James Tate
Born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri, Tate won the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for his first book The Lost Pilot. He wrote eighteen full-length books of poetry along with many chapbooks, collections of prose, collaborations, and a novel. His Selected Poems won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. In 1994, Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the National Book Award. Tate taught for many years in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. In 2004, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He always carried a camera, taking photos of everything around him. Source
Consumed
Why should you believe in magic,
pretend an interest in astrology
or the tarot? Truth is, you are
free, and what might happen to you
today, nobody knows. And your
personality may undergo a radical
transformation in the next half
hour. So it goes. You are consumed
by your faith in justice, your
hope for a better day, the rightness
of fate, the dreams, the lies
the taunts—Nobody gets what he
wants. A dark star passes through
you on your way home from
the grocery: never again are you
the same—an experience which is
impossible to forget, impossible
to share. The longing to be pure
is over. You are the stranger
who gets stranger by the hour.
Published:
1970
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Literary Devices:
Antanaclasis
The repetition of a word within a phrase, in which the second use of the word utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first.
Asyndeton
the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence
Internal Rhyme
A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.
Tercet
A stanza of three lines of verse that rhyme together or are connected by rhyme with an adjacent stanza.