Smart and Final Iris (Author Biography)

Author Biography

James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943, in the middle of World War II. Tate’s father, Samuel Vincent Appleby, was a pilot who was reported missing in action while on a bombing run over Germany in his B-17. Tate, who never met his father, was raised by his mother, Betty Jean Whitsitt. The title piece of his prizewinning Yale Younger Poets collection of poems, The Lost Pilot(1967), captures the poet’s sense of the loss of his dead father. Themes of loss, absence, and imminent catastrophe pervade much of Tate’s work. Tate is also fascinated with war, which he explores in “Smart and Final Iris,” “Land of Little Sticks, 1945,” and other poems.

Tate began writing poetry at 17, often composing in a trance-like state. Though he read and admired modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Tate maintains that neither influenced him, and that it is difficult to name any direct influences on his writing — although he will admit to being a jazz aficionado, and a life-long student of popular culture and human nature. In 1965, he graduated from Kansas State College, and in 1967 he took a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop, where he studied with poet Donald Justice, among others. In 1971, after teaching at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, Tate joined the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he remains today.

From the moment Tate appeared on the scene, critics have characterized his poetry as improvisational, surreal, bizarre, absurd, and singular. Though some have faulted his poetry for being little more than verbal antics, most have recognized Tate’s original voice and see his poetry as part of a process of spiritual questing and self-invention.

Tate seems to agree with them, to a point. In his introduction to Best American Poetry of 1997, Tate writes, “What we want from poetry is to be moved, to be moved from where we now stand. We don’t just want to have our ideas or emotions confirmed.”

The larger poetry world seems to agree with him. Tate’s peers have awarded him many of the literary world’s top honors, including a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry in 1974; Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1976 and 1980, respectively; the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992, for Selected Poems; and the National Book Award for poetry in 1994, for Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Tate was also awarded the $100,000 Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1995. He has authored some thirty books and chap-books of poetry, from presses small and large.