Tate, James (Vol. 25) - William Logan
WILLIAM LOGAN
The allegiance James Tate announced in The Lost Pilot, his first book, was to a surrealism that would inform and interpret the familiar. In his subsequent work, though that early pledge has not been forsworn, there has appeared with increasing frequency an acknowledgment of failure, a suggestion that nothing, not even surrealism, will work as a method any longer, even that language, or communication its bastard son, has become impossible…. It is typical of Tate's perversity that he defines absence in the terms of presence, but his method has always been devoted to the conjugation of opposites: the surreal with the real, the colloquial with the serious, entropy with energy. His non-sequiturs may become violently yoked aphorisms. More than any of his books, Viper Jazz celebrates the notion that no thing may refer to anything else, that the lines of communication are all down, that continuity may no longer be possible. Nothing is...
[The entire page is 536 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
