Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources Further Reading |
Criticism
What Do I Read Next?
- Tate’s Selected Poems(1991) draws from all of his major collections to this date and provides an overview of his development as a poet. Tate won a Pulitzer Prize for this volume.
- One of Tate’s friends and a strong influence on his poetry, Bill Knott, published Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969 – 1999 in 2000. Knott’s goofy vision of the world and his absurdist sense of humor are strikingly similar to Tate’s.
- Richard Howard’s 1988 translation of Andre Breton’s classic surrealist novel Nadja, first published in the 1920s, details the narrator’s wanderings through the streets of Paris with a seemingly “mad” woman named Nadja. Breton uses his narrative to reflect on the nature of time, perception, space, and reality. Tate writes out of the surrealist tradition.
- In 1977, Tate published a novel entitled Lucky Darryl: A Novel, which he wrote with Bill Knott. The two have collaborated on poems as well.
- John Gery’s 1996 study entitled Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of Nothingness examines both the direct and the indirect impact of the nuclear threat on American poets from Gertrude Stein to James Merrill, providing both detailed readings of over fifty poems and four general groups into which poems might be categorized: protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psychohistorical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty.
- Paul Brian’s book entitled Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895 – 1984(1986) provides a highly readable and detailed annotated bibliography of fiction depicting nuclear war or its aftermath.
- In 1995, Coffee House Press released an anthology of poetry addressing the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, entitled Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age. The collection, edited by John Bradley, contains poems from more than one hundred poets, including Adrienne Rich and William Dickey.
- James Merrill was a widely respected poet whose work often explored human responses to living in the nuclear age. Critic Timothy Materer’s 2000 study of Merrill’s poetry, James Merrill’s Apocalypse, shows how apocalyptic motifs inspire and inform Merrill’s poetry.
that the Pentagon’s “plan” to keep the world safe contributes to the possibility of miscommunication and heightens the chance of nuclear outbreak, Tate underscores the perilous nature of language. He elaborates on this belief in his essay “Live Yak Pie,” written as an introduction to Best American Poetry 1997. The idea is a central part of his own poetics:
The poet arrives at his or her discovery by setting language on edge of creating metaphors that suggest dangerous ideas, or any number of other methods. The point is, language can be hazardous as it is our primary grip on the world. When language is skewed, the world is viewed differently. But this is only effective if the reader can recognize this view, even though it is the first time he or she has experienced the thought.
Recognizing how Tate skews the language is the reader’s challenge. The “dangerous idea” in “Smart and Final Iris” is that our image of the world is being configured by forces beyond our control and without our approval. It isn’t only the idea that a nuclear apocalypse is a strong possibility, but that individuals can do nothing to prevent it. The crumbling relationship between code and referent in Tate’s poem attests to the fact that the system itself is breaking down.
First strike andI sniff your nieces
I fall to pieces
Get hell out
It is no coincidence that Tate mocks the Pentagon’s strategy of first strike capability in his penultimate stanza. Critics of the first strike strategy routinely point out its status as the very catalyst for the nuclear arms race. In short, first-strike capability denotes a country’s ability to eliminate retaliatory second-strike forces of another country. At the height of the Cold War in 1962, then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains the “logic” behind staying ahead in the nuclear arms race in his speech, “Mutual Deterrence”:
Now what about the Soviet Union? Does it today possess a powerful nuclear arsenal? The answer is that it does. Does it possess a first-strike capability against the United States? The answer is that it does not. Can the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future acquire such a first-strike capability against the United States? The answer is that it cannot. It cannot because we are determined to remain fully alert and we will never permit our own assured-destruction capability to drop to a point at which a Soviet first-strike capability is even remotely feasible.
By 1986, when Tate’s poem appeared, McNamara’s words still expressed the Pentagon’s policy. Despite the Soviet Union’s dissolution, President Bush’s decision to pursue Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative is only the latest manifestation that the arms race is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
Tate’s poem, though, is a strike against the Pentagon’s attempt to dictate the world’s future with policies built to fail. Gery emphasizes poetry’s power in the atomic age, writing, “without having to lay claim to universality or transcendence, poetry can still, to paraphrase Theodore Roethke, learn by going where it has to go — not only as an agent for change but as an agent of change.” Psychologists Robert Jay Lifton and Nicholas Humphrey, experts on the psychology of surviving war and living in the atomic age, second Gery’s view, suggesting that poets are among the front-line soldiers in humanity’s fight for survival:
If anything in our culture symbolizes the fact and hope of human continuity, it is the continuing presence of the poets, philosophers, and thinkers of the last few thousand years, who in the service of life once stretched their imagination and can now stretch ours.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Smart and Final Iris,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about various forms of literature. In the following essay, Poquette explores Tate’s use of polarities in his poem.
“In these times, when the threat of nuclear war was ever-present, hell could be unleashed by the push of a button.”
James Tate’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry is marked by both comedy and surrealism — a mixing of reality and fantasy that produces unusual scenes that are often found only in dreams. Says Stephen Gardner in his entry on Tate in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The poems themselves are rooted in landscapes that are often — if not generally — bizarre and surreal.” In “Smart and Final Iris,” Tate’s use of comedy and surrealism reaches an apocalyptic level. Through the poem’s use of pattern and word choice, Tate gives the reader a false sense of security, setting the reader up for the climactic end of the poem in which all sense of security is lost.
The poem follows an obvious pattern, employing polarities — or opposites — to trick the reader into feeling that the Pentagon has everything under control. In each of the first five stanzas, the speaker in the poem gives a description of an apocalyptic situation that could happen in a post-nuclear attack. These descriptions are followed by a “Pentagon code.” Whereas the description of the apocalyptic situation is very grim, the Pentagon codes, by contrast, are light-hearted, sometimes surreal, and even humorous, as if the Pentagon does not take the situations seriously. By categorizing these apocalyptic situations with such light-hearted codes, the Pentagon gives themselves mental control over these post-nuclear possibilities.
The divide between grim reality and lighthearted code is emphasized even more by the style of the text. The real situations are written in plain text, while the Pentagon codes are all in italics, drawing attention to them.
With or without italics, however, the codes draw attention to themselves. As the poem progresses, the codes become ever more surreal and humorous, playing off the real apocalyptic descriptions that they represent.
The first stanza introduces the idea of the Pentagon code:
Pentagon codefor end of world
is rural paradise,
if plan fails
it’s rural paradise
Unlike the other stanzas, in which the code is only featured once, this stanza features the code, “rural paradise,” in two separate places. Poets use repetition like this when they want to draw attention to a key idea or image. In this case, Tate is trying to impress upon the reader the idea of the end of the world, and the finality that this idea brings with it.
Apocalyptic landscapes are not usually described as either “rural” or as being a “paradise.” But in Tate’s poem, the surreal images make sense upon closer inspection. A rural area is usually fairly unpopulated. By magnifying the idea of “rural” into a “paradise,” or the ideal form, a “rural paradise” becomes a world without any people at all — which is what would happen if the world ended. The term paradise is significant in another way. According to Biblical history, the world’s first rural paradise, the Garden of Eden, started with no people. So, it is fitting that the paradise at the end of the world would also have no people.
In the second stanza, “losses under 100 million,” is given the code of “a trip on the wayward bus.” A “wayward bus” implies that somebody has made a minor mistake and taken the wrong bus. In a global nuclear war, under 100 million dead people would, in fact, be seen as a minor mistake, when compared to the total amount of people who could have potentially been killed.
It is in the next stanza that Tate hits his surrealistic and comic stride: “For a future of mutants, / bridal parties collide.” As with the previous codes, the words seem out of place at first. However, when one starts to analyze the stanza based on the “mutants” description, the words start to fit. The “bridal parties” colliding provides a surrealistic image of several people in formal wear who have been scrambled into mismatched body parts and outfits during the nuclear attack, becoming mutants. It is a surreal image, yet one that elicits a small laugh on the part of the reader. “There’s a nervous, high-strung humor which often seems intended to bring forth an equally nervous titter from the reader as reality and fantasy are deftly and intricately intertwined,” says Stanley Wiater, in an interview in the Valley Advocate in 1984.
The next stanza is even more surreal and comical: “World famine is / a plague of beatniks.” Although there is nothing funny about famine, or hunger, it is amusing to imagine a horde of beatniks, considered a type of “starving artist,” roaming the earth.
In these first four stanzas, the poem’s pattern of offsetting serious descriptions with increasingly humorous images makes the reader feel as if there is nothing to worry about — the Pentagon has everything under control. With the next stanza, however, Tate changes tactics and disorients his reader, shaking the reader’s confidence in the Pentagon:
First strike andI sniff your nieces
I fall to pieces
Get hell out...
This unusual language does not readily invoke any humorous images as the other codes do, but it does grab the reader’s attention through several of the words. Up until now, the Pentagon codes have been described in an impersonal fashion by an unseen speaker, allowing the reader to distance themselves from the horrors being described in the poem. This code, however, yanks the reader back to reality, and pulls them into the action by using the personal “I,” and by addressing the reader directly by talking about their family members (“your nieces”). Suddenly, more seems to be at stake, and nobody is laughing. The pattern of this stanza yields even more insights. As the stanza progresses, the lines get shorter and shorter, invoking the image of the types of countdowns generally used to launch nuclear weapons. Something bad is definitely happening.
At this point, the normally vivid, concise codes have deteriorated into desperate thoughts. “I sniff your nieces” alludes to the fact that after a nuclear bomb has struck, you can smell the stench of those of the dead who aren’t totally obliterated, which may include a reader’s family. In a similar style, “I fall to pieces” indicates that the Pentagon staff and their carefully laid out plans are crumbling. Finally, “Get hell out. . .” is a curious positioning of words.
Normally, one would use the phrase “get the hell out” to talk about evacuation during a nuclear attack. However, without the word “the,” the line instead becomes a directive to the Pentagon to unleash hell. In other words, a counterstrike. The finality of such a move is underscored by the ellipsis at the end of this line, which implies that the counterstrikes will continue indefinitely until everything is gone, blown into oblivion. This is the beginning of the end.
The word “hell” itself is important and has been used many times by writers throughout history to describe the horrors of war. In the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a tense standoff known as the Cold War, where each superpower hovered over its respective buttons for launching nuclear weapons, just waiting for the sign that its adversary was going to attack. In these times, when the threat of nuclear war was ever-present, hell could be unleashed by the push of a button.
After all of the Pentagon codes that offset the realistic descriptions, and the three-line code that announces the devastation of a “first strike,” the last stanza serves to blindside the reader with a sense of dread. There is no humorous or surreal code to offset the final situation, where “a madman comes.” During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the primary enemy of the United States, but there also existed a number of smaller countries who had access to nuclear weapons, and these countries were sometimes run by people who were considered “mad.”
“Smart and Final Iris” was “written at the height of Reaganism,” says Chris Stroffolino in his entry on Tate in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. During this time, Tate turned “toward society and sociopolitical themes,” according to Stroffolino. One of these themes was how nuclear war was ever-present, and how the United States was encouraging it through certain actions or inactions.
In Tate’s poem, these smaller countries, the “babies,” are viewed as more dangerous than the Soviet Union superpower, which is locked in a stalemate with the United States. Unfortunately, superpowers sometimes failed to realize the potential power of smaller countries with less resources, and so would “kick” them aside, not giving them a second thought, or investing minimal resources to keep them contained — saving the majority of time and effort for the larger adversary. The problem is that the more these countries were kicked aside and out of the Pentagon’s view, the larger they got and the more dangerous they became.
This is ironic in a society that is supposed to have some of the world’s best intelligence officers. In fact, the title itself,“Smart and Final Iris,” plays off the supposed intelligence of the Pentagon. The “Smart” refers to the highly intelligent people who work for the Pentagon, who think that they are prepared for anything. In the poem, however, they are stripped of their confidence, but not before hell is unleashed, in the form of nuclear war. Says Stroffolino, “Smart and Final Iris’ deals with helplessness in the face of the doublespeak of ‘Pentagon code.’”
The inability for the Pentagon to realize that they have missed a much more serious threat than the Soviet Union — and start focusing their intelligence efforts where they need to be — will eventually bring about the “Final Iris.” The iris is the part of a human’s eye that one sees on the outside, through which the world is viewed, so a “final iris” can be thought of as a “final” view or image.
In Tate’s surreal poem, “Smart and Final Iris,” the poet uses specific patterns and word choices to convince the reader that the Pentagon knows all they need to about the threats of potential nuclear war and how to handle them. As the poem progresses, Tate builds up this confidence, then suddenly disorients readers, showing them that the “smart” guys aren’t always smart, and the final iris, or view, may be reserved for a madman.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “Smart and Final Iris,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
“Indeed, a large part of society’s ‘nuclear anxiety’ stems from the belief that nuclear war could occur despite best intentions and current controls.”
