Volume 10 85
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 Mis-
souri, 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 publi-
cations and reprints from earlier volumes. His first
full-length collection, Lost Pilot,won the Yale Se-
ries of Younger Poets Award in 1966, making Tate,
at twenty-three, the youngest poet ever to receive
this distinguished honor. He began teaching im-
mediately 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
forNorth American Review,called “The Route as
Briefed.” He recently used the title again for a col-
lection of essays, stories, and interviews, published
in 1999. If we may take this account of his first
eighteen years as an accurate, unembellished auto-
biography, we may understand where much of the
erratic, despairing, dark humor of many of his po-
ems derives. Tate tells a story of violent stepfathers,
contemplation of murder, humiliating experiences
at camp, an affinity for tarantulas, a mentally im-
paired stepbrother, poor grades, drunkenness, and
crazy friends of the family. One recollection in-
volves 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 mur-
der and was seeking protection from his own par-
ents in Detroit. He was eventually captured and sen-
tenced 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 Pilotcollection. 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 pa-
per, 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 figura-
tive 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 imageryDear Reader