Memoir of the Hawk

by James Tate

Memoir of the Hawk creates a world populated by hundreds of characters, believable and strange, tugged at the edges by the unexpected. In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising ... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century, Fiction, American

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

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 (1967) 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 (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). 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.

Reviews

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, that Tate guy.


Anti-poetry by any other claim.

Function of poetry, Captain Obvious here, is that we connect with a line. This does away with the noxious idea that life is subjective and we’re all islands in Humanity peninsula. Which I always though was a bankrupt notion. Tate does the opposite. Less invisible castles and more monstrous pillow forts, where a real pillow war is ragging. Sometimes you can discern the allegory and sometimes the allegory aint there.

It’s like…well, I’ll just do a bad impression of one of these bad boys. It’ll be crude, but fun for me.


Not Made of Cheese

My wife the astronaut came home from work, the moon. “How was the moon this time? Still devoid of anything educational?” I asked. “Oh we leaned a lot, just nothing that would sell Readers Digests.” She said. I’d been off Digests for four months now so I thought it was in poor taste that she would take to that wound. “Did you close that deal at the firm” she asked. “Oh, I closed that sucker. It’s open for naught ere-more.” I lied. It was still open cause I hand’t closed it. I just wanted to bring back some moon cheese myself, even if it was in lie form. We ate a dinner of nothing but cheese to which she said nothing. Later that week at the firm a man came in selling asteroids. He had a briefcase of volcanic-black fragments with more edges than rocks ought. “Have any of these been to the moon.” I asked. “This one has. It hit the moon, recouped for a bit, then hopped back up for earth. It’s got moon dust on it galore.” He said. I bought it and some flowers from a sarcastic florist and set my gatherings on the family room table that really shouldn’t be there and has no function other than upsetting feng shui. When my wife came home and regarded the flowers and the meteorite and said, “We played a pick up game of softball, and I swore I hit a rock just like this. It was a home run on moon accounts.” We looked at it, then at each other, then at all the other objects within eyesight. They all seemed like they were shot here from some pickup game of the beyond, perhaps us too.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I love him how does somebody have this kind of brain this imagination good lord we need more James Tate visibility in the UK it's not fair the US is keeping him all to itself

This is so good I want a calendar of JT poem-per-day what a craftsman a mind

I find Tate almost impossible to annotate - there's no way of extricating specific lines it's such an entire time. My JTs so far are essentially blank I just let it wash

[Eryk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ideally, for me, at least, this book--along with his others--would be better read at the rate of one poem per day. Even the shortest Tate piece is immense and needs time to settle in. But with one poem per page in this 175 page book, I'd never be able to contain myself to only one a day. So, instead, I did the next best thing: read it in two days! This is a magnificent offering from Tate. The poems here are perhaps a bit shorter than those in some of his other books. Not a bad thing, by any means, as length means nothing to Tate or, say, Russell Edson. My favorites are: Carl's Shoes, The New Love Slave, and Duel To The Death. And the best part of this whole book?: The handwritten signature of James Tate, himself, on the title page!

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

the book that made me laugh this year, maybe the only one all year!

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Tate is one strange dude. His poems are peculiarly surreal, or magic realist, or merely absurd, and they seek out a place where humor meets dream. Check out this one:


New Blood

A huge lizard was discovered drinking
out of the fountain today. It was not menacing
anyone, it was just very thirsty. A small crowd
gathered and whispered to one another, as though
the lizard would understand them if they spoke
in normal voices. The lizard seemed not even
a little perturbed by their gathering. It drank
and drank, its long forked tongue was like a red
river hypnotizing the people, keeping them in a
trance-like state. "It's like a different town,"
one of them whispered. "Change is good," the
other one whispered back.

[Blake Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I happen upon good poetry when I want to read it again and again and muse over the words like drinking wine slowly.



What an awesome book of poems by a poet I've only just found out about.  I really love how absurd the small vignettes often are but often how quietly sad some of them are.  Tate may seem otherworldly or even obfuscating in his work, but I think he's being extremely specific. I loved quite a few of them, and they left lasting impressions.  One in particular "Like a Manta Ray" really spoke to me as tapping into the kind of irrational and rational ways of impulsivity.  The speaker steals pearls from the bottom of a pool. As he remarks, he doesn't need them or want them, but he doesn't want the owner to have them either.   There is something so brutally true about this.  Sometimes we're vindictive, even to strangers for reason we create, and the poem hones in on that.



Also, "Negative Employee Situation" is really something special.  An exaggerated perversion of superstition, and how it ends with them scheming to kill the new Mary is delightful.



Love this poet.  Can't wait to read more.

[JP]

dude has the strangest mind. and i love him for it. but i’m also quite baffled at times. finished this on the plane and the guy next to me was curious about what it was so i gave it to him.


here’s my favorite James Tate poem btw:


Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

[Courtney Hatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Tate is a nut. And his nuttiness won him the Pulitzer. We were reading these out loud last night and could not stop. We were laughing till tears rolled and repeating our favorite phrases over and over to each other, jabbing our fingers into the air emphasizing our favorite lines. I think we read Young Man with a Ham twice, the second time through wheezes.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not great. But ifvread in short bursts--so the repeated technique doesn't become wearying nor the lack of rigor annoying--these show how dynamic poetry can be. Straightforward until their surrealistic. Full of heart and grit. Occasionally magical.

[Jenshaines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typical whimsy with that much deeper edge. Much focus on what could or couldn't be considered "normal" whatever that is and a great deal of focus on sex - who gets it and why or why not. The eponymous poem is a great example of the former.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved Tate's coyness and absolute abandon with which he constructs these surreal vignettes. The page becomes a place of possibility and I enjoyed being swept up by his imaginative whirlwind.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very favorite books. Regardless of genre. Recently re-read and wow, what a joy.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second Ecco volume (in the second Ecco phase) is 175 pp. so say Tate wrote 250 days a year. The next book was 2004. He'd need about a year and a half for a 50% yield.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a strange, surreal Spoon River Anthology, Tate's 'Memoir of the Hawk' captures the strange small town lives of a large cast of quirky characters. A fun read...

[Mollie Pettit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a person who would normally sit down to read poetry. James Tate is my one exception. Each poem is like it's own quirky story. I've re-read this book more times than I can count. <3

[edmondegreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look. I love Tate. That's all I can say. I haven't encountered a miss yet.

[Donna Mork · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting poetry book about various characters who turn and do remarkable, improbably, and even impossible things. Definitely a visual book. Enjoyed it very much.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wacky and genius are separate things, but some people can’t tell them apart.

[Kailee · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the greats if you ask me

[Hrishi Dixit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical!

[Doc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, thoughtful, even insightful snippets of situations but read more as flash fiction miniatures than as poems. If this is what contemporary verse has become, then it is high time for the pendulum to swing back to more formal and disciplined modes. Oh, it is entertaining and worthwhile, but Mr. Tate is not only playing without the net but has eschewed the ball and racquet, and if you were expecting a tennis match, you got instead interpretive dance.

[Jan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clever, sort of like Frank O'Hara, who isn't my cup of tea, either. The poems were written in verse, but with seemingly arbitrary line breaks, and they felt more like prose poems because of their surreal and absurd quality. The next morning, any magazine I picked up reminded me of Memoir of the Hawk, so I guess Tate succeeded in pointing out the absurdity of everyday life.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tate has a wonderful way of surprising. His poems are simple, for a while, but the epiphanies toward the end among the everyday events and relationships he concocts leave the reader with a sense of the surreal, of the fantastic...

[Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been re-reading this collection of late and it kicks a severe amount of ass. Hilarious, eyebrow-raising, lyrical, completely paradoxical. Highly recommend to anyone wanting to read mind-blowing poetry.

[Reacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

with roughly 170 poems in this book, there are inevitably going to be some duds along with great poems, and that's surely the case here. one wonders if the collection would have been made stronger through more judicious selection.

[Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the best gifts i have ever received. thank you leroy.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few definitely stood out, others more lackluster.

[Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's no Garrison Keillor! Hahahahahaha!

[Stephenbailey7 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very funny and accessible collection of prose. I recommend this to anyone who is looking for poetry with mass appeal.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tate can be very, very funny and I enjoyed a lot of the poems but I also tired of the wryness after a while. (Witness how long it took me to get through this book--almost a month!)