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by: James Tate
List Price: $13.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.05 You Save: $1.95 (15%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780880014311
ISBN: 0880014318
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: December 01, 1995
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: December 01, 1995
Sales Rank: 588059
Studio: Ecco
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Winner of the National Book Award in 1994, The Worshipful Company of Fletchers is fresh and startling. Like his doppelgangers Jeff Koons in sculpture and Stephen Malkmus in rock music, Tate is a self-consciously cool comedian of contrivances, devising bizarre situations and dressing them in a camouflage of the familiar world. To read Tate is to hear as music the ongoing negotiations between language and reality. In this book his main amusement is a game of categories, culminating in 'How the Pope Is Chosen':
After a poodle dies
All the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-eleven.
They drink slurpies until one of them throws up
And then he's the new pope.
With a devil's aplomb, Tate inverts cliches to infiltrate the vocabularies of power in such mischievous poems as 'A Manual of Enlargement,' 'Little Poems with Argyle Socks,' and 'What the City Was Like.' The latter seems to caricature the late William Stafford, with its description of a salt-mining operation behind City Hall. For quality control, 'someone / named Mildred' tasted each grain 'until she became a stenographer / and moved away,' thus devastating the community because 'no one could read / her diacritical remarks.' In the poetry of James Tate--or that of John Ashbery, Mark Levine, or Russell Edson, all of whom Tate superficially resembles--one looks for clues to the poet's mission. Perhaps a few hints come in the final poem, 'Happy as the Day Is Long,' in which the speaker feels sympathetic toward the Russians who created a language to communicate with aliens 'but never get a postcard back.' If it were uncovered that Tate was an inhabitant of another world instead of a middle-aged man from Kansas City, few of those rewarded by The Worshipful Company of Fletchers would be surprised. --Edward Skoog
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Required Reading
In James Tate's post-Pulitzer volume, "Worshipful Company of Fletchers," he presents a collection of lyric poetry that offers a constant sense of movement, as though he is guiding readers on a series of speculative journeys with the promise that we could wind up...anywhere. Reading Tate requires trust - trust that his "auto-suggestive" flow of language and ideas will result in a payoff - and it does...there is a payoff of discovery within these pages, his poems. In "Porch Theory," for example, ... Read More
Rating: - "The Nitrogen Cycle"
This book is the key to the closet, where we keep everything that we never use and rarely want. Tate has a keen gift of putting a tear in one eye and a wrinkle in the other. This is where he is most commonly misunderstoond. A friend of mine, after reading Tate's latest book told me that he felt the poet was merely trying to show how silly and zany that he could be. His poems are often funny and even absurd, but there is a painful sadness hidden in them. "The Nitrogen Cycle" puts a smile on your ... Read More
Rating: - Tate will one day be seen for his incredible talent, we hope
The thing that makes me laugh is that Tate has one of the most unique and insightful ways of looking at the world, and yet he is read so very little. It's a classic case of the public at large not catching on to what is really happening in this world. This book in particular shows a wealth of maturity in his work that didn't really show up until the Eighties. He is able to sythesise the forms of speech that people use to plump themselves up so well that you can only identify with him as a fellow ... Read More
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