Letter To . . .
--December 2014
Dear Friend,
They are playing our song, again:
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing Goddamm.
--Ezra Pound, from Ancient Music
There was a light snow over much of southern Kansas yesterday and last night. One half inch where I am. Powder dry. It is the wind and the cold that kill. I know that it is worse where you are.
Such weather takes me to Tate's 'Coming Down Cleveland Avenue', the first poem of The Lost Pilot and the one, at least for me, that set the tone for much that would come from him thereafter. And that is in part because I believe I witnessed that event on one cold snowy evening as I crossed a quiet Cleveland Avenue. You remember . . . that two block long bit of asphalt that hugged the north side of campus. Were you with me that evening? Ah, pity. From a distance I could see a couple nearing the end of the block, talking softly, the male voice sounding much like Jim's, laughing quietly, but by the time I reached the end of the street they were gone. A light breeze and the dry snow allowed no sign of human passage there.
That was like Jim, a child of multiple worlds. Now you see him, now you don't. John Ashbery says "Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere." He got it right, I think, as far as he goes with it. Years ago Tate said he was wanting to capture moments of truth with his poetry. We both know that he knew how difficult a task he had set for himself; that you can not step into the same stream twice; that you can not even step into it once, for it is constantly changing. But in Memoir Of The Hawk he comes as close as possible while obliging us with a hawk's-eye view of the proceedings where, in the search for himself, for instance, he concludes "there was no me, / just flutterings, shudderings, and shadows."
But I ramble. The last I remember of the three of us together was, I think, at a little bar in Chicapee, Kansas. It was summer, 1963. I was on my way to a newspaper back East. You were going to do graduate work and Jim had another year of undergraduate studies before heading off to Iowa. We toasted to the success of at least one of us becoming the writer we thought we could be. And while we knew that Jim was probably "the one most likely", we did not exclude ourselves from the possibility. It was the best of times.
It is over 50 years later and I am wanting to finish this before the year is out, in keeping with our usual year-end greetings. I hope all is as well with you as it can be. I have much more I could/should say but will save it for later. Have a good new year, friend. Yours,
Gerald
That was like Jim, a child of multiple worlds. Now you see him, now you don't. John Ashbery says "Tate is the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere." He got it right, I think, as far as he goes with it. Years ago Tate said he was wanting to capture moments of truth with his poetry. We both know that he knew how difficult a task he had set for himself; that you can not step into the same stream twice; that you can not even step into it once, for it is constantly changing. But in Memoir Of The Hawk he comes as close as possible while obliging us with a hawk's-eye view of the proceedings where, in the search for himself, for instance, he concludes "there was no me, / just flutterings, shudderings, and shadows."
But I ramble. The last I remember of the three of us together was, I think, at a little bar in Chicapee, Kansas. It was summer, 1963. I was on my way to a newspaper back East. You were going to do graduate work and Jim had another year of undergraduate studies before heading off to Iowa. We toasted to the success of at least one of us becoming the writer we thought we could be. And while we knew that Jim was probably "the one most likely", we did not exclude ourselves from the possibility. It was the best of times.
It is over 50 years later and I am wanting to finish this before the year is out, in keeping with our usual year-end greetings. I hope all is as well with you as it can be. I have much more I could/should say but will save it for later. Have a good new year, friend. Yours,
Gerald
