american surrealism (tate)

James Tate and American Surrealism, an essay by dana gioia

Delighted to find this essay online after stumbling onto it in the library and neglecting to check out the book.

Points that stuck with me:

• American surrealism did not develop, the energy went into animated cartoons instead
• Tate’s poetry used elements of surrealism – “dream logic and free association” – but diverges from surrealism in other ways: use of tight construction, spare language and autobiographical focus (confessional)
• His poems are strangely homogeneous (as I found out when I tried to read Shroud of the Gnome straight through – more impressive one or two at a time!)
• Tate’s poems “fail to make a deep emotional and intellectual connection with the reader.” They are surface-only, without subtext.

How do you tell the difference between

• a complex poem where you still feel the emotional power of the subtext (Pound, Eliot, Cummings, Stevens) and
• a hollow poem with an enigmatic surface lacking any subtext (Tate)?

Don’t you doubt yourself? Don’t you think, well, I’m just not intuitively strong enough to get the subtext?

And a reminder: look up Austrian Expressionist Georg Trakl. His text and subtext supposedly cohere.

I want to know stuff like this.

Quoted from Dana Gioia, James Tate and American Surrealism

Finally, I have one more serious reservation. Despite its surface brilliance, stylistic originality, and consistent invention, Tate’s poetry often fails to make a deep emotional and intellectual connection with the reader. It isn’t just matter of accessibility (though Tate’s habitual avoidance of logical structure, his aversion to psychological realism, and his instinctive denial of conventional meaning surely contribute to the problem). Difficult poetry can be deeply communicative. The great Modernists like Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Stevens demonstrated how powerfully complex poetry can speak to the common reader. They understood, however, that if a poem renounces the obvious pleasures of clarity and overt coherence, it must then provide the compensation of strong subliminal communication. In the best poetry, even if the reader doesn’t always understand the surface meaning of a text, he or she intuitively feels the emotional power of the subtext.

In Tate’s work, however, there hardly seems to be a subtext, only marvelously crafted but enigmatic surfaces. Whatever deeper meaning the poems have, if, indeed, they do cohere at a deeper level, remains largely inaccessible to the reader. Tate provides vivid and abundant images but no intuitive sense of their relation to one another. A reader can witness Tate’s dreamscapes but rarely enter them fully. Rereading Tate’s Selected Poems to prepare for this broadcast, I was reminded of the Austrian Expressionist, Georg Trakl, who died during the first World War. Trakl is an opaque and hermetic poet of extraordinary originality, a far more challenging poet in many ways than Tate. Yet, as one studies Trakl’s richly lyric work, the poems acquire powerful resonance and meaning. Text and subtext cohere for the reader, intuitively, emotionally, intellectually. Even if the reader is at a loss to paraphrase the literal meaning of a poem, he or she feels it holistically. In comparison, Tate remains deliberately elusive. Not only the author disappears behind these poems but also ultimately the poems themselves, vanishing like the Cheshire Cat behind its own sly smile.