The Ghost Soldiers: Poems

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Amazon

James Tate is the Jerry Seinfeld of American poetry.

You’ll remember Seinfeld, the ‘90s sitcom famously dubbed “a show about nothing.” Here’s part of Charles Simic’s blurb for Tate’s new collection, The Ghost Soldiers: “To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate’s genius. Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction.”

Tate’s been called worse, especially during the 1970s, when his poems were deemed cerebral, cold, vacant, with little substance beneath the surface dazzle. Since his emergence at age 23, when his first collection, The Lost Pilot (1967), earned selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, even admirers have struggled to describe Tate’s hypnotically idiosyncratic verse, often quite funny, with its non sequiturs, dream logic, grisly imagery and conversational language.

I can’t claim to have read anything close to all of Tate’s work. For a poet, he’s amazingly productive, with 15 books of poetry, most of them much fatter than the standard 64-page collection. The Ghost Soldiers alone, by my count, includes 94 poems. But whatever doldrums, if any, Tate may have traversed midcareer, he’s long past them. His National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize came later, in the 1990s.

Not to contradict a distinguished poet and critic such as Simic, but The Ghost Soldiers is far from being about nothing. These poems engage everything from war to police-state oppression to romance to small-town family life. Aliens make appearances, as do mythical creatures, talking animals, shadowy government agencies and malevolent corporations. Tate is clearly responding to contemporary issues. The war in Iraq, though never mentioned, looms behind many of the poems.

Here’s an excerpt from “The March”:

I was standing next to the captain at the bottom of the mountain. “Shoot them all!” he ordered. “But, captain, they’re our men,” I said. “No they’re not. My men were well-trained and disciplined. Look at this mess here. They are not my men. Shoot them!” he again ordered. I raised my rifle, then turned and smacked him in the head with the butt of it. Then I knelt and handcuffed him. The soldiers gathered about me and we headed for home. Of course, none of us knew where that was, but we had our dreams and our memories. Or I think we did.

You’ll notice how this reads like narrative prose. Tate abandoned traditional versification long ago, causing some puzzled critics to reach for new descriptors, one even going so far as to call them “small movies” --- ridiculous, what with the perfectly fine term “prose-poetry” close at hand. I’ll admit to wondering midway through this collection what qualifies these pieces as poems instead of, say, highly compact absurdist short stories. By the end, I had something of an answer: condensed language, for one thing; intensity of effect for another. And something ineffable: They just are poems, no matter how prosey they appear.

And Tate, by some legerdemain, endows the disparate elements of each poem, and the collection as a whole, with a variety of meaning that also resists classification. A new reader might be frustrated by Tate’s surrealism—that’s the one description that’s stuck to him: American surrealist—while another might want to read slowly, as I did in the early going, savoring and digesting each poem in turn. But the book gains a ferocious momentum, and by the halfway point I found myself gulping them down as fast as I could, one enlarging the morbid pleasures of the next.

Tate once wrote, in a line sometimes used to illustrate a supposed heartlessness, “Of course it’s a tragic story; that’s why it’s so funny.” But doesn’t that sum up the human condition? We’re all going to die, life is often absurd, and yet every day we find something to laugh about.
That’s the real genius of The Ghost Soldiers. By locating humor in tragedy, by highlighting the false connections by which we mortals construct daily life, Tate distills the sad little details of existence into a potent elixir, at once pathetic and noble.

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