Dear Reader
Dear Reader
James Tate 1970
As readers of James Tate’s poems, we are the subject of this one, aptly titled “Dear Reader.” Upon finishing it, we may not think there is much “dear” involved, but, to the contrary, Tate is skilled at underlining the seemingly offensive with a hint of loving concern and drawing on the absurd to make almost-sense. “Dear Reader” is a typical Tate poem in its surreal setting, placing both speaker and subject in a bizarre place performing bizarre actions, but the poet presents the scene as though it is natural and, therefore, not too obscure to understand. Often, when a poet or fiction writer indulges in unreal and unusual circumstances, readers are left out in the cold—becoming bystanders to actions that take place only in the writer’s mind. “Dear Reader” may leave us perplexed at first, but the poem’s intention manages to work its way into our own heads by the time it is over. We may be in the cold for a while, but we are not left there.
Writing a poem that directly addresses the person(s) reading it is by no means unique to James Tate, nor to the genre of poetry. Most often, however, the sentiment is one of “gentleness” and appreciation. A common practice in nineteenth-century writing—especially fiction—was to break up a sentence with the direct address “gentle reader,” serving to draw us more closely into the events taking place or the thoughts of the persona. Tate’s poem certainly draws us in, from the title on, but not with such softness or kindness. Still, a close read reveals less of the speaker’s curtness, or rudeness, and more of his feelings of inadequacy and despair. In the end, we may indeed be a little more “dear” to him than it would first appear.
Author Biography
James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943 and was educated at the University of Missouri, Kansas State College, and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He received his M.F.A. from Iowa in 1967. Tate claims not to have begun writing poetry until his freshman year in college but over the years he has become one of the most prolific poets in America, publishing more than thirty books, many of which are small-press publications and reprints from earlier volumes. His first full-length collection, Lost Pilot, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1966, making Tate, at twenty-three, the youngest poet ever to receive this distinguished honor. He began teaching immediately after graduation, with positions at the University of Iowa, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University. Since 1971, he has been on the English faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In 1976, Tate wrote an autobiographical article for North American Review, called “The Route as Briefed.” He recently used the title again for a collection of essays, stories, and interviews, published in 1999. If we may take this account of his first eighteen years as an accurate, unembellished autobiography, we may understand where much of the erratic, despairing, dark humor of many of his poems derives. Tate tells a story of violent stepfathers, contemplation of murder, humiliating experiences at camp, an affinity for tarantulas, a mentally impaired stepbrother, poor grades, drunkenness, and crazy friends of the family. One recollection involves fleeing in a car from Kansas City to Detroit with his mother at the wheel, his stepfather hiding under a rug in the back seat, and the six-year-old Tate wondering why he had been pulled from school to suddenly move out of state. A month or so later, upon returning to Kansas City with just his mother, he learned that his stepfather was wanted for murder and was seeking protection from his own parents in Detroit. He was eventually captured and sentenced to the electric chair for killing his first wife. Tate’s real father was a fighter pilot killed during World War II before ever seeing his infant son, born five months earlier. The fact that Tate never met his natural father played heavily into his work and was the impetus behind the Lost Pilot collection. While there may be no direct connection between specific childhood events and the “Dear Reader” poem, its general macabre setting and tortuous language could understandably evolve from early encounters with violent behavior and an insecure home life.
Poem Text
I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.
I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see. 5
If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe
start a little fire
with our identification papers
I don’t know but I keep working, working 10
half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.
Poem Summary
Line 1
Tate draws us into a strange scene at the very beginning of this poem. The first thing we find out about the “dear reader”—about ourselves, in other words—is that we are dead. Or, at least, we are thought to be dead because the reader addressed here has been placed in a casket, the lid sealed. If we pulled this line out of the poem and read it as a separate, freestanding sentence, it would connote a sense of desperation on the part of the speaker. If we saw the line scrawled alone on a piece of paper, or across a wall, it would likely conjure up chilling images about the person who wrote it— horror, despair, a mad attempt to bring a loved one back to life, the frantic refusal to let go. But all these macabre pictures derive from taking the line in its literal sense. We can also consider a figurative option. Perhaps we are “dead” to the speaker— the poet—because we no longer respond to his work. And perhaps the poet is so desperate to have our attention that he is willing to “pry open” our closed minds. These metaphorical references are more in line, of course, with where the poem takes us and will become more evident in the end.
Line 2
The second line of the poem swings the reader 180 degrees in relation to the first one. Suddenly the allusion to death and the dark, horrific imagery
Media Adaptations
- If you have audio access on your computer, you can hear James Tate read his poem “Restless Leg Syndrome” by clicking on the “Hear James Tate Read” icon at http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/jtatefst.htm.
- A 1996 cassette recording by James Tate includes his witty, comedic reading of several poems, including “How the Pope Is Chosen” and “An Eland, In Retirement” from Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Tate is introduced by fellow poet Jon Ashbery. The tape runs 60 minutes and is available from The Academy of American Poets Tapes Program in New York.
are counteracted by an absurd, impossible, comedic admission. The speaker is using a “burning snowflake” to pry open the coffin. Now an act we thought of as desperate and determined is nothing more than foolish and half-hearted, if that. The sarcasm toward readers of his poetry in this line comes quickly and unexpectedly. But the about-face is not that unusual in Tate’s poetry, and the use of incongruous images is one of his specialties. In a 1982 interview for The Poetry Miscellany (reprinted in The Route as Briefed) with critic Richard Jackson, Tate stated that he attempts to “set expressions in motion against whole new meanings so that you can’t classify them as simple statements. The reader thinks that the poem is making a statement and then all of a sudden the poem insists that the reader think about words, not about content.” The second line in “Dear Reader” does force us to think about the words, especially in conjunction with the first line— “burning,” “snowflake,” and “casket” are all unlikely companions.
Line 3
Line 3 is a declaration of the self-sacrifice that the poet is willing to endure to connect with us, but now we are leery of his sincerity. “I’ll give up my sleep for you” tells us that he will work all night to write a poem if that is what it takes to satisfy us, to create something that we appreciate. This line is “softer” than the one preceding it and several of those that follow, and it seems like an honest gesture of eagerness to please. Given the previous tongue-in-cheek remark, however, we need to see where the rest of the poem goes before deciding on the poet’s intent.
Lines 4-5
These lines return to the exaggeration of the entire surreal scene. At this point, we picture a desperate man standing over a casket late at night during a blizzard, trying to use a snowflake as though it is a crowbar. With the sleet pouring down, he can barely see what he is doing or whether he is progressing in prying the coffin open. All of this, of course, is a metaphor for how difficult it is to create a good poem for a fickle audience. The scenario is full of self-pity, opposing the struggling writer against the unimpressed “dear reader” who is still waiting to be entertained.
Lines 6-7
Lines 6 and 7 indicate that the poet is indeed sincere in his effort to stay in touch with his readers, and he admits that it will be a “trick”—or a real feat—to make that connection. He will go so far as to “rub our hands” to bring some life back into the relationship between poet and reader, but the “maybe” that ends line 7 once again throws a little doubt into the mix. The word is ambiguous here, for it can be seen as the bridge to the next line so that we read it as “maybe / start a little fire,” or it can leave in limbo the idea of reviving a lost reader: “we can rub our hands / together, maybe.”
Lines 8-9
Line 8 may be an extension of the thought begun in the previous two lines, but it also implies starting a fire with something other than hands— in this case, “identification papers.” Perhaps Tate means here that our hands are a form of our identities, but the term also reflects an estrangement or a lack of familiarity between the poet and the reader, or the desperate would-be savior and the dead, so to speak. If we must show someone ID papers, we must not already be acquaintances, much less friends.
Line 10
Line 10 presents the speaker as both doubtful and determined. Exactly what he does not “know” is not spelled out, but it seems that he is not sure whether we will be able to rekindle (“start a little fire”) the connection between him as poet and us as readers. There may also be a less apparent reference here, one hidden within the statement, “I don’t know.” Perhaps the speaker does not know why he is even trying to please us, why he struggles so to appease an audience that will likely remain aloof and unappreciative. Regardless of the implication, the speaker continues to “keep working, working,” determined not to stop writing—or, to carry the metaphor through, not to give up trying to pry open the casket with a burning snowflake.
Lines 11-12
The last two lines of “Dear Reader”—“half hating you, / half eaten by the moon”—are, essentially, half understandable and half vague. The poet/speaker has already established the notion of a love-hate relationship with his readers, fluctuating between frantically trying to reach us and mockingly putting forth the effort of a snowflake on fire. Line 11, therefore, is clear: the poet hates his readers, but not completely. His feelings of animosity stem from the pressure to “produce” for us, to create poetry that we will read and, hopefully, appreciate. The possibility of achieving that keeps him from walking away from the work altogether. Line 12 is Tate insisting the reader “think about words, not about content,” as mentioned above. The moon plays no real part in this poem because there is no reference to it throughout and, more importantly, it is unlikely that the moon would “appear” during a blizzard—in the sky or in the poem. Nonetheless, it is there, but why the poet is “half eaten” by it is unclear, and intentionally so. Perhaps he feels so inadequate in his efforts that even this heavenly body is a foe, eating away at his confidence. Perhaps moon is just an overused cliche in so much poetry that Tate drops it in here as another tongue-in-cheek move. And perhaps it is just a phrase that sounds “poetic” and defies analysis altogether. Whatever the impetus behind its inclusion, is typifies this poet’s typical “play” with language.
Themes
Surrealism
Surrealism refers to artistic or literary works that attempt to express subconscious thoughts through the use of fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. Many of James Tate’s poems are grounded in surrealistic and bizarre settings, including “Dear Reader.” The most obvious juxtaposition of subjects in this poem is the notion of prying open a casket with a burning snowflake. Certainly, the idea of a “burning snowflake” itself is not only unrealistic, but physically impossible. We could dismiss this conflict as simply a touch of sarcasm to express how much the speaker is not attempting to pry the casket open, but just the presence of a coffin—and, therefore, death—introduces a macabre, surreal element into it. Tate’s speaker is not perplexed by his situation and his dilemma. Rather, he too expresses strange desires and exhibits freakish behavior. In the reader-as-corpse metaphor, he contemplates rubbing the hands of the dead person in order to bring back life in the same manner we may rub two sticks or stones together to spark a fire. He describes himself as working feverishly in a surreal scene, perhaps in a cemetery where a sealed coffin stands in the open, and snow, sleet, and the moon complement the eerie setting.
Surrealism and fantastic imagery in this poem are effective devices that make the poet’s point. If he were to forsake metaphor in favor of “plain talk,” he would, ironically, end up with a poem that drives readers even further away, making our caskets even more difficult to pry open, so to speak. Take away the figures of speech from this poem and it would read something like, “Dear Reader, you do not seem to like or read my work anymore, no matter how I slave over it, but I will keep trying to write something that pleases you because I crave your attention.” Obviously, the poem needs strong imagery to keep it from lapsing into mere pathos.
Loneliness and Despair
Loneliness and despair are common themes in James Tate’s work, and he is capable of packing quite a few melancholy, depressing thoughts into a short poem such as “Dear Reader.” In spite of the gloomy tendencies, however, he is not a poet who gives in to despair. Instead, he usually finds a way to introduce a comedic effect or to incorporate such odd language pairings that we are distracted from the hopelessness by curiosity and amusement. In “Dear Reader,” the very first line sets a despondent tone. But the about-face comes quickly here, as the poet resorts to a snide, yet whimsical, remark about a snowflake on fire. The rest of the poem is not so easily rescued from despair, but settles into a nagging sense of loneliness and disheartenment that is overcome only by the speaker’s decision to “keep working, working.” Even that notion is something
Topics for Further Study
- Pretend you are a composer of classical music and are writing a poem entitled, “Dear Listener.” What would you say to your audience and how would your thoughts and sentiments compare or contrast to James Tate’s in “Dear Reader”?
- Write an essay exploring the basic differences between realistic and surrealistic writing. Beyond the obvious, what sets the two apart and which style do you find more appealing to read. Incorporate your opinion into the essay.
- Research the topic of starting fires by rubbing sticks or stones together and write an article explaining how this phenomenon occurs. Be scientific, but accessible to informed readers, in your essay.
- James Tate’s father was shot down over Germany in WWII, and his remains were not found until many years after the war. Do some research into soldiers missing-in-action (for any war) and write an article discussing the main issues on why these men and women were never found.
less than positive, for it implies a pathetic perseverance to attain the unattainable.
Tate’s persona has chosen the lonely profession of writing poetry, made even lonelier by being rejected or ignored by readers. In the metaphor that he sustains throughout the poem, the speaker/poet operates in a self-inflicted vacuum. Alone and sleepless, he works in the freezing weather, and his attempt to accomplish the job is hardly more than futile. He appears to acknowledge that futility, but then relieves his despair by opening the door—only slightly—to possibility: “If this trick works” and “maybe start a little fire.” The fact that he and the person inside the casket would have to show “identification papers” to one another further indicates a lack of relationship or closeness. While darkness and “freezing sleet” are obviously gloomy images, we may expect that the introduction of the “moon” at the end of the poem provides a touch of optimism or accomplishment. Instead, however, the moon slips easily into the themes of loneliness and despair, for the speaker feels “half eaten” by it. Once again, though, Tate does not relinquish the entire poem to hopelessness. In the end, the word “half”—used twice—tells us that his hatred for readers and the viciousness of the moon do not make a complete picture; there is still room for the better half.
Style
“Dear Reader” is a 12-line, free-verse poem, divided into five stanzas that alternate between two and three lines each. There is no obvious rhyme and very little alliteration, with the exception of the long “i” sound in “I am trying to pry” and the long “e” sound in “freezing sleet keeps.” The poem is made up of simple, declarative sentences that depend on surreal language for effect rather than any stylized approach to its appearance on the page. Tate’s earlier work tended to be more formally structured with attention to the number of syllables and an intentional rhythm. With the publication of The Oblivion Ha-Ha in 1970, which contains “Dear Reader,” the poet presented a looser style, showing much less poetic restraint than in his previous work. Commenting on the poems in this collection, critic Stephen Gardner stated that “the strengths and weaknesses of his style become evident. For Tate is a skilled poet, a turner of metaphors and a shaper of images. When he is terrifying, the fear is universal. And when his stories are captivating, there are few poets who can be more successful.” “Dear Reader” is an example of Tate’s resorting to metaphors and images to tell a “captivating” story—a brief and limited story, yes, but one that piques our curiosity and holds our attention.
Historical Context
In “Dear Reader,” there is no specific time or place in which the events occur. To the contrary, any work of surrealism tends to defy certain markers that would set it in a particular year or decade, or in any particular area of the world. By definition, metaphysical poetry is boundless and more in tune with the intellect than actual surroundings. This, of course, is not to say that concrete images and natural objects do not play a role in this type of work. “Dear Reader” is full of images that, by themselves, are very “normal” or easily recognizable. We can
Compare & Contrast
- 1960: Alfred Hitchcock’s now-classic film Psycho appeared in theaters across the country.
1999: At Columbine High School in Colorado, two students went on a killing spree that left more than a dozen dead and many others injured. - 1969: The Woodstock Music Festival lasted for four days in the Catskill Mountains. Illegal drugs and sexual freedom were widespread.
1992: Euro Disney opened in France, causing many French citizens to complain about the unwelcome spread of American culture. - 1973: Direct American involvement in Vietnam ended, but the bombing of Cambodia continued in efforts to retrieve P.O.W.s.
1993: In Cambodia, the monarchy was reestablished, and Sihanouk became king.
all picture and understand caskets, snowflakes, sleet, hands rubbing together, fire, and the moon. It is what Tate does with these images—how he uses them together—that turns the real into the surreal.
What we can say about the historical and cultural perspective of this poem, or about Tate’s work in general, must come from the poet himself. During an interview conducted over a three-year period, from 1975 to 1978, Tate answered questions from fellow poets and critics Helena Minton, Lou Papineau, and Cliff Saunders for an article which eventually appeared in various journals and in Tate’s own collection, The Route as Briefed. The discussion centered on all of the poet’s collections up to that point, including The Oblivion Ha-Ha. When asked whether he saw himself and other poets as social historians, Tate responded, “I wouldn’t mind that particularly, but I think it happens to you unwittingly. If one succeeds in being spoken through by one’s times, then you’re bound to reflect it.” Given that Tate’s early work was written and published during the Vietnam War era, it would have been easy for him to use that conflict and the resulting social turmoil as a backdrop for his work as so many other poets and writers were doing in the 1960s and 1970s. But when asked the question, “Did you ever write any blatant antiwar poems?” Tate said, “I find that all too obvious; you can get all that matters on the news, and I’m not a bit interested in some poet’s righteous opining. In fact I find it offensive to be slapping yourself on the back because you don’t believe in killing babies, as so many poets were doing at the time. I mean, did you ever meet anybody who said, ‘Yeah, I like to kill babies’?”
The most revealing point in Tate’s comments is the fact that he finds antiwar poems—and, presumably, other blatantly opinionated pieces—as “all too obvious.” This would account for his preference for a more obscure use of language and metaphors that are sustained throughout poems. He may in fact write a poem that speaks out against war on one level, but that level may be buried beneath layers of surreal imagery and bizarre occur-rences, leaving the actual meaning lost to the reader. Tate would make no apology for this and appears content to have his poems enjoyed, if not completely understood. He reemphasized his feelings when asked whether he had written what he would call political poems: “What is obvious is seldom worthy of poetry. I do think poets must be committed to being certain kinds of ‘outlaws.’ They can’t ‘fit in,’ as it were. I definitely mean for most of my poems to ridicule our performance in life: it is shoddy and not what it should be. I am political in that I speak for failure, for anger and frustration.” In “Dear Reader,” this sentiment is at work. The speaker/poet expresses both anger and frustration in not being able to please his readers, and that in turn gives him a sense of failure.
Critical Overview
As critic Stephen Gardner noted about James Tate’s poetry in his article for the Dictionary of LiteraryBiography, “Critic after critic has pointed out the obvious: his imagery is dreamlike, although clear; his stance is often ironical, ranging from involvement to objectivity; his major themes confront (although some would say avoid) the confusion, terror, emptiness, or boredom that defines the times.” In general, Tate’s work has been well received, most readers referring to his ability to convey the inner human psyche and all our dark thoughts without pitching the entire poem into despair and hopelessness. He has also been applauded for his humor in the face of anguish and whimsy in the midst of melancholy.
Not all critics have been so accepting, however. Those who find fault with Tate’s poetry most often site the lack of real substance it contains. They point out that the “cleverness”—the unusual imagery, odd juxtapositions, bizarre occurrences, and so forth—sometimes present only confusing fluff that sounds interesting but means nothing. Despite the harshness of these criticisms, Tate’s overall acceptance is recognizable in the numerous accolades he has won over the years, including the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1966, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1974, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Criticism
Jeannine Johnson
In the following essay, Johnson examines the conflicted sentiments the poet has toward his reader, revealing that Tate ultimately concedes it is better for a poem to be read than to remain un-read.
In “Dear Reader,” James Tate explores the nature of poetry by examining the relationships that coexist with it. The poem first appeared in the 1970 collection The Oblivion Ha-Ha and is reprinted in Selected Poems. In “Dear Reader,” though he is interested in the creation of meaning and other theoretical issues involving verse, Tate is more concerned with the ways that we use poetry and with its role in a unique kind of interaction between people. Tate has said that “The poem is man’s noblest effort because it is utterly useless” (Contemporary Poets of the English Language). However, it is clear in “Dear Reader” that, even if it is true that poetry is useless, Tate continues to act as if it were not. He wants to believe that poetry can serve some constructive purpose and that it can contribute to our efforts to know ourselves and each other.
The tension between Tate’s knowledge that poetry is useless and his desire for poetry to be useful is reflected in the conflicted feelings the poet directs toward his reader. On the one hand, the poet resents the reader, as he is forced to “keep working, working / half hating you.” On the other hand, there is no doubt that the poet needs a reader, that he cannot work without imagining that someone hears him, and that he is willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for that person: “I’ll give up my sleep for you. / This freezing sleet keeps coming down / and I can barely see.” The poet is willing to risk fatigue, illness, and even compromised vision for the sake of a reader, demonstrating just how important it is for his voice to be received by another person.
In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1997, Tate claims that poets “write their poems with various degrees of obsessiveness mostly for themselves.” A good poet, he contends in that essay, does not write with his audience in mind, nor for the primary purpose of being read, recognized, or understood. Instead, a poet writes poetry to serve his own needs and to fulfill his own intentions. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, it is this method of composing exclusively for himself that makes it worthwhile for others to read his poetry. Tate continues, “It is precisely because the poet has written his poems in solitude for himself to satisfy unanalyzable hungers and to please his highest standards with negligible prospects of any other rewards that the poem is incorruptible and may address issues unaddressed by many people in their daily lives.” In other words, a poet writes best when he refuses to consider the demands of others or the possible acclaim he might receive for his work. When he does so, he can concentrate on grooming the poem for its own sake and can ensure that everything in it contributes to its success. Thus, in writing for himself, the poet makes it more likely that his poems will be effective and, therefore, that they will be valued by his readers.
Tate may have felt more secure about his ability to attract readers in 1997—by which time he was sufficiently well-known to have been named to the prestigious position of editor in the Best American Poetry series—than he was in 1970 when he published “Dear Reader.” Thirty years before his assignment at Best American Poetry 1997, he was not as eager to ignore his reader, and this dependence created considerable conflict in the poem. Here and elsewhere in Tate’s work, the intimate relationships that are engendered by poetry are almost familial. Poem, poet, and reader interact with each other as naturally and as contentiously as do the members of any family. The familial relationship is arbitrary and inescapable, and it is one that both produces resentment and generates exceptional devotion. In “Poem to Some of my Recent Poems,” published in 1983, Tate calls his works of art “My beloved little billiard balls, / my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums _” (Selected Poems). Tate’s poems are contradictions unto themselves, as they are meant to be played with, trained, and consumed, all at once. More than this, his poems are his children, and their mother is a beautiful firelog who, as he tells his offspring, “scorched you with her radiance.”
In “Poem to Some of my Recent Poems,” as in “Dear Reader,” fire is central to the experience of poetry, indicating both poetry’s power and its potential danger. Tate pays tribute to the mother of his “recent poems,” announcing that “I shall never forget / her sputtering embers, and then the little mound.” The poet wistfully recalls the past and the flame that, in giving his poem life, also guaranteed its own demise. He assures his children, “you are beautiful, and I, a slave to a heap of cinders.” Fire is a symbol of the creation and appreciation of beauty, and, as such, both phenomena are necessarily fleeting.
The image of death with which “Poem to Some of my Recent Poems” ends supplies the starting point for “Dear Reader”: “I am trying to pry open your casket / with this burning snowflake.” The poet’s first words reveal the paradoxes involved in this art. They intimate that poetry can revivify the reader with its flames; in other words, the opening lines suggest that fire, instead of destroying something, can renew it. These first words also signal the hazards—and perhaps even the impossibility— of successful poetry: after all, poetry is an endeavor that is similar to that of burning a snowflake. The fact that the reader is dead further complicates the poet’s project, and confirms the difficulty of his task. Tate says that “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 Best American Poetry 1997). In “Dear Reader” this task of moving the reader is literalized: for only when the reader is removed from his casket and returns to life can the real work of poetry begin.
In this poem, the creative moment seems to be in the future rather than in the past, and therefore the poet expresses a measured hope for his encounter with the reader: “we can rub our hands /
“And yet … it is this method of composing exclusively for himself that makes it worthwhile for others to read his poetry.”
together, maybe / start a little fire / with our identification papers.” Yet, even if the poem reveals expectation for an event that is still to come, it also testifies that the present is marred by discord. The reference to “identification papers” seems to locate the poet and reader in wartime and link their meeting with each other to destruction as much as to creation. Furthermore, the poem ends with an image of incompletion, as the poet goes about his task “half hating you, / half eaten by the moon.”
The poet remarks that he is “half eaten by the moon,” which may be the same “black moon” of “Shadowboxing,” another poem included in The Oblivion Ha-Ha. The latter poem ends with a confrontation between a universal “you” (who is a proxy for the poet) and an unnamed figure who perhaps represents life or God or conscience or even art. This figure asks, “How come you always want to be / something else, how come you never take your life seriously?” The poet, speaking for “you,” responds, “Shut up! Isn’t it enough / I say I love you, I give you everything!” In the final stanza, the poet recounts a scene in which “you” confronts a higher power: “He comes closer. Come close, you say. / He comes closer. Then. Whack! And / you start again, moving around and around / the room, the room which grows larger / and larger, darker and darker. The black moon.” Here Tate illustrates that it is both futile and inevitable to fight against that for which we are destined. The person identified as “you” expresses love for someone (or something) while at the same time throwing punches at that person or thing. Likewise, in “Dear Reader,” Tate dramatizes the way in which the poet contradicts himself as he both entreats and resists his reader.
“Dear Reader” is one of the last poems to appear in The Oblivion Ha-Ha. Tate might have placed this poem first in the book, in which case it would have served as an invitation to participate
What Do I Read Next?
- In 1997, The Best American Poetry series celebrated its tenth anniversary, and James Tate was the guest editor who selected the 75 poems included in the volume. It is interesting to read the works that Tate considered the “best” that year and to read his introduction, in which he states that, “The daily routine of our lives can be good and even wonderful, but there is still a hunger in us for the mystery of the deep waters, and poetry can fulfill that hunger.”
- Editor Joe David Bellamy put together a collection of poets discussing their own work in the 1984 collection, American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work. This book is very accessible to readers and provides interesting insight on poetic perspectives from the poets themselves, including James Tate.
- Known as a “science fiction poet,” Keith Allen Daniels published his collection Satan Is a Mathematician: Poems of the Weird, Surreal and Fantastic in 1998. These poems have been called exotic, horrific, bizarre, and uncanny— all characterized by inventive uses of language and imagery.
- Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism(translated by Richard Howard) was first printed in 1965, but has been reprinted in several later editions. This book has been called the “bible” of surrealism and covers the art movement’s history through the artists who employed it, the culture in which it thrived, and its progression into the various arts. It is lengthy, but worth the read.
actively in the sequence of verses to come. Instead, “Dear Reader” stands near the end of the volume, intoning a final plea and forecasting the uncertain effect of the collection’s poems: “If this trick works we can rub our hands together….” The poem is no more reliable or sincere than a “trick,” and, even if it works, its effects are unpredictable: the poet concedes that only “maybe” will a fire start. “I don’t know,” he confesses, declining to name the nature of his ignorance, and burdening the last lines with a conspicuous silence. Nevertheless, he assures us that he will “keep working, working,” repeating that word to emphasize the unceasing nature of the poetic process. Even if the poet writes in solitude, he will return to his work in part because well-crafted poems are the only ones worth writing, or worth reading. Tate cheers on the poems in Best American Poetry by concluding his introduction with the line, “Go, little book, make some friends if you can.” Tate reconstitutes a few words from the end of Troilus and Criseyde, written by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and in so doing he echoes several other writers, from Ovid and Horace to John Bunyan and Lord Byron. Like many poets before him, Tate understands that, although the measure of good poetry is not whether or how well it is received, there is nothing wrong with a successful poem that makes a few friends along its journey.
Source: Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Sean Robisch
Sean Robisch is an assistant professor of ecological and American literature at Purdue University. In the following essay, Robisch discusses Tate’s “Dear Reader,” examining how Tate’s surrealist influences structure this poem and form its images.
Regardless of what labels are given to them according to their styles or eras, poets have always been shockers. Many of them love the odd juxta-position, the surprising turn, the line break that makes a word seem to fall on us from a little higher up. The temptation for readers who encounter a poem filled with strangeness is to run for the comfort of those labels; and so James Tate has been called an absurdist, a free-associator, and most often, a surrealist. The odd imagery in his poems may seem on the surface to be mere cleverness or gamesmanship, but the poetry in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, in which “Dear Reader” appears, holds together with an order and clarity that seep up through the poems, come to us slowly, and therefore may affect us deeply.
The surrealist movement with which Tate is often associated includes Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Andre Breton, who wrote, “I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way.” They loved to poke fun at death, to chat about revolution, to make grandiose claims about their own works and the way those works awakened readers from their slumber. How readers make sense of something surprising to them is the matter at hand for the surrealists. In “Dear Reader,” we see an opening image that gives some support to James Tate’s being known in that tradition—the narrator trying “to pry open your casket / with this burning snowflake.”
Surrealist images at their best are written by poets who aspire to clarity, not just cleverness. When the reader comes to a poem in an effort to make sense of it, the poet that only frustrates that effort is writing questionable poetry, material in which the gamesmanship may have taken over. On the other hand, readers are in the constant position of training themselves to understand more and more writing, to keep at it, to work with the poet and the text to expand their consciousness and hammer out their definitions of art.
This is, of course, hard work, and “Dear Reader,” is very much about frustration and effort. Although Tate uses many strange images and wild juxtapositions in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, he does so in order to bring the reader close to his poems, to let the reader sit and think through the possibilities, to give us material that keeps our minds alive and awake. There is an old joke in which a party clown hires a person to write cue cards for him, in case the clown forgets what he wanted to say. The clown goes to a party with a crowd that does not like him much. So he turns to his writer, who holds up a cue card reading, “Tell a funny joke.” In “Dear Reader,” Tate seems to understand both the clown’s position and the cue card writer’s.
The poem is addressed as a letter, resembling a letter that comes from a magazine or journal to one of its readership. The obvious implication here is that the poet is writing to one person, but this poem goes out to many readers. Given that one of the criticisms of Tate’s poetry is that it is too clever, too aware of its own jumps and surreal junctions, we might consider that the poem is written so that critics, who are also readers, may better understand their relationship to poets.
The narrator of the poem establishes a strained relationship with its reader. The reader is being sent a letter, but is, as is assumed from the first line, dead. It might also be possible that the narrator is trying to pry open a casket the reader has not yet entered. In the latter case, the impossible (a burning snowflake, a snowflake as a pry-bar) might indicate what is to come; the poet is looking ahead
“Surrealist images at their best are written by poets who aspire to clarity, not just cleverness.”
to the reader’s inevitable demise, to only the poem being left behind.
In the second stanza, the narrator makes a trade. It is hard to tell the emotion or motivation behind the line because it is a flat statement. The narrator could be reluctant or enthusiastic to give up sleep for the reader. But one clue might be that throughout the second stanza, Tate uses the double-e sound, a kind of keening in “sleep,” “freezing sleet,” “and see.” The narrator shares the reader’s confusion as to what is happening at this point in the poem. The white-out, the inability to see, is a winter image that adds weight to the sense of sleep and death, indicating that the narrator is as “blind” to how to pry open the casket as the reader is.
The third stanza indicates that a poem is a trick, a sentiment in keeping with the surrealists. But it takes a turn into a cooperative image, a little bit of hope in that the trick might work. There is a possibility here that ends in a line break at “maybe” and, in stanza four, becomes a fire to warm the reader in the winter sleet. Tate’s use of “identification papers” may imply several things: one is that readers give up their official selves and connections to the establishments that identify them when they unite with the writers of poems. Another image is that of a wartime poverty, a place in which the poet and reader stand over a fire because the infrastructure has collapsed. This reading may be a tie to Tate’s use of surrealist influences, because surrealism did not follow the standard infrastructures of traditional poets. In this image then, the narrator and the reader burn their papers—which further implies that they are in this together, and that the papers to be burned could well be poems.
The narrator moves out of stanza four with a kind of plea, a throwing up of the hands and getting back to work despite the confusion, the honesty of how he or she feels as the poem comes together. Readers frustrate the narrator. They require something. They are to be satisfied somehow, and while at work, the narrator is upset by that fact.
Many writers would write without fanfare or expectation; perhaps many of readers consider writing as something one does for one’s self. But the narrator of “Dear Reader” understands that putting words on a page in some way makes the act public because the poems can now be found and read, if not published. This narrator is trying to be present with the reader, so that perhaps the crafting of a poem makes a little more sense. In some ways, this is a paradoxical position, given that surrealist images, such as a burning snowflake, are designed to bend perceptions of reality, not straighten them out.
“Dear Reader” ends with mention of the moon, the cliched muse of poets throughout the centuries. The narrator says that he or she is “half eaten” by it. The muse has taken its toll; writing is a chore. This is the answer to the critic who assumes that poetry must be a precious, sentimental, formal, and easily accessible thing. As surrealism goes, Tate’s is strong because it actually confronts the very people upon whom poems depend most: the readers. Tate ends the poem, leaving the narrator in the position of diligently writing despite the frustrations of trying to reach someone else with the work. Rather than feeling detached from poetry by the clever turns and odd images that appear, the reader is challenged in “Dear Reader” to sympathize with the poet, to work a little harder and entertain the possibilities of what could happen when one is willing to participate in the exchange.
Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Cliff Saunders
Cliff Saunders teaches writing and literature in the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, area and has published six chapbooks of poetry. In the following essay, Saunders asserts that “Dear Reader” is a surrealistic poem that probes two key concerns of author James Tate at the time of its writing: his ambivalent feelings toward his readership and Americans’ complacency and obsession with superficial materialism.
Perhaps more than any other poem in The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970), “Dear Reader” lays bare the conflicting feelings that James Tate had toward his readership at a crucial time in his career. Actually, Tate had found himself grappling with this dilemma ever since his first book, The Lost Pilot, won the Yale Younger Series of Poets award in 1966 and thrust him into the national poetry limelight at the tender age of 23. In an interview conducted by Lou Papineau and myself in the early 1970’s and included as part of a larger interview published in American Poetry Observed (University of Illinois Press, 1984), Tate went into considerable depth about this issue. Asked whether any pressures had been placed on him by the Yale award, Tate responded that for the first time as a writer of poetry, he had to consider the possibility of an audience, and although he mused that this was probably a “phony” (i.e., foolhardy) consideration, he admitted undergoing a struggle with the concept of reader expectation in the wake of his impressive early success.
Other poems in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, such as “Shadowboxing,” deal on some level with Tate’s love-hate feelings toward the reader, but none does so more overtly than “Dear Reader.” It is right there in the title, of course, for without it, the “you” addressed in the poem could be interpreted in any number of ways, such as a lover or even the poet’s own “second self.” So Tate wastes no time in defining the battleground, so to speak. Of course, the unassuming reader encountering the poem for the first time is likely to be surprised, if not outright shocked, that a poet would have the gall to come right out and say I kind of hate you, and those readers unaware of Tate’s proclivity for biting irony might just toss the book aside. Until the publication of “Dear Reader,” no poet had come nearly as close to facing in print the dilemma of readership as directly as Tate had. Such bold, risk-taking moves are sure to alienate a number of readers, and truth be told, Tate got raked over the coals a bit by critics for The Oblivion Ha-Ha, which is surely a more bitingly ironic and caustically intoned collection than The Lost Pilot. As noted by Chris Stroffolino in his entry on Tate for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Oblivion “was almost universally panned for lacking the restraint” of The Lost Pilot. Looking back, however, Tate’s second collection seems a seminal one, and in poems like “Dear Reader,” one can see Tate taking off the “kid gloves” and adopting a “take-no-prisoners” stance that encompasses not only his struggle with society’s penchant for the conventional and superficial but also his mixed feelings about poetry’s readership. The rules of engagement that had guided him so well in The Lost Pilot were no longer adequate for a time when “everything” (not just the social status quo and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War) had to be questioned, including one’s modus operandi for writing poetry in the first place.
And so, in fearless fashion, Tate forged ahead in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, viewing no ground too sacred for investigation, least of all the implied covenant between poet and reader based on certain assumptions of how “the game” should be played. At a time when a new generation was attempting to tear down the status quo, Tate was trying to strip away any veneer that might stand in the way of his quest to shock the reader into a fuller, deeper awareness of life’s possibilities. For Tate, a primary concern was that people were so locked into an entrenched system of conventional thought and superficial values that anything less than a direct frontal assault would be insufficient. Paul Christensen addresses this central concern quite cogently in his article on Tate for Critical Survey of Poetry, in which he points out that “[t]he central theme running throughout Tate’s canon is the desire to shatter superficial experience, to break through the sterility of suburban life …” Indeed, in “Dear Reader,” the implication in the poem’s first line, “I am trying to pry open your casket,” is that the reader is dead—if not literally, then at least figuratively. Tate sees the reader as someone “boxed in,” and though this reader may feel safe within the confines of a secure haven, Tate suggests that this attitude represents a kind of death for the reader. Moreover, he implies that it is the poet’s mission to revitalize and even resurrect the reader from a death of the spirit brought on by bourgeois materialism. This task, though, may be an impossible one, for W. H. Auden may have been right when he said in his profound elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen”? Is the task of prying open the reader’s “casket” an impossible one if you are using a “burning snowflake” to perform the operation?
The burning snowflake initially strikes one as maddeningly paradoxical and irrational. How can a snowflake burn, let alone be held in order to pry open a casket? It cannot, of course, in any rational sense, but its powerfully symbolic suggestiveness cannot be dismissed. Aside from implying that the job of awakening the reader from a deathlike state may be doomed from the start, Tate may be using the burning snowflake as an indication of his mixed feelings toward the reader. The snowflake could mean that the prospect of having to awaken the reader from a figurative death leaves him “cold,” yet a passionate need to at least attempt such a daunting task “burns” within him, so much so that it enables him to overcome the “chilly” prospect of any such foray into the private world of the reader.
It is this insular world with which Tate ultimately is concerned, the personal worlds that people protect and will seemingly do anything to maintain a safe, orderly existence. Yet it is this private
“The rules of engagement that had guided him so well … were no longer adequate for a time when “everything” … had to be questioned, …”
place within everybody, this storehouse of subconscious energy, that manifests in dreams and in the irrational that Tate wants to penetrate. It is there, as many poets believe, where the real living is taking place, not in the mundane world of job sites, supermarkets, gas stations, and the like. This quest constitutes a kind of prime directive for the surrealist writer. Like many of the European and Latin surrealists who had preceded him, Tate was very much involved with the odd juxtapositions and incongruous combinations of words and dreamlike images that mark surrealism around the time when The Oblivion Ha-Ha was published. In Line 3 of “Dear Reader,” Tate boldly proposes making what can only be seen as the surrealist’s ultimate sacrifice: “I’ll give up my sleep for you.” This line emphasizes Tate’s need and determination to make a connection with the reader. The bridge to the reader is a slippery one because Tate’s journey toward the reader is being compromised by “[t]his freezing rain [that] keeps falling down,” blinding him (“I can barely see”) and thus compromising his attempt to reach the reader. The “freezing rain,” which can be seen as a type of static gumming up the lines of communication between Tate and his readership, reinforces the references to cold and numbness (that is, “casket” and “snowflake”) in the first stanza.
Is Tate implying that there is a “big chill” in the public imagination that he is having a hard time negotiating? The poem would seem to support such an interpretation, especially in Lines 6-9, where Tate suggests that if contact between poet and reader can be made, then a spark can ignite and spread like wildfire through the public imagination. He muses that perhaps this spark can be stoked if his readers would just contribute their “identification papers” to a community fire. Here is another image packed with possible associations. On the one hand, the image draws parallels to a very real situation occurring in America around the time when “Dear Reader,” was composed: the burning of draft cards as a protest against the Vietnam War. With his choice of “identification papers,” however, Tate proposes something even more fundamentally revolutionary. Whereas the burning of draft cards attempts to negate one aspect of what is perceived to be an unjust system, the burning of identification papers would be a protest directed at the entirety of such a system. This move would require great sacrifice on the part of all involved, including the loss of creature comforts and material possessions that keep most everyone safe and happy within a sense of false security. In keeping with the revolutionary tenor of the times, Tate seems to be implying that such a sacrifice may be the only means of breaking through to the heart of what really matters, of scraping off the “freezing sleet” that coats society in a numb, impenetrable gloss of superficiality. He is saying, in a sense, Let’s fire up the public imagination and get our priorities straight.
In the poem’s final stanza, however, this burning desire dissipates under the weight of doubt and the realization that his goal of communal passion will likely never come to fruition. “I don’t know,” Tate remarks with a tinge of helplessness, “but I keep working, working …” In other words, he is determined to keep striving for this ideal conception of shared passion, to keep plugging away in his poetry despite the possibility that his words will make “nothing happen,” will fail to spark the communal intensity he so desires. This struggle is not uncommon among serious writers, who are often caught in the dilemma of trying to push their creative powers to new heights and worrying about whether an at-large readership will jump ship for something “safe” and less demanding. This dilemma is clearly at play in the poem’s last stanza, where Tate implies that his quest for artistic growth is being fueled by two contradictory forces: hatred for the reader (or, perhaps more precisely, for the kind of reader expectation that might force him to stop taking risks and thus compromise his artistic growth) and the all-consuming needs of the muse, as represented by the moon eating away at him.
In the poem’s context, however, the hungry moon of the last stanza is as loaded an image as the “burning snowflake” of the first stanza. Both are images of “cold fire” being used in an irrational way, for just as a snowflake cannot burn, the moon cannot eat. Yet the moon is surely an object of “cold fire” in that it “burns” or glows but is known to be largely a frozen stone in the sky. In one sense, Tate may be saying by way of this surreal image that the muse will always burn within him, regardless of his concerns about his readership. In another sense, given that the moon has traditionally functioned as a literary symbol of longing and desire, Tate may be saying that no matter how strongly he convinces himself that the reader is an enemy of sorts, he will always long for a stronger connection between the reader and himself. Though this connection may have its high points and low points (much as the moon waxes and wanes), it will serve as a source of sustenance for poets and poetry readers alike for as long as there is a moon in the sky.
Source: Cliff Saunders, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Sources
Amazon, www.amazon.com (April 18, 2000).
The History Channel, www.historychannel.com (April 18, 2000).
Tate, James, The Oblivion Ha-Ha, Little, Brown & Company, 1970.
———, The Route as Briefed, University of Michigan Press, 1999.
For Further Study
Tate, James, The Lost Pilot, Yale University Press, 1967.
This is Tate’s first and most highly acclaimed collection. Taking its title from the actual event of his father’s plane being shot down during World War II, the poet blends childhood memories, personal encounters, and his own imagination to create this award-winning book
———, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, Ecco Press, 1994.
This recent collection was the winner of a National Book Award. In these poems, Tate continues his surprising twists of metaphors and comedy/horror effects by placing in bizarre situations such ordinary things as toy poodles, gum wrappers, crayons, and Camp fire Girls.
Upton, Lee, The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery, in Five American Poets, Bucknell University Press, 1998.
As the title suggests, this book is a close and comprehensive look at how and why five poets produce the work they do. Poets include: Russell Edson, Louise Gluck, James Tate, Jean Valentine, and Charles Wright.