In the spring of 1991, after a series of aimless months in Baltimore, I was getting ready to move: either to Seattle or to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for graduate school. I couldn’t decide. Flipping through The New Yorker Book of Poems, I happened upon James Tate’s “Coda,” which begins:
Love is not worth so much;
I regret everything.
Now on our backs
in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
the stars are falling
into our cracked eyes.
So I chose Fayetteville. I chose to take my regret and my cracked eyes to the Ozarks.
Tate’s poems are orbiting all over the Internet today. I’ve seen “The Lost Pilot,” “Saint John of the Cross in Prison,” “The Blue Booby,” “Teaching the Ape to Write Poems,” and many, many more. Everyone has a favorite, or favorites. There were so many Tates to love! The serious Tate. The not-serious Tate. The serious-and-not-serious-at-the-same-time Tate.
“Coda” changed my life, but the Tate poem I return to most often is “What the City Was Like,” from his 1994 collection Worshipful Company of Fletchers. “The city was full of blue devils,” it begins, “and, once, during an eclipse, the river / began to glow, and a small body walked out of it.” Later: “The spots were all given names by the janitors— / River of Unwavering Desire, River of Untruth, / Spring of Spies, Rill of Good Enough Hotelkeepers, / and then, of course, there was the Spot of Spots.” And finally:
In the days that followed children were always screaming.
You could set their hair on fire and, sure enough,
they’d start screaming.
This is how to end a poem, right? So is this. Rest well, James Tate. Everybody loved you.
