The Lost Pilot

Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
– James Tate

JAMES TATE died on Wednesday, and if you aren’t into poetry, you’ll probably have no idea who he is. If you are into poetry, you realize what a loss this is for modern literature and the arts. James Tate won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Yale Young Poets Award. I was first introduced to his work when I began taking poetry classes in 1988 – Goodtime Jesus there was the first poem of his that I had read, and I wondered what the hell I’d just read, and then pretty much made a point of reading everything he’d ever written after that, and emulating it, if not just out-and-out stealing it – bad poets borrow, after all, and good poets steal. And it was his poetic voice that I wanted to have. James Tate was my poetic hero, and probably still is.

And what voice is that? For starters, it’s funny, goddamnit. I went to school with a whole bunch of narcissists who wanted to drown themselves in faux angst and malaise, having been inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath. I wasn’t interested in confessional crap. Give me comedy, damnit, because poetry is all about lying, and the best way to get away with telling a lie is to make it funny. James Tate taught me that poetry could be funny – and, more importantly, that it should be funny. In the kingdom of literature, he was the court jester. I still remember sitting in the office of my professor, Jim Harms, with three of my poetry buddies after writing class, the five of us reading through Tate’s poems while drinking beer and literally laughing until we cried.

But the comedian is always sad behind the masque. Tate’s genius was his ability to take the absurd and make it poignant, to verge on abstraction and yet make that abstraction seem somehow tangible – and he could do it in the same verse. His personae in his work were often losers, fringe characters, dumb guys next door happening upon a situation that suddenly became profound. He’d write poems about going to visit doctors, about wild rounds of cheese roaming the countryside, about Galapagos birds which had grown duller over time, about listening to the nondescript neighbour having awkward sex. There was something amazing about his ability to turn the mundane into the meaningful. The world according to Tate was mad as hatters. His work is often described as ‘dreamy’ because it was only in the dream world where the world seemed sane.

One of my great triumphs from the days of Serendipity, Berkeley’s world’s greatest bookstore, was unearthing a copy of Row With Your Hair from somewhere deep in the bowels of the 1,000,000 volume store. Peter Howard, the store’s owner, was notorious for being unwilling to part with a book if he didn’t think the buyer deserved it. He and I had clashed several times, as he disapproved of me making off with some of his finest books of poetry, and he was particularly displeased to see someone approach with Row With Your Hair in hand. Row With Your Hair is a hand printed, hand illustrated, limited edition (1,000 copies) of James Tate’s work published in San Francisco in 1969. It may say $1.50 on the cover – the original cost – but penciled inside the front cover was Peter Howard’s asking price: $90. Much as he had done with another 1960s book I’d made off with  – Jack Gilbert’s Views of Jeopardy – Howard quizzed me on the contents of Tate’s book. 

“What’s your favorite passage?” he asked. Not poem, mind you, but passage.

“Yes, Sister Michele, it is all true: the fire-dance you are waiting for in the next life happens every night on my livingroom floor.”

I quoted verbatim a passage from The Fire Dance, a poem on p. 27. He turned to p. 27, confirmed I had uttered it correctly, and then sold me the book for $75.

And there was always an element of heartbreak in his work. Optimism, too – his poems would have this curious sense about them of “it’s all going to be alright … well, not really, but we’ll manage and get by.” Tate was, in some ways, born with a tinge of heartbreak to him by nature. His debut book was titled The Lost Pilot, and the title poem is about his father, a WWII bomber pilot who was killed when his son was only 5 months old. He had grown up never knowing his father, only imagining him, and yet there was a connection there impossible to let go of. It was unshakable and unbreakable, a disappointment he was destined to be saddled with that what never of his choosing:

The Lost Pilot
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,  
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,  
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.  
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,  
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,  
read your face as Dallas,  
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads  
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.  
However frightening, I would  
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make  
you face your wife, or Dallas,  
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy  
orbiting, and I would not try  
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know  
is this: when I see you,  
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,  
spin across the wilds of the sky  
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were  
the residue of a stranger’s life,  
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,  
I cannot get off the ground,  
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling  
to tell me that you are doing  
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune  
placed these worlds in us. 
 – James Tate

And when I began writing poems again in 1998, after a long hiatus, one of the first poems that I wrote was in a similar vein – it was called Breaking Down the Bridge, and is about the grandfather that I never knew, but whose influence upon my family and the way they acted was inescapable. And I had Tate’s Lost Pilot in mind when I wrote it:

Breaking Down the Bridge
for George Morgan (died 1971)

Yours is a lost entry: never was your name
a subject of dinner conversation, no jaundiced
photographs perched upon bookshelves
or the hearth. My one true point of
reference: an abridged quotation

from your second son. When I asked
of you, he paused to edit and strategize,
portraying you as a man content
rocking in a rocking chair, passing
the hours with a volume of Plato.

We were driving that day, perusing
valleys of butternuts and zealous fog,
incomparable landscapes inhabited
by the sorriest of folk. Your homelands.
After decades of founding and refounding

your dreams – Chicago and Detroit,
Bay City and Watertown – you built
an empire here, a hotel and stone
castle on the bank of a small pond,
and you fancied the horses, spending

your every last moment at the Downs,
even as misdirected trotters carried
your dowry and your ægis back
to the stables. I inherited your features
and your luck at the races (I hit the Daily

Double and it paid $4.80). I’m saddled
with the bitterness of your two youngest
sons, anchored in the mud while
the eldest – my father – cut himself
loose. I never even knew you, yet

I find myself inexorably stuck with you,
the bridge between us a ludicrous
wrought iron bridge which hovers
atop a dry riverbed, the river long since
having altered its course. Place a hammer

in my grasp and I would hammer free
the rivets and bolts, reducing that bridge
to an elegant heap of rubble, waiting
for summer rains to overflow the gulch
and carry the remains to the sea.

That poem was published in Washington Square, the literary journal of New York University, in 2000. I still have the copy of that literary journal over here on the shelf, a copy I remember purchasing at a bookstore in Santa Fe on what was otherwise one of the lousiest days of my life, a day so lousy that I’ve spent 15 years and $10,000 on therapist bills trying to come to terms with what it meant. But there was my work on the pages of this terrific literary journal, and for a moment there, being an abandoned and mentally ill artisan suddenly seemed worth it. A few weeks later, I was at City Lights in San Francisco and I peered over the shoulder of a man reading through that particular issue of Washington Square. I asked him what he thought about the poem on p. 50 (mine), he read it and nodded and said it was pretty good, I then said, “I wrote that,” and he not only bought the journal but asked me to sign it. What price, small victories?

And also published in that edition of Washington Square were three poems by James Tate.

I always wondered if, when reading through the issue, if he noticed the poem on p. 50, noticed the subject matter and the word “lost” in the opening line, and made the connection, coming to realize that it was an homage to his work. Probably not. He probably just read it and said, “this Morgan guy, he’s kind of a jackass.”

There’s a weird sensation when someone whose work you so admired, whose work meant so much to you, passes on. It’s an odd sort of creative emptiness you cannot really explicate. You feel a great loss, even if you never knew them. You feel like you disappointed them somehow by not living up to their level of inspiration – you weren’t good enough to say that they influenced you. Robin Williams made me want to be funnier. Roger Ebert made me want to be more mutable and insightful. I wish I’d been a college kid when Kind of Blue and Time Out came out in 1959 so I could use Miles’ and Brubeck’s masterworks to try and seduce cute girls. When I turned 46 on the 25th of May, and began to attempt to plot some sort of life course for the umpteenth time, I was instantly reminded of three other artisans, across a multitude of genres, whose work I truly admired and revered who died when they were 46 – Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Sandman. My new life course immediately involved vowing to make it to 47, since none of those three did.

But on the writing front, I know what I want to say. Or should that be that I know how I want to say it. I am proud to be an absurdist, a humorist, a satirist – understanding that doing so requires sharper senses of observation, incisiveness, and compassion than I thought I was capable of. It’s who I am, who I want to be, and who I strive to continue to be. And I owe more thanks to James Tate for that than anyone else. I wish I’d had the chance to thank the Lost Pilot himself for steering me in the right direction all of those years ago now, even if I was too dumb at the time to realize it.