Volume 10 93
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 mat-
ter 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 ham-
mer 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 inThe 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 burn-
ing snowflake, a snowflake as a pry-bar) might in-
dicate what is to come; the poet is looking ahead
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 through-
out 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, indi-
cating 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 pos-
sibility 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 “identifi-
cation 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 infrastruc-
ture has collapsed. This reading may be a tie to
Tate’s use of surrealist influences, because surre-
alism did not follow the standard infrastructures of
traditional poets. In this image then, the narrator
and the reader burn their papers—which further im-
plies that they are in this together, and that the pa-
pers 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 get-
ting back to work despite the confusion, the hon-
esty of how he or she feels as the poem comes to-
gether. Readers frustrate the narrator. They require
something. They are to be satisfied somehow, and
while at work, the narrator is upset by that fact.Dear ReaderSurrealist images at
their best are written by
poets who aspire to clarity,
not just cleverness.”