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Matthew Zapruder on James Tate ("Quabbin Reservoir")
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How is poetry like skipping stones across the surface of a lake? How might a poem be like an undelivered letter or package? Matthew Zapruder joins the podcast to talk about James Tate's "Quabbin Reservoir," a poem that raises those and other questions—and does so with Tate's gorgeous ear for weird idiom, full of both humor and feeling. (For the backstory on the place this poem is—at least on its surface—about, see this story.)
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five books of poems, including, most recently, Father's Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California. You can follow Matthew on Twitter.
As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my own writing.
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Transcript
Introduction to Matthew Zapruder and James Tate
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to be talking to Matthew Zapruder today. Matthew and I have been in contact for a little while now when I reached out to him to see if he might be interested in doing an episode.
00:00:21
Speaker
I asked him the kind of question I don't usually ask potential guests, which is to say that I suggested a poet to him, a poet who I knew was sort of near and dear to his heart, both both as sort of on the page and in life as it were. And I hope that we'll have some occasion to talk about that. So Matthew is here to he agreed very graciously, and he is here today to talk about the poet James Tate.
00:00:51
Speaker
who avid listeners of the podcast might note has come up on at least one occasion before, but perhaps on other ones as well. James Tate came up in the conversation I had with Sarah Osment about David Berman, poet, lead singer of Silver Jews and a former student of Tate's as Matthew himself was. The poem,
00:01:20
Speaker
that Matthew is here to talk about and which I have to say and thank him in advance.
Matthew Zapruder's Background and Works
00:01:25
Speaker
He's very graciously done the legwork to make available to you in linkable internet form, so you'll be able to find a link as always in the episode notes to the text of the poem. The poem is called Quabin Reservoir.
00:01:42
Speaker
And Matthew noted this to me also in an email leading up to this episode is perhaps one of the few Tate poems about which a bit of background information might be useful in sort of enriching one's experience of the poem. So we'll get to all of that.
00:02:03
Speaker
in just a moment. But first, let me tell you just a bit about our guest today. So, Matthew Zapruder is many things. He is a poet, he is a professor, he is an editor, he is a critic and a writer of prose. He's the author of five books of poems, most recently a book called Father's Day,
00:02:25
Speaker
which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2019, and two books of prose. So his first book of prose was called Why Poetry and was published by Echo in 2017. The book answers the question that it asks in its title and is a really lovely book for all kinds of readers. I think for
00:02:54
Speaker
and perhaps I'd say especially for readers who are sort of poetry curious, but also a bit anxious. I've used that book in the classroom and to great effect and have had students report back to me that it was really useful to them in understanding what to do with poems, how to think about poems,
00:03:18
Speaker
And so I recommend it to teachers and to readers alike. But much more recently, Matthew has written a book which is really beautiful and moving. I'm about halfway through it, reading it myself right now, and I really admire it. The book is called Story of a Poem. It's published by Unnamed Press in 2023.
00:03:48
Speaker
This new book, which I'll say more about in a moment, is the result of a really intriguing project that Matthew said himself recently, which was to record and reflect upon the composition of a single poem over the length of a book. So to preserve all of the poem's drafts,
00:04:13
Speaker
to write in a kind of diaristic or memoiristic way about what he was thinking about as he composed those drafts and made those revisions and what was going on in his life alongside the composition of the poem.
00:04:31
Speaker
And it's just a really deft and moving account of a stretch of life in addition to being a really poignant and thoughtful book about poetry. Matthew is also editor-at-large at Wave Books, which publishes a terrific series of poetry books.
00:05:00
Speaker
And so we have him to thank in part for many of the most exciting titles in poetry coming out these days. And he teaches in the MFA in creative writing at St. Mary's College of California, the state from which he is joining us today. I want to quote just a moment from early in a story of a poem because I found it really
00:05:30
Speaker
I found myself while thinking about it, carrying it with me after I set the book down. Here's Matthew. He says, quote, more and more often I think the rare treasure I gather in writing poems is the awareness I would not have without writing them.
The Nature and Purpose of Poetry
00:05:52
Speaker
And then he asks, can that state of awareness be communicated through a poem? Can the poem be a secret machine carried on a little scrap of paper or hidden in the mind so one can always have a place to rest, to resist? End quote. That question, that is the idea that the poem grants a state of awareness and that that state of awareness might be
00:06:24
Speaker
revisited or preserved or sort of made renewable and once again possible in the poem itself is a question I take it that in the first place Matthew is asking or that sort of came to him as he reflected upon the act of writing a poem but of course one thing I really love about that moment in his book is that it bends around by the end of its asking and not all of us can be poets
00:06:50
Speaker
but any one of us can read a poem. And I think it's as much a question about reading poems as it is about writing them. And one thing I find really engaging about the way Matthew writes about poems is that he's always willing to stand sort of on both sides of that poetic encounter, the encounter between poet and reader.
00:07:11
Speaker
That's there in the way that he writes critically about poems. You can sense it there in his own poems that he's sort of willing to imagine a kind of readerly perspective. He's modest and self-effacing in this book, which tells the story of the composition of a single poem, as I've said, yes, but it also gives an account of his own coming to poetry in life.
00:07:37
Speaker
And it's a really kind of humble and modest and honest sounding account of what that, you know, august sounding thing that is to become a poet
00:07:56
Speaker
might have been like. And it's a story, I should say, and maybe this can bring us around to our conversation now, in which James Tate played a role.
James Tate's Influence on Matthew Zapruder
00:08:06
Speaker
So with that, I want to welcome you, Matthew Zapruder, to the podcast and ask you how you're doing today. Thanks so much, Cameron. I'm good. I'm really glad to be doing this. Thank you for quoting that
00:08:22
Speaker
that sentence or those few sentences about attention. I think, you know, in a way that I think of that as sort of a kind of a pocket definition of modernism, I guess, that, you know, the idea that a work of art might be as much for creating an experience when you're, you know, in front of the painting or reading the poem or listening to the piece of music as it is a,
00:08:51
Speaker
method of communicating some message that the artist has. And of course, though both those things are always important in any work of art, but it's like the emphasis or the shift to like the experience of the person who's coming to the work of art is so meaningful. And I feel like this podcast emphasizes that in its close reading. I'm looking forward to getting into this poem and talking about Jim and talking with you about poetry.
00:09:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah, well, I'm really happy to get the chance to do it with you. Yeah, you know, it was interesting as I thought about that word awareness, which is, you know, the word that you're using in the passage that I quoted, it struck me that, you know, awareness is like nicely poised between, I mean, and is itself neither reducible to like a feeling
00:09:43
Speaker
nor to a thought. Maybe it's somewhere halfway between feeling and thought, and then something else besides those again. And that to me, that's an attitude that I share with you about
00:10:04
Speaker
what poems might make possible. Virginia Woolf has this great phrase that I'm sure you're familiar with, moments of being. And she, I think we can think of a lot of her novels as being sort of a chronicles of moments of being of various characters in the book, which explains why the narration will shift from one person to another to another to another, because she's almost sort
00:10:32
Speaker
passing attention or awareness along and only staying with the character as long as that person is having what she would call a moment of being. And I think of poems also as moments of being in that way, moments of heightened attention, awareness, but which, like you said, like leaves room for all sorts of feelings and contradictions and isn't necessarily even about
00:10:55
Speaker
something important. I'm making those quotes. Right. We hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I mean, sometimes they are about something important. But of course, sometimes you're right. If we took the poetry away, you would think, well, why should that be a poem more than any other kind of thing? And maybe in particular, that's a kind of modernist impulse to make, to take an ordinary occasion as an occasion for poetry and not just so much depends upon. Right. Yeah. There you go. Right.
00:11:25
Speaker
the red wheelbarrow, case in point. All right, Matthew, I know that there are doubtless many lovers of James Tate among the listeners to this podcast, but I like not to assume that people already know who it is we're talking about. And since you have such a
00:11:47
Speaker
unique perspective on Tate. I thought maybe you would be willing to tell us a little bit, you know, for the uninitiated about who James Tate was and maybe along the way you can say something about who he was to you. Of course, I'd be glad to. Yeah, I think, you know, we should just start by saying that his
00:12:12
Speaker
James Tate was a member of a generation of poets who started writing in the late 60s. We can think of Charles Wright or Charles Simic, that sort of group of poets. And he kind of burst on the scene in 1967 with the publication of his first book, The Lost Pilot, which won the Yale Younger Poets series. And he was a young guy at that point.
00:12:40
Speaker
It's, yeah, it was just almost like a fully formed voice that arrived kind of at that time and very original. And I think since then it's gone through, had gone through many, many, many iterations of styles of poetry changing a lot. And we can talk about that along the way, which is one of the things that made it hard to pick a poem to talk about because it was, I felt suddenly this weight of responsibility. Like I don't want everyone to think,
00:13:05
Speaker
You know, he's only X sort of poet. They don't know him. It's funny, you know, it's most guests, Matthew, have struggled to narrow down the poem. So you were no different. Yeah. No. Yeah. And so so so anyway, so I first came to James Tate's work because I was so in the early 90s, I was a graduate student and I was getting a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I got there in sort of 92 or something and immediately knew that this was not the direction I wanted to go. I mean, I loved a lot of things about it, but it wasn't quite right. So, and I was writing, I just started writing poetry. And so I was writing and I'd heard of these things called MFA programs. I didn't really know what they were. I had one friend who went to Iowa and he explained what they were to me and I thought, oh, that sounds amazing. And so I, my second year there,
00:14:01
Speaker
As I was doing my master's exams, I applied to a bunch of different MFA programs, including the one at UMass Amherst. I'd gone to Amherst College, so I was familiar with that area. And when I got in, I looked who the faculty was, and James Tate was there. And so I went to erstwhile Cody's books on Telegraph Ave and bought James Tate's selected poems, which you and I were talking about earlier, which came out.
00:14:30
Speaker
believe in 1991 and won the Pulitzer Prize. And it sort of sits, it turns out, kind of right in the middle of his career. In the end, it turns out that sort of it's, so it covers really basically the first half of his career. And it was just, you know, kind of incredible. And you and I, you said this earlier, and I had the same reaction. When I read this book, I thought, I didn't know you could do this with poetry. I didn't know you could be the all, and there were a lot of different
00:14:58
Speaker
This is in that book. Yeah. Well, that's that's a natural follow up. I want to ask you like what? So I guess I have my own version of it. And I do remember so clearly. I mean, it must. What's funny, Matthew, is it must have been at almost exactly the same time that you met him. I was in high school in the mid 90s and I remember going over to the house of a girl who, you know, I was trying to impress, I guess, and I was talking to her father.
00:15:24
Speaker
who was a writer and learned that I was interested in poetry. And he went back into his office and pulled from his shelf, the selected poems, the same volume of the selected poems, his copy, I think, and said, well, maybe you'd like this. And it's still sitting, I mean, it's sitting on the shelf behind me right now. And for me, part of, but you'll have more to say than this, part of what the this was that I didn't know poetry could be was like funny.
00:15:51
Speaker
But of course, there's much more to it than that. And so you were further along in your life, in your education, and then you met the man. So now I want you to pick up the story and tell us what made Tate different for you. Well, at that time, I don't know how much further along I was. I mean, I was studying Russia. I was deep in Russian literature and Russian poetry, but I didn't actually really know that much about American poetry. I was familiar with the kinds of things people are familiar with when they go to high school in America. So I'd read
00:16:19
Speaker
of the things one reads. But I didn't really know very much about it. And, you know, it's funny because I was probably just at that time listening to way more music, you know, like deep in, you know, REM and pavement and all kinds of stuff like that. You know, so my sense of what a lyric could be was way ahead of what my sense of what like a poem line could be. And that was my own ignorance. That wasn't obviously. So suddenly reading Tate, I was like, oh, this is like,
00:16:49
Speaker
hip and contemporary and sometimes conversational and sometimes surrealistic. Like you said, super funny. I remember standing in the aisle at Cody's books holding this book before I bought it, reading the poem Good Time Jesus, and bursting out laughing after reading it, which was not generally a feeling I get when I'm
00:17:20
Speaker
reading poetry or hadn't been. Let's say, you know, Pushkin wasn't cracking me up generally. Although Pushkin's actually kind of funny. Yeah, it's actually funny. So maybe that's not an example, but you know, also Mandelstam, it's not hilarious. So anyway, so that was one thing, but also just like, yeah, just in general, you know, just wowed by the whole range of it all. And, you know, I was lucky enough also, by the way, I should mention,
00:17:45
Speaker
when I was there to study with Dara Wire and Akha Shahid Ali, Shahid was amazing. I had great friends and colleagues and poets there also. It was a wonderful experience. I ended up going to UMass, but Jim was a big figure for me. I got this crash course in it. I went to UMass and
00:18:13
Speaker
The book, the first individual volume after the selected poems that came out was called Distance from Loved Ones. And both these books were originally published by Wesleyan University Press. And so the selected one, the Pulitzer Prize, and then this little volume, Distance from Loved Ones, came out. And actually, it's funny, I was looking at the publication dates. Weirdly, Distance from Loved Ones came out in 1990, and the selected came out in 1991.
00:18:42
Speaker
but the poems from distance from loved ones are not in the selected there. And then the next iteration sort of like the Beatles, right? Like, let it be. But anyway, so I, so the poem that we're going to talk about quadrant reservoirs in distance from loved ones, it's the, it's actually the first poem in this book. Yeah. And it's so, so I thought also one of the reasons why I wanted to pick it was it was kind of,
00:19:07
Speaker
contemporaneous with my own actual meeting of Jim and getting to know him as a student of his, which was exciting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to follow up on that, but something you just said reminds me.
Exploration of James Tate's Poetry
00:19:20
Speaker
There was something I wanted to point out, and maybe you'll say more about it as well, which is that the selected, which I think is the way a lot of
00:19:29
Speaker
readers, maybe readers vaguely our age or something like that, would have gotten to know Tate's poetry, covers only half of his career. But you've told me there's a new selected on its way, right? So do you have a sense of when readers can expect to be able to get that? Yeah, I think that book is going to be around in November. Echo Press is doing it. It's called Hell, I Love Everybody, which is actually the last line of Good Time Jesus, the one that we
00:19:55
Speaker
Um, we'll be, that we were just talking about. And, um, so, so there's this, there's this selected, I mean, not to get bogged on it, but there's this, and then there's another selected, um, uh, which covers kind of most of the second half of his career. And then there are two books that came out afterwards, possibly. Um, and, um, and so, yeah, so you kind of can get through, if you're kind of a big fan, you can read those two selecteds and get it and get a good feel. But this new one is pretty tight. It's, I think it's 50 poems.
00:20:24
Speaker
and has an introduction by Terrence Hayes, which I mentioned to you earlier. And I've read it in Mays, because it's fantastic. So that's a good intro if you don't know about Jim at all. But this poem is fun, because it does do a lot of things that Jim's poems do. But of course, it's not everything, but we can see
00:20:48
Speaker
Let's come to the poem in just a minute, but because there's this question that I'm dying to ask you, which maybe precedes that. So, you know, you've given us this lovely anecdote of reading his book and laughing out loud in line at the bookstore and so on, and obviously that book was
00:21:07
Speaker
at least partially to thank for your accepting the you know for matriculating to that MFA program and and so on. Now I'm curious about how the the teacher who was James Tate sort of did or didn't align with the kind of poet whom you'd gotten to know a little bit on the page and you have this wonderful line in Story of a Poem which I hope it won't
00:21:34
Speaker
embarrass you if I read aloud, but you say, I signed up for a workshop with James Tate, whom I worshiped. The feeling was not mutual. We both suspected I could not write any good poems and the evidence appeared weekly. So no doubt, well, you've given an account of how you got a different reaction out of him and became a different kind of poet under
00:21:56
Speaker
you know, partially under his tutelage eventually. But yeah, what was he like in the classroom? Was there any surprise there or was it sort of the same presence in some way, the same intelligence? Well, that's a great question. I mean, it was kind of awful, you know, because I came and I obviously, you know, had this, you know, already was worshipping him as a writer and
00:22:23
Speaker
And I had a long way to go before I was going to write any good poems. And I knew that. But it was sort of rough to kind of experience that in his class. And he wasn't mean about it. But yeah, he was very, you know, I think he taught in a way that I think would be considered pretty unfashionable now. I mean, he was very quiet. He would wait, but then he would say what he thought. And often,
00:22:47
Speaker
kind of harsh, especially with the students he thought could take it. He was pretty kind to people who were, I think he was one of those teachers who was pretty good at picking up if somebody was in distress or maybe really overly sensitive and he would be actually pretty careful with people like that and thoughtful and cautious with their feelings, but wasn't that way with me really. I remember the first time, first thing I ever said in his class, somebody read a poem out loud, they brought in their poem and they read out loud
00:23:17
Speaker
And I said, I raised my hand and never said anything. I never spoke of them. It was the second semester. And I said, that line, whatever it was, reminds me of, you know, something in such and such a movie. I can't remember what I said, you know, probably something pretentious like Fellini or something. And he just looked at me and said, well, that's your problem, isn't it?
00:23:39
Speaker
which was very funny and kind of neat. But also, you know, in a way it was like, I appreciated the lesson, which is like, don't, you know, this is, let's respect this person's poem, like their artistic act. Let's not drag it into, you know, like, like, you know, comparison immediately with somebody else's artwork, you know? So I think, I think it was anything he said and anything he did was always in the service of the poem. And he really treasured poetry and worshiped it and loved it.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that's really what I got. One of the main things I got from him was to really take it seriously on its own terms. And make him sound like a mean person. He wasn't a mean guy. He was a funny guy, a sweet guy, a lovely guy, but in class he could be a little stern for sure. Yeah, right. Right. Well, and like you said, maybe he understood or intuited that you could take that kind of response.
00:24:31
Speaker
He was right about that. I mean, here we are. I thought it was funny. I wasn't. Yeah, good. So well, let's do what he, I don't know if he'd want us to do it at all with his poetry, but let's give that kind of attention to the poem that you've selected.
00:24:51
Speaker
For the episode now and Matthew maybe you know you sent me a fascinating article about the and I can make that article available for people who are listening to this to this episode but but
00:25:08
Speaker
about the place that's named by the title of the poem, about Quabin Reservoir, which, you know, for a naive reader, such as I was before you sent me that link, sounds like it might be a made-up place to me. You know, I'm not familiar with the region. It sounds like it could be a sort of poetical landscape somewhere, but it's a real place. Because it's Jim, you might, you know. Yeah.
00:25:34
Speaker
that's a reasonable assumption. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. But this is a real place, and it's an unusual place. And knowing, I think, just a little bit about what makes it unusual sort of unlocks a few experiences, I think, that a reader might have with the poem. So do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about what that place was? Yeah, just real quick. Yeah, it is. So what it is, essentially, is it's a
00:26:03
Speaker
um, now reservoir, um, that is, you know, East of Amherst basically. So, you know, if you can, you can get there, it's not a long drive away from, from Amherst and Northampton. And it was, uh, it was a Valley where there were these towns. Um, and you know, in the early 20th century, the, the government basically decided that they needed that to use that, that areas as a reservoir of water for Boston.
00:26:31
Speaker
And so the town was intentionally flooded. The town, sorry, the valleys were intentionally flooded, and those people who lived there were told they had to leave. And so it's when you go to see the, if you can stand there in the reservoir, you can see steps literally going down into the water, and you can see some structures and different things. And so it's kind of a spooky, cruel, sad,
00:27:00
Speaker
Um spot, you know in in western, massachusetts that you know locals know about and that you can read I mean Yeah, the article which yeah, it'd be nice if you posted is sure and sort of give people some picture You can look at see some pictures and and get some history of it But basically that's quab and reservoir is this spot with these so when he talks in the poem about you know describes kind of these actions in the town under the water that's you know
00:27:29
Speaker
from a historical thing. That's not just a made up imagining thing, although you could read the poem and just think it was a made up thing and that would probably be okay too. Sure. And now other alternatives are occurring to me as well. I mean, some poets, but I take it not him, not even in the original book publication of the poem, some poets might have put at the back of the book like an explanatory note or something like that.
00:27:55
Speaker
Right, so that's what's in the style, right? No, I wouldn't have thought under the under the poem, you know right under the title maybe right the note, you know in one line a person or we could say awesome interestingly, you know, a lot of poets would try to Work that into the poem somehow. Yeah interesting, you know, right like maybe sort of give a little runway into it like, you know
00:28:22
Speaker
I don't know how, but sort of just see if you couldn't do that or whatever. He didn't bother. Right, right. So there's this on the one hand, this kind of perhaps unusual for him, the kind of instinct towards specification in the title, right? It's like a point on a map.
00:28:43
Speaker
And on the other, a kind of lack of helpful explanation, which makes it sound like it could just be a metaphor or it could just be a fantasy or something. So interesting, I think, to have all of that. Maybe we can tease out some of the implications of that sort of, that kind of two ways, two or more ways of relating to the material that this poem takes on. But I think we ought to hear the poem. So Matthew, would you read Quabbin Reservoir for us?
00:29:14
Speaker
Sure. Thanks. This is James Tate, Quavin Reservoir. All morning skipping stones on the creamy lake, I thought I heard a lute being played high up in the birch trees, or fawn speaking French with a Brooklyn accent. A snowy owl watched me with half-closed eyes. What have you done for me for lately? I wanted to ask it, licking the air. There was a village at the bottom of the lake,
00:29:44
Speaker
And I could just make out the old post office. And occasionally, when the light struck it just right, I glimpsed several mailmen swimming in or out of it, letters and packages escaping randomly. 1938, 1937, didn't matter to them any longer. Void, no such address. Soft blazes squirmed across the surface. And I could see their church, now home to druid squatters.
00:30:14
Speaker
rock and the intoxicating current as if to an ancient hymn. And a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion. Awake, awake, you germs of habit. Alas, I fling my final stone, my calling card, my gift of porphyry to the citizens of the deep and disappear into a copse, raving like a butterfly to a rosebud. I love you.
00:30:44
Speaker
So that was Matthew Zapruder reading James Tate's Quabin Reservoir.
00:30:53
Speaker
Matthew, you said this was the first poem in the book. Do you find that Tate does the, or did the kind of thing that I find that many poets do, which is to put a, often the first poem in a collection serves a kind of special purpose, I think. I mean, it's a poem that can be abstracted on its own, perhaps put into a selected volume or talked about in the way we're doing here.
00:31:17
Speaker
but that there can be something ours, Poetica, like about a first poem in a book or something crystalline about one. Was Tate want to do that in your experience?
00:31:33
Speaker
Um, yeah, I think so. I think that's fair to say. I mean, some of the, some of his best known poems, I mean, I'm sort of doing this off the top of my head, but some of his best known poems are not necessarily the first ones in the book. Like I don't believe the Lost Pilot is the first poem on the Lost Pilot. I don't think it is. Yeah. But, um, but yeah, I think, and I think this poem in particular, um, sort of announces like, like we were saying before, a certain form of attention, a certain relationship to the world, to the natural world, um, highly subjective,
00:32:03
Speaker
um, highly, uh, and playful. Um, but tonally, you know, kind of shifty, like some like shift very fast from like some kind of jokey or whatever into like, you know, and, or even goofy into something that's pretty, you know, uh, direct, uh, just sort of like naming where he is or what he's seeing and shift. And then there's this, these moments, which I look forward to talking about with you sort of high,
00:32:31
Speaker
lyric almost, where he really sings.
Analysis of 'Quabbin Reservoir'
00:32:34
Speaker
And so it's a bit of an overture, I would say. Right. And among those registers, the jokey, the kind of high lyric, the direct and kind of prosaic, there's also, I find in Tate's poems, often the kind of sentimental or the kind of mockishly, sort of ironically, sometimes you think, but you're not sure, sort of sentimental, this poem ends, I love you. Well, it's pretty gutsy to end your
00:33:01
Speaker
the first poem in a book with a, I love you. I mean, and I don't, you know, in that moment, I don't read that. I mean, of course it's channeled through somebody, something saying something to something else.
00:33:13
Speaker
But I don't read that ending ironically, but we can talk about that. Not that you did, but let's not get too excited. I want to begin at the beginning, which I think is also an interestingly, potentially self-descriptive moment. This image of skipping stones
00:33:36
Speaker
You know, well, I don't know. So I guess it would be a natural enough topic for no pun intended for a poet to write about a lake, you know, or sitting, you know, sitting, sitting at a lake or a reservoir, a body of water of some kind describing it.
00:33:51
Speaker
And unless the reader of the poem is from the area or something, there is nothing yet in the poem by the first line to explain what's so unusual about this place. I suppose reservoir suggests that it is man-made rather than naturally occurring, but even so, he doesn't call it a reservoir in the poem there. He calls it a creamy lake.
00:34:18
Speaker
I don't know. Skipping stones, you described Tate earlier as playful. And skipping stones, and maybe I'm thinking of this also because I've been recently trying to coach my daughter into how properly to get a stone to skip. So we were just at a lake and I was trying to help her do it.
00:34:43
Speaker
Skipping Stone seems to me to be like a particular kind of playfulness. And I wonder what it evokes for you in terms of the kinds of, as metaphor, in other words, as a kind of, as the kind of poetic playfulness in which Tate might have indulged or, you know, towards which he might have been drawn. So talk about Skipping Stones, Matthew. Yeah, I like that. It's kind of like a childish
00:35:13
Speaker
act, I guess, you know, and I like the all morning is kind of funny. It's been, you know, it's like usually when you skip stones, you're like, kind of you do it a couple times. But like, you know, it's like he's started treating it almost like his job, right? All morning skipping stones, like, you know, already there's sort of a little bit of a kind of like joke, I don't see jokey, but maybe a little. But yeah, I was thinking about that. And I was thinking to in this reading about, you know, you mentioned Lake, and of course, you can't have a think of the romantic
00:35:40
Speaker
Poets, you know, the lake. And so in this poem, in the beginning, you have a lake, a lute, a fawn, and then an owl, right? And it's like you've got sort of these elements of a more romantic or traditional form of poetry that are, I think, being kind of like, yeah, repurposed, I guess I would say.
00:36:05
Speaker
Yeah, and so sorry, but for people who don't know, among the most famous figures of English Romanticism and of the first generation of English Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, most notably among them, these poets are sometimes referred to as the Lake Poets. They lived and worked in the Lake District in England. Maybe that
00:36:30
Speaker
whether or not that particular thing is in Tate's mind as he's writing this line, the web of associations, I think, is no doubt there. It's a kind of a romantic spot and a typically poetic one, perhaps. I think he would be, I mean, Tate was a big, big, big reader, read everything. I'm sure he would be, you know, I think a poet standing in front of a lake, having deep or
00:36:58
Speaker
not so deep thoughts. It's got to be, you've got to think you're putting yourself in a tradition and then you're already sort of like how you orient yourself towards that tradition is going to be meaningful to, you know, to, to you and the reader. And he certainly doesn't make a federal case out of it as my dad used to say, but he, but he, but he, you know, it's fair. And I think it's kind of funny the way he starts. So again, it comes back to what you said about a first poem in a book. It's sort of like,
00:37:27
Speaker
you know, he's sort of playing a tiny bit at being a child and the skipping stones and playing a tiny bit at being a romantic poet. And also, you know, a bit about this, I, you know, I mentioned this to you earlier, but there's something, you know, I think any reader who's familiar with Tate might think that we're drifting towards a sort of surrealism here. And that's a complicated, complicated word in Tate's work and in general. But, you know, this, these things,
00:37:56
Speaker
you know, a foreign speaking French with a Brooklyn accent is...
00:38:00
Speaker
you know, immediately sort of puts us in a kind of certain space. You know, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know why. It puts us like in three different, you know, a faun speaking French. A faun is one thing. A faun speaking French another. And then and then, you know, with a Brooklyn accent feels like a joke, I think, in part, because I don't know. I mean, it's sort of strains one's ability to imagine what that would sound like. Sounds fun. For one thing, it sounds fun.
00:38:27
Speaker
but it's sort of, you know, it is characteristic of Tate too. He doesn't, he doesn't explain, you know, he doesn't elaborate on like why that's important. You know, some other poet might kind of stay with that, but he just sort of like, boom, he's off. And you know, Fawn speaking French for the Brooklyn accent, a snowy owl, and then we're off to the owls. Yeah.
00:38:44
Speaker
which is a little more realistic in quotes, I guess it's saying. Yes. And there's a kind of jokey relationship to received language or idiom that I find throughout the poem. So an early example is the what have you done for me for lately, which, you know, seems sounds like a plan. What have you done for me lately? But oh, it's fantastic. It's a triple pun. Right. Because what have you done for me for lately? Right. I see for lately stamps.
00:39:13
Speaker
but filletly, of course, oral sex, I said looking there. It's a kind of hominid there, right? Yeah. It's crazy. I remember reading that for the first time and thinking, this person's mastery of different layers of language is so far beyond my capability. I can barely manage one, and it's very casual. It says, what have you done for me filletly? I want to ask it, meaning the owl, right?
00:39:41
Speaker
a snowy owl watch me with half closed eyes. What have you done for me for lately, which is funny also, why would, why would I owe him anything? Um, you know, but, uh, I wanted to ask it licking the air, um, which definitely sends him and it's, it's funny, it's clever. It's, it's, it's, and it also just like, I feel like it like shoots my attention into single words, you know, like for lately. And I think about that word with pleasure and
00:40:09
Speaker
and kind of like attention that is just in and of itself, I think a gift. Totally. Totally. And then it sort of sends him to then thinking about the mailman, I think. Yeah, which I'm...
00:40:23
Speaker
fascinated by and I want to come to in a moment, but first I want to just offer a thought provoked by something you said. I mean, I guess I had my own ideas sort of swimming around about what the skipping stones thing might gesture towards, but then something you said I think cinched it for me, which was you talked about, or you sort of asked
00:40:46
Speaker
how it was that Tate would kind of orient himself towards a tradition or towards a kind of certain romantic view of poetry. And you also said something about, well, the poet kind of having deep thoughts at the lake. Well, skipping stones is like a
00:41:04
Speaker
is a way to sort of, I mean, it's both aggressive and playful. It's like, you know, you got to be, you got to, you got, well, one thing I was trying to explain to my daughter, for instance, like, you got to throw the stone kind of hard. If you don't do that, right, you got to whip it. Exactly right. And, and, and so, and it's that force that allows you to sort of stay on the surface of a thing
00:41:29
Speaker
that wants you to sink down into it, right? And I think Tate's kind of relationship to the literary tradition is like that. Like he zips along it fast enough not to sink down into its depths. Yeah, totally. I love that. I never had thought of that. And I think, you know, and that's something you could ding him for if you wanted. I mean, somebody who was looking for something else, looking for someone to sink deeply into something, you know,
00:41:58
Speaker
you know, get frustrated with that. But I mean, thankfully, we don't have to only read James Tate, we can read lots of different things. But yeah, I mean, I also I don't know about you. It's funny, I was thinking about you teaching your daughter about skipping stones. I always feel guilty when I do that, because I feel like the stone
00:42:15
Speaker
has taken like so long to work it's going to happen to the shore. And then I just like whip it back in. I said it back like a thousand years, you know, like it just, it feels, I apologize, you know, like to the stone, like, like, sorry, you like took all this time to get here, you know? But, but yeah, that's, that's not really in this form. That's just, that's just my own. Well, yeah, I don't know. Is it or isn't it? Let's, let's, let's sort of file that thought away. Time, time.
00:42:41
Speaker
a kind of certain, you know, relationship to objects. Sorry, Lane. That's okay. I keep, I keep muting it. But, um, that's okay. No, no, I, I, yeah. Um, anyway, so, so, yeah. So, so will we, do you want to move? I love that thought about, I love that thought about the skipping stunts. I never thought about that, but it's, it's, it's exactly right. Let's, let's talk about, about mail. Likewise, looking in the air, by the way, something kind of like a little bit like, you know, you know, that's a sort of, that's not something where it's worth it to say.
00:43:11
Speaker
Right. I don't think so. I don't think so. We'd have to go through the whole preload, but I don't think so. Yeah.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I do. Maybe the case that Wordsworth, at least I don't know, I'm like, it's a product of my particular education in poetry that I'm always seeing Wordsworth everywhere. And there's a way in which I think maybe he comes up again towards the end, but that's neither here nor there. I want to talk first about this. Well, I think it maybe is a bit here because I mean, the beginning of the prelude is
00:43:45
Speaker
if I'm recalling correctly, you know, oh, there is blessing in this gentle breeze. Right. That's right. That's the beginning. So he starts there, too. And so, you know, I think that that's I mean, I'm not saying that Tate was conscious of that in a moment. I have no idea, but he certainly was very well familiar with that text. And so, you know, in Tate's case, he he licks the air and makes this kind of funny remark. As one would lick a stamp, I guess. Right. Yes. Right. For lately. Yeah. Right. That's one of the stamp or
00:44:14
Speaker
something else, a body. But yeah, it is. But I like what you're saying about his sort of like distance, and the book is called Distance from Love Ones, this kind of productive distance or lightness or something that's a defamiliarization, I guess you can say if you wanted.
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, and it's distance from loved ones that is the kind of necessary condition for the sending of a letter too, right? I mean, this brings us to the next topic or the thing that you were already gesturing towards this bit about the post office and so on. So maybe just because it's been a moment, I can read the lines again.
00:45:01
Speaker
to remind our listeners. So right after the licking the air moment, the poem reads this way. There was a village at the bottom of the lake, and I could just make out the old post office. And occasionally, when the light struck it just right, I glimpsed several mailmen swimming in or out of it, letters and packages escaping randomly, 1938, 1937,
00:45:30
Speaker
it didn't matter to them any longer. Void, no such address. I think that would be a place to stop so we could cordon off just for the moment the lines that I just realized. The tone of that is so different from what comes before, isn't it? Say something more about that, Matthew. What are you hearing differently? Oh, I just think it calms itself with this sort of almost clinical observation. There was a village at the bottom of the lake.
00:45:57
Speaker
And again, like I could just make out the old post office, like make out that kind of casual colloquial language, you know, like a sort of, and of course we know cause we've talked about it, that these, he's actually talking about looking at a structure, you know, under the water. So like, um, you know, and I occasionally when the light struck it just right, I don't know, just the pace of it is, is, it feels kind of more weight, like he's shifted into a far more,
00:46:25
Speaker
conversational, for lack of a better term, mode.
00:46:31
Speaker
I don't know, but how does it strike you out or anything? Well, yeah, and I think you're right. Sorry, when I asked you to say more about the tonal shift, it wasn't because I disagreed, but just because I was interested in hearing you describe it. So I agree with you. And maybe part of what produces it is like the opening lines have him sitting up above or at the, whatever you call it, if it's a reservoir.
00:46:57
Speaker
bank or shore doesn't sound quite right, but there's whatever the word would be. Being sort of in his world, you know, like in the environment that he can touch and walk around in and so forth.
00:47:12
Speaker
But whatever is sort of beneath the surface of the water is something which he can regard only from a distance. I mean, even if it happens to be close by, it's sort of a world apart, right? And distance and time, distance and air, but also distance and time, distance, yeah, for sure. And so maybe what I'm getting at is the inability to enter into the scene
00:47:40
Speaker
in that second part produces a kind of calm, like, you know, you don't sort of don't have to be anxious about what your relation is to it anymore, because you're not, you know, it's not your world. Yeah, there's a kind of detached tone from to that, even even as detached word for it. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I mean, he does the there is the still the eye, right? I could just make out that line when you called out the old post office.
00:48:10
Speaker
I glimpse several mailmen. Okay, so that's an interesting moment, and perhaps a place where surrealism is a word that we would want to reach for. I know it was something you were curious to talk about in this conversation.
James Tate's Surrealism and Style
00:48:23
Speaker
Maybe it's the case that literally he can just make out the old post office, or maybe even that is a kind of imaginative flight of fancy. He knows that it's there and his imagination, as it were, sort of projects it into what he can see with his eyes.
00:48:40
Speaker
But no doubt, the mailman swimming in and out of that post office is now a different kind of, that has a different relationship to facticity or to reality. So yeah, what do you make of this swimming mailman? And that is itself a kind of shift within the description that we're getting. Yeah, well, I mean, it's,
00:49:10
Speaker
You know, I think if a lot of people, you know, I don't know if you would agree with me or not, it's hard for me to say, because I know Jim's work and Jim's so well, but if you don't know him so well, you might, it's two of the things that probably come up immediately that people sort of know about Tate is that one, that he's funny, and two, that he's surreal, whatever that means, you know? And, you know, I know from talking to him and hearing him talk a lot that he always bristled.
00:49:37
Speaker
I think called a surrealist. Didn't love that term. And it took me a while to figure out why. I mean, I don't know if I figured it out, but to speculate productively on why. And I think it's a bit infantilizing in a certain kind of way to call any act of the imagination surrealist, you know, like, oh, like it's sort of, I think in our culture, it can become, it can become a way of, of sort of,
00:50:04
Speaker
you know, putting something in its place. Like, oh, that's just surreal. That's just being weird or strange or whatever. But I think for, it's serious, but the surrealists were engaged in serious business. You know, they were, they were reuniting the world of dream and the world of quote unquote reality or whatever, in order to, you know, kind of heal us. If you read the surveillance manifesto, that's really what they were, they were interested in doing. They felt like we were damaged souls. We were damaged by adulthood, right? Um, that's kind of what Breton talks about and how, you know,
00:50:33
Speaker
the task is to sort of bring that childlike wonder, that dream consciousness back together with what we adults call the real so that we can stop behaving monstrously to each other. So in this case, when I think about surrealism, I think less about like sort of orthodox surrealism of like fur covered, you know,
00:50:57
Speaker
trains or whatever. Yeah, you have teacup, right? But like, sort of more like, you know, like, or, or, or, or, you know, automatic writing where the, where there's semantically no, no sense in the words, but, but this is more the largest spirit of surrealism of sort of like the, the dream world and the real world coming into contact, fusing, intertwining. And I think this is a kind of
00:51:24
Speaker
enactment of that of that thing. So those mailmen are, they come from the dream world or the world of like subjective perception, but they become as real as anything else.
00:51:37
Speaker
just like the fawn speaking French. So that way I do think it's kind of accurate to call this a surrealist poem in that more general sense. He doesn't, for instance, say, I could just make out the old post office and occasionally when the light struck it just right, it was as though I could glimpse up, right? He doesn't do that, right? There's no hedging in that way. That's the difference between a surrealist and a knock.
00:52:05
Speaker
Right. I love the account you've just given us, Matthew, of a kind of objection that a person might have to the label.
00:52:24
Speaker
You know, the person who is in an art museum and sees a kind of jarring and inexplicable juxtaposition of things in a painting, say, and then is told while it's surrealism,
00:52:41
Speaker
might come away from it thinking, well, all surrealism is to be weird or to not make sense or something. But in the account you've given us of dreams as one way to access that mode,
00:52:59
Speaker
you know, depending on what the theory of dreaming is that you have that would undergird that practice, presumably there is the person who is guided in that way thinks there is something kind of meaningful but hard to access otherwise in the reporting of dreams or in one's memory of dreams, whether it's a psychoanalytically kind of directed approach or some other kind of approach, they're perhaps there with the artist who is working in that mode
00:53:29
Speaker
is doing is not just trying not to make sense or trying to break the hold on sense-making, but is trying as it were to submit to a kind of sense-making that is beyond their grasp otherwise, that exceeds them, their conscious thinking. I think exactly.
00:53:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I love, I mean, I love this as, I mean, I wish I'd be very interested, of course, in knowing more about, you know, what Jim's account of why that term didn't suit him, what that account would look like. But I do think you've, you know, you've well described a kind of feature that I find in many, if not certainly not all of his poems, but that seems characteristically like him.
00:54:23
Speaker
I think it was exhilarating at the time to read Jim and many other writers who were doing that kind of, let's say, you know, some people call it American surrealism. And because it felt like... I think of a poet like Simic, maybe, who you mentioned earlier, right? Yeah, and Simic is a fascinating case too, because he sort of brings in a lot of the Eastern Central European
00:54:49
Speaker
Spirit of poetry, but likewise. Yes, like like like definitely bringing in a version of that too or But just the the elevation of the dream state To on the same plane as the as what we ordinarily refer to as real and not in a way that feels to me kind of you know gratuitous or purely just for sensational purposes, but in the interests of of exploring
00:55:18
Speaker
a feeling. I mean, here, here, you know, it's like, there's a lost world that he's standing in front of. I mean, these people, there are people who lived in these villages, who lost their homes. I mean, I mean, sound dramatic or whatever, but they, you know, but it was, it's, it's, it's, it's about this poem, really, a lot of it's about the past, right? And about, about, about lost things and about, about who we are now in relation to what was and
00:55:41
Speaker
you know, like it. And so I find it very moving in that way without, you know, he's not explicit about that, but I think that's the spirit that comes to mind. And so when he's talking about those male men, it feels tender to me. Absolutely. Absolutely right. He does eventually talk about other, I mean, there's like the church, which comes up a moment later and the band pavilion and so on, but nothing gets the extended attention that the post office
00:56:10
Speaker
does and I want to invite you to say more about what Tate's, like what in your way of reading the poem is fascinating him or drawing him to this beginning with the word for lately but then extending into that you know description of the post office and the mailman. What is it about
00:56:33
Speaker
I mean, does it have, I'll sort of offer this as an initial question, but then please, you know, run with it. Does it have something to do with, you know, certainly in an era before things like podcasts and the internet and so on, the mail is a way for people who are a part to keep in touch, right? So you've described, you've said that some of the tenderness of this poem has to do with the kind of
00:57:00
Speaker
separation between the past and the present. But, you know, is the male the thing that gets the attention here? Because it's the it's this kind of technology for keeping people in touch. I think I think that's exactly right. We have to put ourselves back pre pre Internet days, you know, or yeah. And it's and I think, yeah, the feeling that there are these undelivered
00:57:29
Speaker
letters and packages is, I mean, it's metonymy, right? It doesn't need to be explicitly said in the poem, but it's a metonymic characterization of what's happened to this entire world or what always happens in the past period. It's always, always undelivered messages, right? And so the poet standing on the bank witnessing these undelivered messages
00:57:57
Speaker
sort of floating around and not being able to really do anything about it except just describe the fact of them is you know is maybe you could you could if you were in the source that sort of mood you could even say that's sort of a poet's job so even if you don't live in the sort of town that has the extraordinary thing happened to it that the government decides to flood it you know and you have to move out there is a sense do i hear you saying this matthew there is a sense in which
00:58:24
Speaker
our lives are sort of inevitably going to produce undelivered messages. Yeah. I mean, it happens, you know, I mean, the water is, I mean, not without, you know, uh, I mean, you could think of the water as just being like time, right? I mean, for all of us, right? And it's, it's, it's, you know, in this case, it's sort of a, there's a physical kind of thing that's happened, but, but this is just an example of what happens. Right. And I like the specificity of that 1938, 1937,
00:58:54
Speaker
You know, it feels, you know,
00:58:59
Speaker
I don't know, appropriately specific, let's say. Yeah, it's but it's both specific. And there's something in the article that you sent me, I'm not going to look it up right now. I know that in 1938, there was a there's big hurricane in the Northeast. And that has there was something to do with the history in that. But I agree, it's both specific 1938, 1937. And then after the line break, it sort of throws up its hands like, well,
00:59:25
Speaker
None of that matters anymore. It didn't matter to them any longer. I also love these phrases that are italicized for people who aren't looking at the text of the poem, but just hearing us read it. The word, sentence though, void, italicized, and then after the line break, no such address. Those are both
00:59:48
Speaker
recognizable, I think, for people who have any experience writing letters or in the mail with the mail as things that might get stamped on an envelope by the post office or so on when a message is undeliverable.
01:00:04
Speaker
but that also have these other kinds of, um, scary, um, larger content, right? Void. Certainly. No such address is also interesting to me. I mean, it's a, to think about it in poetic terms, right? We think about poetic address, right? The ability for, for, um, for a poet to address, um, a listener. Um, we'll get to that later, right? Yeah. Yeah. Say more. Go, go. Yeah. No, no. You're, you're absolutely right. I mean, who's he, who's he so in the, in the poem and we'll get there in a minute. Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:33
Speaker
You know, in the poem he's sort of like doing the poet thing where he's just sort of like speaking to the air. You know, or speaking, he's being overheard by this, by this spawn and this owl, but he's, you know, he talks a bit to the air, but he's like,
01:00:49
Speaker
But then he gets later on, he gets to actually talk to the citizens of the deep, and we'll get to that. I'm not sure who he talks to there, but we can talk about that. Well, let's talk about it now.
01:01:09
Speaker
I don't know. It's probably tedious and unnecessary in the end for us to try to divide the poem up precisely into movements or sections or something like that. But okay, fine. I mean, I think another one begins sort of midline after no such address. Soft blazes squirmed across the surface and I could see their church.
01:01:31
Speaker
now home to druid squatters, rock in the intoxicating current as if to an ancient hymn, and a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion. Awake, awake, you germs of habit. Maybe, I don't know, do we want to mark another section there before the end or say more? Well, I mean, I think it's, again, just funny how quick he gets from, you know, there was a village at the bottom of the lake,
01:01:56
Speaker
or even a line like it didn't matter to them any longer, which is, you know, pretty, you know, it's something you and I might say in conversation too, pretty quick to soft blazes squirmed across the surface. I'm sort of wondering what you, what you think of that line and it's a kind of a, it's a, it's a, it's a funny shift in tone. And then, and then it gets more and more excited over the course of those four or five lines that you read to the team and ending with an awake, awake, you germs of habit, which is like,
01:02:24
Speaker
funny, you know, who's he talking to? But it's the reeds. So the reeds are conducting the drowsy brand band pavilion, right? So it's like he's looking and he sees grasses kind of waving and he's imagining them sort of like all conducting. So these imaginary musicians in the band pavilion that's again under the waters or whatever. And it seems like they're asking the germs of habit
01:02:54
Speaker
to awake, which I don't know what you, but I'm, I'm curious what you make of, you know, um, you know, the soft blazes and the druid squatters and the germs of habit. I mean, those are actually, I think characteristic tape type of, you know, kind of like phraseologies that I, you know, I, I adore those moments that they sort of, they're, they're, they, they, they're a bit elusive, more elusive than some other things, which I don't mind at all, but it's, but you know, I wonder if you have thoughts about that.
01:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think he does the thing that there are some poets I love. I mean, I think for instance of a poet like Ashbury who
01:03:40
Speaker
has his own ear for idiom, and then often his interest in idiom is to sort of replace one word in the idiom with another word so that it no longer quite makes sense, but it still sounds like an idiom.
01:03:56
Speaker
So you have the kind of feeling of sense, but it's hard to explain it to someone else. It really relies on a kind of native knowledge of the language or something. Yeah, that whole poem, Paradoxes and Oxymorons, kind of does that. It's sort of like working with that exact thing that you just so gracefully described, sort of off-kiltery kind of way of saying things that are sort of like what we always hear.
01:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't know. My first instinct was to try to naturalize soft blazes squirmed across the surface. So I remembered that at the beginning of the poem, we were told that he was doing something all morning. And so I think, well, maybe now it's afternoon or something like that. And there is a kind of reflection of setting sun or
01:04:48
Speaker
you know, some kind of atmospheric effect, which is producing a strange kind of luminescent phenomenon on the surface of the water. Yeah, something like that. But it's sort of a funny way of saying it, right? Totally. Yeah. But I agree with you that it is essentially a visual effect. Yeah. And squirmed is the funniest word in there, maybe, because if it were soft blazes,
01:05:13
Speaker
you know, could be anything glided across the surface or something like that appeared on the surface. Right. You know, struck my eye, whatever. Yeah. It's squirmed is weird and funny. It suggests what discomfort kind of awkwardness. That's when you squirm, right? When you're, um, a little gross.
01:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little gross. That's right. There are all these, I don't know, soft squirmed surface, you know. Yeah, it does sound great. I don't know. The reeds, like reeds are another, yet another sort of poetic kind of image of poetic voice or the production of poetic sound, the wind in the reeds and all that.
01:06:04
Speaker
But yeah, I'm confused by the, so again, if you're not looking at it, the line goes, and a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion. That's the end of the line, and that line ends in a colon.
01:06:18
Speaker
So what, so then awake, awake, you germs of habit comes in the next line. So sorry, Matthew, you were saying that you took that awake, awake, you germs of habit as sorry, who's the speaker? I'm not sure. I mean, it could be, it could be either that's the, that's the instruction that the, that the conducting, the reads, and I think elbowing is kind of interesting word because it's sort of like, you know, it's almost like they're, he's, again, he's sort of weirdly accurately describing what it looks like to kind of look, look at,
01:06:47
Speaker
grass, it's sort of half in the water and a half knot, but like, you know, but it, you know, I don't, I, but elbowing, elbowing reeds is also kind of like, you know, those are musical references as well. You know, when I, when you watch someone play a string instrument, they're elbowing, you know, they're, they're moving their bow. And then, and then reeds of course is, you know, reeds, reeds are part of wind instruments. So, so, so it's, it's, there's a kind of,
01:07:12
Speaker
There's a lot of layers in there, but essentially, yeah, I see him looking down at the water and seeing these reeds, these grasses or whatever, conducting these figures in the submerged van pavilion. And yeah, I don't know if a wake-a-wake in terms of habit is something the grass says or something that he bursts out with. I'm not really sure. In terms of habit is odd.
Themes of Memory and Connection
01:07:41
Speaker
totally odd like what is that you know that's like the germs of habit like like i don't know what i it's almost like he's it's almost like he's saying it to himself i mean i know he's not it's like it's like wake up right you know
01:07:55
Speaker
like germs of habit. Well, it sounds as though it's coming from this place of desire to kind of reanimate, which is what he's been doing imaginatively in a way up to this point, to sort of reanimate this town that's been submerged.
01:08:16
Speaker
A germ is what, like it's a seed. I mean, that's one of the, right? But germs of habit, yeah, is, I don't know, habit, I think of like, if maybe it's related to like a, gosh, like a habitat or, you know, habitual, you know, action. I think it's the kind of thing that if you're imagining,
01:08:44
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I'm sort of thinking about it. It takes me back to the moment to the time before the time was submerged. Right. And it's almost like you, you, you, you, the citizens, the people in the town come and they hear a concert and it's like, you're like, you know, you, you, you know, wake art, like art is going to wake you up or music is going to wake you up or like, like, like, you know, here, here's something to stir you out of your habitual
01:09:08
Speaker
you know, whatever, like, you know, we mentioned defamiliarization earlier, but it's, you know, it's like, you know, this idea that like, art's job is to sort of, yeah, shake us out of our habitualized behaviors and perceptions or whatever. So it's sort of that's kind of how I read that moment. But, you know, I don't know if it bothers you to not exactly know what he means. I mean, I, you know, I don't, I'm gonna make, I gotta make my peace with it.
01:09:35
Speaker
No, I mean I'm not bothered I mean, I think I'm bothered when I read a poem and I have no idea what the person's talking about but I think Tate is so good at situating us in somewhere where I'm I I'm very I'm very grounded for lack of a better word like in in it so it almost like I I like these moments where the language kind of escapes a little bit from my easy ability to to paraphrase it or
01:10:02
Speaker
You know, it's a fine line, obviously. I mean, you know, I don't love a poem where, like I said, where it's just filled with language like that. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? But I never, I never feel that way in a tape call. No. Well, yeah, I mean.
01:10:18
Speaker
The drowsy band pavilion helps. For me, just now, it has been helping me as I've been thinking about it, as you've been talking, too. The conceit there is that the town has submerged, but also it's asleep. So awake, awake, you germs of habit comes as the frustrated prodding in response to that, a provocation in response to that.
01:10:47
Speaker
He wants his time to come back to life at that moment, I think. He wants his time to happen. And what's a town's life but a kind of a collection of habits, right? Like a collection of, you know, it's not a particular sort of set of events, but it's like the kind of humming of a kind of habitual life that you could see as though in a kind of time-lapse movie or something. There's the mailman every day and there's the this and that.
01:11:15
Speaker
And so much of Tate's later work, you know, especially his last several books kind of take place in these towns, like he's tells has these poems where where things are constantly he's like I went to the feed store and so it's what happened or I was at the stop and shop and such and such happened or a guy came knocking at my door with the mail and says and so like I think this is a kind of points to what will happen in his in his work going forward, you know, these germs of habit. I think that's yeah, that's really
01:11:42
Speaker
you know, that's so much at the center of what goes on for him as he moves forward. And then whatever that instruction or frustrated exclamation is meant to record or perform,
01:11:58
Speaker
It seems clear that the rhetorical gesture that follows it is an indication that it's unsuccessful, right? Alas. Alas. Another old-timey word. Yeah, right. I fling my final stone, my calling card,
01:12:14
Speaker
my gift of porphyry. There's a good example of the play with idiom, which I think the ghost of the idiom that's lurking behind that maybe is my gift of prophecy or something, but it's my gift of porphyry, which is a kind of stone. My poor gift. Porphyry, the kind of stone, you see him returning. So much has happened, but we're returning to the skipping stones. One more, he's going to throw one more.
01:12:45
Speaker
It's like F and I can't bring these people back to life. They're stuck under there. I'm stuck out here, whatever, but I'm just going to whip one more stone across. And maybe this one doesn't skip. I don't know, because I mean, he's sending it down. I mean, I guess even a skipping stone will eventually sink, but this one seems meant to skip. So yeah, let's talk about the slides. Can I just ask one thing to you too? Please. I think that this moment,
01:13:13
Speaker
Um, alas, I fling my final stone, my calling card, my gift of porphyry to the citizens of the deep. That to me, I don't know how you feel, but that to me has a kind of heightened, uh, sort of almost like theatrical, um, tone to it that I, I miss in contemporary poetry sometimes, like that it's, it's, it's, he's letting himself, I kind of get up on the stage and sing a bit.
01:13:38
Speaker
there in a way that I just really adore. It sounds so good. I just appreciate that moment. I don't know if you would agree. Maybe you see that more in contemporary poetry than I do, but it feels...
01:13:52
Speaker
I like the boldness of that. That doesn't sound like a poem that I'm not one to, and I don't think you are either, so I don't mean to suggest that you are, I'm not one to disparage contemporary poetry and say, oh, it's an impoverished art and we should go back to the way things were.
01:14:16
Speaker
having said that. Not at all. Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, I mean, you're an editor at a press that publishes many great books of contemporary poetry and a poet yourself, of course. But yeah, that doesn't sound like a poem that I might just happen upon in a poetry journal right now. And you might hear it for sure from some poets, man, but from a way a poet comes to mind, Julian Tomano at Sproulowski, for instance,
01:14:44
Speaker
write a line that sort of has that kind of turnality. I mean, there's people, you know, I just, I guess it's not so much like, to, to, to, you know, criticize, Deborah, just a more sort of note, again, like the terminal shifts in this poem and how he moves back. Well, but even the tone there, Matthew, and I'm glad you're sort of slowing us down here for the, for the series, even, even the tone there is like, um, it's, it's kind of multivalent, right? Like,
01:15:13
Speaker
because we get this sort of sequence of a positive phrases, I take it. I mean, I don't think this is a list in other words. I think my final stone is another way of describing my calling card, which is another way of describing my gift of authority. Yes, it's all described in the stone area. Right.
01:15:32
Speaker
Right. And maybe all of that is presumably a description of the poem or hearing or something like that. Yeah, I think so. But those different, when a writer, not even necessarily a poet, but when a writer tries out those positive phrases, I think of it sometimes as like,
01:15:57
Speaker
swings of an axe, right? Here it is one way, here it is a different way, maybe this one will get the tree down. They each have their own registers, right? My final stone sounds mythical and kind of... Yeah. My calling card sounds kind of folksy and American to me, you know? Or like sort of old-fashioned, like, you know, I'm announcing myself for an afternoon visit or like maybe like a
01:16:23
Speaker
business man or like a salesman or some traveling salesman or whatever. If it's a literal calling card, but we've come to use that phrase as like, I don't know, a surrealist line in a poem is James Tate's calling card. That kind of thing, the sort of characteristic gesture.
01:16:45
Speaker
And calling card, yeah, it's interesting also. It sort of brings me back now maybe to the post office and some of what we were saying there. And then, but by the time I get to my gift of porphyry, that seems yet again in a different register. And so I think there is something kind of dramatic and I don't know, I'm making hand gestures that aren't being picked up by the mic. But and- Just making great hand gestures.
01:17:12
Speaker
comments make them great and injustice. There's something kind of like a heroic sounding about these notes, but also the semantic kind of context of them makes them... I guess what I'm trying to say, Matthew, is that my sense of it is that part of what enables Tate to write in that spirit at this moment and in related moments in other poems
01:17:42
Speaker
is there's almost always a kind of, to a greater or lesser extent, a kind of tongue in cheekness.
01:17:52
Speaker
about the kind of self-awareness that he's doing it. It's as though he's sort of quoting a register that a different kind of poet might have adopted. So I don't know, call that irony or not. I know you said, well, you're not sure that we ought to take the ending of this poem ironically. No, no, I think irony in the more classic sense, I think it is ironic in that sense of like double consciousness. I think I agree completely with you. I think that's an important thing to point out. But of course, you know, a lot of
01:18:21
Speaker
lesser imitators of Tate, um, have taken that irony and sort of, they don't, they, it becomes one dimensional. It can become one dimensional easily, just pure self-consciousness, pure stance. And I think that, you know, that's, that's sort of, it's a risky, it's a risky, um, orientation irony. And I think, I think you're absolutely right that this is ironic in that classic sense, but I, but it allows,
01:18:49
Speaker
what allows him to do exactly what you're describing, which is like kind of pull in these different, uh, you know, stances almost and, and, and activate them. Yeah. Yeah. I love citizens of the deep. I was going to ask about that. I mean, this is fantastic. I mean, to the citizens of the deep to talk about the lost people, you know, I mean, who of course weren't there when the town was flooded, of course they weren't, but like his imaginations, the poet imagines,
01:19:18
Speaker
this water rushing in and the people still being in the villages, which of course they moved out. But the citizens of the deep, I don't know, I just think it just sounds great. It does sound great.
01:19:33
Speaker
Well, so two things. One, I think I read also in the piece that you sent me that they had to, which of course they had to, but you don't think of it until you think of the kind of craziness of such a project. They had to exhume the cemeteries in these towns and sort of transfer people's remains. So not even the dead are still there. Sounds like a bad job. I know.
01:19:59
Speaker
But then the other thought I had was to do with, well, earlier you gave us a really beautiful way of seeing the waters and the submerged nature of the sort of town, which is a little bit like, I don't know,
01:20:21
Speaker
like a, I don't know, I'm thinking of like Vesuvius or something, like a sort of town that's preserved in the past, as it were. Sorry, you gave us a way of thinking of that, not just in the kind of literal terms of what happened at Quabin, to create Quabin Reservoir, but as a way of thinking more broadly about what time does to any kind of human life, right? That it gets left behind, submerged in some sense.
Reflections on Poetry's Impact
01:20:51
Speaker
So, I mean, there is something beautiful that I think first works at that kind of literal level in Citizens of the Deep. We're sort of imagining the people in the water there. But if we're also able to kind of back up from that and revive that more general or metaphorical meaning, then in some way is he addressing
01:21:12
Speaker
us or all of us. What's odd is that... You mean are we the citizens of the DP thing? Yeah, but here's something weird about that. Poetry is its own kind of time travel, right? Any writing is, really.
01:21:30
Speaker
But poets are sometimes explicitly, but often implicitly, there's this sort of understanding that what you're addressing, you're addressing readers of the future, that there's a kind of posterity that you're invoking. Tate in this poem is addressing the past.
01:21:54
Speaker
we come after him, you know, you can't write to, you know, the people who precede you, you know, writing is inevitably like it gets read after you've written it not before. So the deep, I don't know, are we in the deep? He's in the deep in a way, right? Yeah, I don't know. I think we're overhearing. I feel like I'm overhearing something in this poem. You know, I'm less like directly addressed, but I'm overhearing it.
01:22:23
Speaker
Um, and yeah, I, but I think, you know, when I read citizens of the deep, I think, yeah, I mean, maybe that's, yeah, without being cheesy about it, that does strike me as being kind of all of us in a way that we all are. And I don't think he needs to say that, that that's sort of there. And, um, I re I resonate with that, let's say, you know, I feel like I am. And, and that then, you know, it's, it's like, uh, I'm reading, I'm rereading Lear right now. Um, and, uh, so I, so there's something kind of Shakespearean to me about this,
01:22:52
Speaker
about this ending, you know, in a way like this withdrawal, you know, I disappear into a cop. Disappear into a cop, which is... You know, but also kind of comic too, you know, that whoever's seen that meme from The Simpsons, like backing up into the hedge. Yes. You know, like there's something a little bit funny about disappear into a cop. Right. Or it's like, I can't remember which episode of The Simpsons that came from or what the context was precisely. Maybe you can, but you know, somehow in my imagination that
01:23:19
Speaker
Meme which are that Jeff whatever that I that I think we can all are many of us who are too online maybe can I can easily imagine is like merged in my mind with what happens in field of dreams you know where they like walk into the corn corn stocks.
01:23:34
Speaker
and disappear. But of course, you know, the other thing I want to say is that there here is this is a this was the Wordsworth thing that I was hearing earlier. Wordsworth has a moment where cops you're almost sort of forced like you can't help but misread it as corpse. And there is a sense in which like we all disappear into a corpse, right? Oh, my God. That's what it is to die. So true. Yeah. And I think that's
01:24:03
Speaker
In this poem, that is a really fair reading because we, there's so many moments in this poem where he really like sort of lasers us into individual words and like asking us to kind of like look at them almost as materials. So I feel like cops and corpse are too close not to make that connection. I agree, especially as he's mentioned.
01:24:21
Speaker
in the context of this particular poem. Yeah, cops is kind of a funny word for a poet to be using in the late 20th century. Also, you know, the fact that it comes in that sort of line ending.
01:24:35
Speaker
that sort of terminal position on the line, and it's right under porphyry, which I think is like another punny sort of word, you know, or pun isn't quite the right word for it, but... Echoey. Yeah, echoey sort of word where we're meant to hear prophecy or something like that. I'm hearing corpse there. I agree. But that last line, I want to hear you talk about now. So he...
01:25:02
Speaker
He flings his final stem. I fling my final stem, my calling card, my gift of porphyry to the citizens of the deep and disappear into a cop's raving like a butterfly to a rosebud colon. I love you. Um, yeah, raving like a butterfly. I mean, yeah, you know, this is sort of a literal sense. I mean, you know, like, like, uh, like an inherently, you know, butterfly or, you know, any kind of,
01:25:28
Speaker
insect like that. I mean their job is sort of to take the pollen right and like kind of touch down for a bit and it gets on their wings or whatnot.
01:25:36
Speaker
proboscis or whatever, and then they move on and they knock it on in a different place. And that's what creates the, you know, that's what fertilizes or, you know, whatever. I know bees do butterflies fertilize things? I think all flying insects. I mean, you know, we're really outside of my expertise. But, you know, that, you know, all of them
01:26:01
Speaker
You know I think do that but yeah, but I mean more importantly it touches on what you've what you said Sorry, my wife is texting me. That's okay. So, um You know is Talks like touching on things like touching things and moving on that that that's sort of this like and and and the conflation of that touching on things moving on with with This this mad love
01:26:30
Speaker
raving. And it's sort of raving like a butterfly to a rosebud. I love you. And it's so in the pocket of distance from loved ones and that feeling of love, adoration, attachment, or whatever, and distance and the dynamics between those things. And like you said, this being the first poem in that book, I think, introduces the theme. And also, I wanted to point out too, just one more thing, which is that
01:26:54
Speaker
You know, I mean, there's a kind of way that a lot of Tate's poems or a lot of contemporary poems in general start in one place and move to another, right? They sort of don't, they're not that interested in closure. They're not, you know, they're not that interested necessarily in like sort of tying the loop. But in this one, he comes back to the initial action in the first line of skipping the stones to the flinging the final stone. Right. And, you know, so I think it has a kind of unity that feels almost pre-modern to me in a way, like, like, like, like, you know, that,
01:27:22
Speaker
I know this isn't a sonnet, but it almost has a sonnet-y kind of like, like a circular or, you know, sort of like coherence to it formally, that is pleasurable the closer you read the poem. It's not something that might initially be at the forefront of the experience, but like I just haven't read the poem many times.
01:27:41
Speaker
I enjoy that about it, too. Oh, I do, too. And I'm glad you pointed it out. It's funny, I was laughing to myself as we were talking about the butterfly and I was saying, oh, bees do that. I wonder if he's thinking of Muhammad Ali, you know, like float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Probably, probably. And then with Rosebud, I wondered if there was some kind of like Citizen Kane kind of. I thought about that and I thought also about Stein, too. And also about Williams, the roses, absolutely.
01:28:10
Speaker
You know, like I think the right, you know, any like a lot in a lot of this poem, I mean, the elements are really do echo with our thoughts about the history of poetry, too, in very light ways. But yeah, right dissertations can be written.
01:28:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'm out of that game. So, yeah. So I love you. Say something about that as the, I mean, you know, I think you had sort of gently alluded to it at that moment where I was saying something about how no such address as the language printed on the envelope might also contraver us modes of poetic address or something like that. But, you know, who is saying I love you to whom?
01:28:54
Speaker
of the butterflies saying it to the rosebud, but also, you know, I love you there. And then implicit, you know, therefore I must leave you, therefore I can't stay. I love you, but I can't stay. I love you, but I must move on. And of course, I mean, can't help but think of the, you know, the what's happened to these villages, you know, the
01:29:17
Speaker
I love you, but it must end. You know, like, like I can't continue, you know, all these things. I mean, which we all, you know, part of life and banal to, to even say them out loud. But I think that's implicit. The temporality, the temporariness of, of attachment is, is, you know, in his own relationship to, and I, and I read it too is like, um, I, this is, there's no justification for this reading really, but I read it almost like he's saying it to me.
01:29:48
Speaker
Like, I've been here with you, but now I must leave. The poem must end, and now I'm going to go. And I've been here with you, and that's been an act of love. That's kind of tension, you know? Yeah. Sorry. I think there's plenty of justification for it. I mean, you say it's, well, the butterfly is saying it to the rosebud, but of course the butterfly and the rosebud was always only ever a simile for what? Right.
01:30:12
Speaker
his act of throwing his final stone like to the citizens of the deep was which i guess if we took that as writing the poem then it is something he's saying to you in other words and yeah i love you i love you citizens of the deep i love you reservoir i love you lost world i love you mailman i love you man stand i love you everything i i can't help it right that's how i feel and and that's that love is what produces this poem it's a certain kind of love like you said it's a distanced
01:30:42
Speaker
Well, it's an ironic one. It's moving on too, as you said, right? Like the butterfly doesn't stay with the flower. They don't mate for life. No, they don't. And then we move on. This is the first poem that we move on. I mean, it was quite a first poem in a book, I would say. Yeah,
Podcast Goals and Closing Remarks
01:30:58
Speaker
I just adore this poem and it makes me miss him.
01:31:04
Speaker
And I'm just so grateful for his poems. I think there's so many more that are just worthy of this kind of attention. Well, I think that's a great note for us to end on. And I have to say, Matthew, it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you and also your love for this poet, by which I mean both the author of this
01:31:31
Speaker
poem and many other great poems, but also the person you knew and who helped you, you know, who was among the many people, I'm sure, who helped you become the person you now are, is really evident. And I hope, you know, I guess the truth is like I started this podcast project with not a very clear sense of what I wanted to get out of it. Some people have asked me, what are you trying to do with this thing? I don't know. I want to talk to people about poems.
01:31:59
Speaker
And that's sort of all I know. I mean, I guess there is the thought, well, if we can help people, if we can model for people how to make sense of a poem or how to sit with a poem, make sense is maybe not the right phrase to use because sense isn't always where you wind up.
01:32:17
Speaker
how to be with a poem for an hour, how to take something of it with you, then that's great. If we can be useful in that regard, that's wonderful. But also, if we can help people find particular poets
01:32:33
Speaker
they will love. And, you know, not not every poet is for every reader, but I would be surprised if after having listened to you talk about Tate, many listeners to this podcast who weren't yet readers of James Tate will will become it. So I want to thank you for that, too. Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity. And I feel like I know what you're doing with this podcast. You know, I mean, it makes me think of Simone Bey's famous remark, you know, attention is the purest form of generosity. And I think that
01:33:03
Speaker
being attentive to these poems. And it's great. It's a pleasure. And I think it slows me down. And to talk with you about this poem, which I've read hundreds of times, I feel like I just see it anew this time. I learned a lot this time. And so it's, I don't know, it's a pleasure. So and thanks for inviting me to talk about Jim and think about him and think about this poem. And I hope everybody will
01:33:30
Speaker
Read his work? No. They will. And if I can ask for one last indulgence, they're about to hear the poem from him. One more time. Again, in your voice, Matthew, would you be willing to read Quabin Reservoir one more time for us on the way out? With pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Cameron. Sure. This is Quabin Reservoir by James Tate. All morning, skipping stones on the creamy lake.
01:33:54
Speaker
I thought I heard a lute being played high up in the birch trees or a fawn speaking French with a Brooklyn accent. A snowy owl watched me with half closed eyes. What have you done for me for lately? I wanted to ask it, licking the air. There was a village at the bottom of the lake and I could just make out the old post office. And occasionally when the light struck it just right, I glimpsed several mailman swimming in or out of it.
01:34:23
Speaker
Letters and packages escaping randomly, 1938, 1937, it didn't matter to them any longer. Void, no such address. Soft blazes squirmed across the surface, and I could see their church, now home to druid squatters, rock and the intoxicating current, as if to an ancient hymn. And a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion, awake, awake, few germs of habit.
01:34:54
Speaker
Alas, I fling my final stone, my calling card, my gift of porphyry to the citizens of the deep and disappear into a cop's, raving like a butterfly to a rosebud. I love you.
01:35:09
Speaker
Matthew Zapruder, thank you so much for this conversation, a real gift to me, and I'm sure to our listeners. Listeners, thank you for hanging out with us for the last hour and a half. I'm sort of on a summer schedule right now, so the episodes might not appear quite as regular. Maybe you've noticed this already, might not.
01:35:29
Speaker
appear quite as regularly as they had been in the early days. But rest assured, I'm still at it. So please do subscribe to the podcast if you don't already. Share an episode with a friend. I love that our audience is growing, and I'll have more for you soon. Be well, everyone.