Learn About James Tate on good-read.club

James Tate

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Born: December 07 1943

Died: 0707 07 20152015

James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he worked since 1971. He was a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.

Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry collections that grew more and more strange.

He published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee and The Route as Briefed . His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a National Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Popular Genres

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

James Tate

James Tate

Books from James Tate

Return to the City of White Donkeys

Worshipful Company of Fletchers

The Ghost Soldiers

Memoir of the Hawk

Shroud of the Gnome

The Lost Pilot

The Government Lake: Last Poems

Riding the Earthboy 40

Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems

Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories

State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems

The Insomniac Reader: Stories of the Night

The Austin Review

Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate: Poems

The Oblivion Ha-Ha

Ploughshares Spring 1987 Guest-Edited by Derek Walcott

Absences

The Best American Poetry 1997 (Best American Poetry)

Reckoner

Riven Doggeries