Archive for January, 2009

by James Tate
Ecco Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

“What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.”

A winter ago, I drank beer at a bar with a literary critic. He told me that he had all but given up on James Tate for a pretty credible reason: he’d been let down too many times by story-poems that started with cleverness of purpose, but meandered into what seemed a series of arbitrary whims. His disappointment in Tate was like that of a dog owner shocked when his “good dog” bites a neighborhood girl and has to be euthanized. Like that of a ten-year-old whose divorced Dad always calls eight minutes before their weekly visits to Applebee’s to say “too busy, but definitely next week.” After a while, I suppose, one stops believing.

But believe me, The Ghost Soldiers is going to linger. It’s true that sometimes, the suspension of disbelief one must employ when entering a Tate tale doesn’t pay off; the poem ends, one feels duped. Both The Ghost Soldiers and his last book, Return to the City of White Donkeys, are bulky and so include such poems. But all of Tate’s new poems are refreshingly chancy, and the lesser poems martyr themselves before their more marvelous battle-buddies. His most fully-imagined poems crystallize as they proceed, and present an otherwordly quality that no contemporary writer can match. Living in Tate’s world has to do with waking up and realizing you can’t remember your own name. For the reader, too, it means waking up on a battlefield in civilian clothes with a loaded M-16 at your side and no idea which side you’re fighting for. You enter, in Tate’s best work, a dream world. Or, in the case of The Ghost Soldiers, an Orwellian nightmare.

Tate is brilliant about war (has been since The Lost Pilot), and war is everywhere in The Ghost Soldiers. Which war? All of them, none of them. The roots are what matter: the fear, confusion, and powerlessness that impel individuals to become members of a group that means to destroy another group. Yet in The Ghost Soldiers, battlefield poems blend seamlessly with poems set in living rooms and kitchens on the homefront. Human interaction is everywhere, but nearly every conversation involves some kind of misunderstanding; everyone’s anxious, ripe with forboding, but hardly anyone knows why.

Tate’s men and women live in purgatory. People are accused of things they can’t say for sure they did or didn’t do; anyone can be perceived as both innocent and guilty, and everyone constantly, constantly forgets. Fear abounds: fear of death, fear of pain, fear of war, fear of trust, fear of Big Brother. In “The Goldfinches,” an average man is accused of plotting to bomb a building. He is innocent, so the charge feels outrageous. But the powerful can do whatever they like: “They are masters of illusion. The can make / you believe anything is real.” The man’s life was one thing, and now it is something else:

                                                       My lawyer says there
 is no use fighting it, they always win. He advised me to plead
 guilty and plead for leniency.

With such a ruthless power structure in place, it follows that the bulk of the public will work to serve their Leader; if confusion leads to fear, and fear to powerlessness, wholesale devotion is a way to route all three. Tate penetrates the grave consequences that can result from such blind devotion, to the extent that The Ghost Soldiers is the most violent thing he’s written. The chilling “Long Live the Queen” is told from a torturer’s perspective:

                                         …I threw him back against the wall,
 then smashed him in the face. When he fell to the floor, I kicked
 him in the ribs. He laid there moaning and sputtering. I lay
 down beside him. “You’re quite a remarkable man, you know,” I
 said, “with many admirable qualities. The Queen would like to
 meet you for tea. She’s a single lady now that her husband,
 the King, has died. She’s very attractive for her age, which
 I believe is the same as yours. I don’t mean to put any ideas
 in your head, but I hope you’ll think it over,” I said. “Over
 my dead body,” he said.

Smashed him in the face, however. Human reason only takes us so far, Tate offers; people need to find what, if anything, they can control. The torturer is validated by serving the Queen; the prisoner sustains himself by maintaining some abstract moral high ground. We readers don’t know the stakes, so beyond perhaps a general disapproval of torture, we don’t even know which side we’re on. It’s trancelike; life, we’re reminded, is a waking dream. War itself seems the enemy, but war is initiated by the same sense of confusion and powerlessness it generates.

So in Tate’s world, Big Brother too is a symptom. Perhaps people need government conspiracies in order to feel that something is being controlled. Someone has power. Perhaps we create problems for ourselves, if only so that we can control them, or let them control us:

                                                    …I want to have my wits
 about me to know what’s going on. Maybe nothing’s going on,
 just mass hysteria, waves of it sweeping over the country, people
 whispering, then screaming, something is invading their lives,
 stripping them of everything, covering them with spiders. The
 fear grows and crushes them. They barely have the strength to
 visit their doctors, who give them pills that make them happy.
 And then they become addicted to these pills, and are terrified
 of running out or being cut off.

Maybe the people are afraid and crazy; maybe the best way to control them is to keep them feeling afraid and crazy. Either way, it’s bleak, so it helps to align oneself with a cause, sidelining innate anxieties about living a meaningless life. Power structures come and go, but the urge for power will never leave us:

                               “This World Peace stuff is a load of crap,”
 I said. “Men are killing each other all over the globe. That’s
 what they do. They hate each other over land, religion, money,
 whatever. It’s a way of life. What are we supposed to do, take
 that away from them?”

An impossible war for peace, then, is the human predicament. And folksy Tate offers plenty of humans; you’ll meet Clifford, Joaquin, Mavis, Darcy, Jasper, Lester, Jones, Kimball, Jennings, Jaffee, Brian, Uncle Raymond, and dozens more, even Phongsri, who “lived in a very tiny world / but he knew how to blow it up.” Even from the relative safety of the homefront, individuals are thick with impending horror. In “Honey, Can You Hear Me?”, a confused husband thinks he and his wife have plans to go out for the evening, and says, “It will be wonderful to be there tonight”:

             “We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “I meant here. It
 will be wonderful to be here tonight,” I said. “A little romantic
 night at home,” she said. What did she mean by “nomadic?” A little
 nomadic night at home. There were times when I worried about
 Alison.

There is confusion and miscommunication here that only the omniscent reader (or writer) is privy to. Perhaps the husband could reroute his confusion by joining the military and fighting for an ideology. But sometimes, even loyalty to a cause can’t deceive someone long enough for him/her to forget s/he too is confused. Confusion permeates the battlefield, too; in “The Enemy,” a man confesses that his life had been “squandered” until he joined the army: “I was an ideal / soldier… There / was nothing I wouldn’t do to please my officers.” Yet when we see him in battle, “right” and “wrong” break down:

               I said to Kansas, “What are we doing wrong?” He
 said, “You still don’t get it, do you? We’re the enemy.” I was
 confused.

In The Ghost Soldiers, war tries, but can’t but provide what, say, professional sports provide: battle lines. Meaning, clearly defined. A war vet in the supermarket is interrupted by a woman who claims he “saved her village.” He’s hard pressed to see it that way, or to see it at all, but she insists:

                                                     …“No, that’s not true. You
 were so brave and courageous,” she said. “That was a long time
 ago. I have forgotten many of the details,” I said, and tried to
 push past her.

Perhaps he’s right; the next person he bumps into says, “I ought to break your neck / right here in front of everybody, you low-down, vicious killer.” Rightness then amid nothingness and confusion has to do with perspective, and little else.

This tension is also implicit with Tate’s forward-minded formal considerations. Each poem is indented, and has the look and feel of a prose poem, but is in fact broken into lines. There a slow swell at work; while individual poems maintain singular line-lengths, line-lengths from poem to poem swell gracefully, and tend to get longer as the book proceeds (as they did in Return to the City…). Here we have the ebb and flow of tension, tension too shy and fearful to step out of line and become rage. They are poems of strong and secretive rhythm, poems as hidden and fearful as Tate’s narrators. Lines disguise themselves; they break at odd moments, the result of a mysterious compliance to order. Tate is the only poet of his stature that insists upon yet conceals invention in this way.

I should note again that The Ghost Soldiers is not exempt for the meandering I mentioned in the beginning. Does Tate make it up at random as he goes along? Charles Simic seems to think so: “To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate’s genius…just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry.” Some poems become boring or inconsequential as they progress. In others, the poet too plainly writes himself out of the poem; in “Map of the Lost World,” for example, our narrator describes interesting objects that he finds while cleaning his house. He then sits down to think, and concludes by likening his contemplation to “pulling a yak over / a mountaintop, hauling water and rice to a dead wise man, / who knows nothing, says nothing.” Literally, the man is sitting on his couch. Early on, the poem is tastefully peppered with nostalgia. But Tate’s poems are so deeply metaphorical by themselves that when a narrator starts making his own yak and rice metaphors out of the blue, the results are uninteresting.
 
But the improvisational vibrations in these poems tend to arrive flush with their subject matter, as if they too are written purely from powerlessness and confusion, and stand as an experiment; the poet sits as scientist creating hypotheses, looking for something–and somehow maitains his charm throughout. What he finds is what Wallace Stevens found: imagination (incidentally, Stevens supplies the book’s epigraph: “The paratroopers fall and as they fall / They mow the lawn.”). He creates a world and controls it the best he can. Sometimes his findings are insignificant, but in more than a few cases, they are as palpable and meaningful as the sacs in your lungs, as whatever it was you dreamt last night. In the end, the ideal answer to Tate’s challenges is a form of personal responsibility: “What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.” Man, not men, woman, not women. Individuals may seem powerless, but the extent to which they can control their own actions is the extent to which they can control anything at all.

*

Tags: 8.5 stars, Ecco Press, James Tate, John Deming
Posted in reviews