92 Poetry for Students

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 con-

cedes 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 Poetryby concluding his introduction

with the line, “Go, little book, make some friends

if you can.” Tate reconstitutes a few words from

the end ofTroilus and Criseyde,written by the Eng-

lish poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and in so doing he

echoes several other writers, from Ovid and Ho-

race 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 Stu-

dents,Gale, 2001.

Sean Robisch

Sean Robisch is an assistant professor of eco-

logical and American literature at Purdue Univer-

sity. In the following essay, Robisch discusses

Tate’s “Dear Reader,” examining how Tate’s sur-

realist 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 com-

fort of those labels; and so James Tate has been

called an absurdist, a free-associator, and most of-

ten, 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 to-

gether with an order and clarity that seep up

through the poems, come to us slowly, and there-

fore 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 il-

luminating a life of relations fecund in another

Dear Reader

What

Do I Read

Next?

• In 1997, The Best American Poetryseries cele-
  brated its tenth anniversary, and James Tate was
  the guest editor who selected the 75 poems in-
  cluded 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 po-
  etry can fulfill that hunger.”


• Editor Joe David Bellamy put together a col-
  lection of poets discussing their own work in the
  1984 collection, American Poetry Observed:
  Poets on Their Work.This book is very acces-
  sible to readers and provides interesting insight
  on poetic perspectives from the poets them-
  selves, 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 Fantasticin 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 his-
  tory through the artists who employed it, the cul-
  ture in which it thrived, and its progression into
  the various arts. It is lengthy, but worth the read.