems “surrealist” is incorrect, because the surrealists were really interested in something else, language as a kind of mind and soul changing substance. Jim wasn’t doing automatic writing or creating collages or merely juxtaposing images. In Jim’s poems, there is almost always some kind of situation, or organizing principle, along with a total freedom of language and the imagination. In other words, they are poems. If he is a surrealist, then we all are, or should be.
‘Jim could do anything in his poems, and did. Throughout his whole life as a poet, he was just as comfortable with narrative as with a lyric that is more experiential, present in and exploring a particular state of mind or orientation toward the word that is full of contradiction and humor and darkness. You will see what I mean if you read his first Selected Poems, as well as the newer one, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, which together will give you a sense of his entire body of work. Jim Tate was a great American poet, maybe even the greatest of the past 50 years. His influence is everywhere in American poetry, on those who don’t realize it as much as those who do.’ — Matthew Zapruder
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