James Tate's "Rescue"

Thoughts on style.

Rescue

For the first time the only
thing you are likely to break

is everything because 
it is a dangerous

venture. Danger invites
rescue—I call it loving.

We've got a good thing
going—I call it rescue.

Nicest thing ever to come
between steel cobwebs, we hope

so. A few others should get
around to it. I can't understand

it. There is plenty of room,
clean windows, we start our best

engines, a-rumm...everything is
relevant. I call it loving.


from Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991)

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Man, I don’t really know how to write about James Tate, a poet who once wrote, in his poem “South End”:

The challenge is always to find the ultimate
in the ordinary horseshit

That’s what he does. He finds the ultimate in the ordinary. But he also writes like someone who would say ordinary horseshit instead of just ordinary. That quality of his—of a kind of reverence of irreverence, mixed with a belief in the holiness of whatever is among us—is there in all of his work. It’s there in his poem, “Never Again the Same,” which begins:

Speaking of sunsets,
last night's was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn't natural.

Or it’s there, inverted, as he finds the ordinary in the ultimate in his quite infamous poem about Jesus, “Goodtime Jesus,” perhaps the best poem about Jesus ever written:

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.

One of the joys of that poem is the subversion of expectation, the very idea of Jesus dreaming, of sleeping so deeply, of drinking coffee, of talking, vaguely and quite joyously, like a cowboy. It’s a poem that, to me, maybe even gets worse with deeper analysis—it lives, as so much unbelievable and utterly remarkable art does, forever on the strength of its own imagination. It’s best, I think, to simply read it and shake your head. To say: Hell, I love that poem.

Today’s poem, which I love dearly as well, is Tate’s imagination made clear. Consider these lines:

Danger invites
rescue—I call it loving.

We've got a good thing
going—I call it rescue.

Those moments where Tate inserts the I into the poem and renames a thing—I call it loving; I call it rescue—are moments of imagination made real. Those three words—I call it—are, to me, three of the best words to describe why I read anything at all. I want to know, deeply, what other people call a thing. Sometimes I have no idea that I wanted to know such a thing. But then I read a poem that contains a moment where Jesus says don’t mind if I do, and I realize that, yes, I did want to know what James Tate thought about (or, in other words, called) someone like Jesus. One joy of reading is truly that specific joy. The joy of being surprised into the realization that you want to know—now, right now—what someone calls a thing, when moments before you had no idea you wanted to know such a thing at all.

That desire to know what someone calls a thing comes, too, from how someone calls a thing, from the rhythm of their sentences to the very strangeness of their language, its specificity and its individuality. Think of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which melds metaphor and vernacular:

Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

Something special happens here, where what is said feels personal, from some felt place. Hurston herself was an anthropologist, basing so much of her novel’s vernacular on actual field recordings she took. As such, these moments in her novel feel like stumbled-upon occurrences, these bits of magic overheard as one might overhear a conversation on the street. The kind of thing that makes you remember how wonderful it is to know that there are other people in the world who feel love, but call it different than you. The feeling is universal; the metaphor is specific.

This combination of the what and the how is in Tate’s work constantly; I notice it here, right at the end of this poem today:

everything is
relevant. I call it loving.

Think not just of the sonic craft at work here, how loving holds the sound of relevant that comes before, how the two words almost rhyme with one another, in some kind of slanted way. Think, also, and perhaps more importantly, of the work of association at play here, the work of calling something by the name of something else. What is relevant becomes what is loved, which means that all that you love is relevant, which means, too, that if you are capable of finding the ultimate in every ordinary thing, you are capable of loving the entire world.

Come on, now.

Who else but James Tate?

At the end of that poem “South End” cited above, Tate writes:

some folks
sit out on the front stoop all night

slowly they roll through the dead plum
trees and fill the air with a numbing moan.

This, here, is a moment of dark frustration with what happens when people give themselves over to a life without association, a life without being able to link two unlike things, a life without the ultimate in the ordinary. It’s a life without poetry, I think, explained in poetry, with the numbing moan echoing off the dead plum that comes before, the two phrases hitting like bass drums in the heart, reminding you, with one last and final thump, of what you might lose if you give up on that life of music.

I’m thinking of all of this, and I hesitate to say this, because I cannot help but think of what much of the literary world has been talking about lately—the award-winning story selected by Granta that has been credibly accused of being written by AI. Or the preponderance of commencement speakers either gleefully using AI or earnestly touting AI’s myriad benefits to crowds of graduates. Or so much more.

I don’t want to add too much discourse on top of the discourse, other than to say that so much of this makes me feel somewhere between sad and despondent. Never mind that so much of that Granta-selected story takes what I love most about writing, these words I say probably too often—surprise and permission—and dials them to the nth degree, with these metaphors that come sentence after sentence, so many of them making no sense, which is not a thing I often begrudge a metaphor, but still find myself begrudging now.

Indeed, one of the things I love most about any writing is when the gap between two things that are compared is so large that I find myself swimming desperately to seek the connection, as if I have been dropped into an ocean of sense-making. I find, often, that when there is great distance, there is great delight. Consider Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus” poem, and the distance it creates between one’s expectation of Jesus and the lived reality at the heart of Tate’s poem. There is real joy, I think, in writing that might feel, at first, like nonsense. It seems, sadly, that large language models have learned that, too.

And yet, in the short time I’ve spent scrolling through people’s responses to this AI-generated story, I’ve encountered some less-than-generous takes that have rationalized the sheer magnitude of metaphors and dangling modifiers and other such things at work in that story as stemming from “purply fiction,” or as “bad imitation(s) of the kind of sentence Toni Morrison often wrote,” as if the fault is not with the technology being lorded over us, but with ourselves. As sometimes happens with literary discourse, I think people have seized on this moment to articulate what they find wrong about contemporary writing, and then they have applied that sensibility to the situation at hand. It reminds me of a pedagogically unsound practice I experienced in school, where a teacher once assigned a story for workshop without naming the author. Inevitably, the students, eager to display some kind of critical competence, took their knives out, only for the teacher to reveal, right at the end, that the story was written by James Baldwin. This current moment has, in other words, offered license for people to make wide-ranging, generalized claims about literature as a whole. The knives are out.

I struggle with moments like this because they tend to reveal that people do actually believe that there is one right way to write, to which I’d say: the point of style is to have it, but not to have it in a certain way. I love James Tate’s irreverently reverent poetry at the same time as I love W.S. Merwin’s earnest devotion. I adore Elizabeth Strout’s wry and sensitive sentences that almost ease you into some profound realization at the same time as I adore Cormac McCarthy’s fucking biblical prose that turns a desert into a place of immense holiness and violence shattered through with blood and light. These are two writers who I cannot imagine being more stylistically separate, and yet they are two writers whose separate and unique sensibilities I would follow to the ends of the earth, however different those ends. That’s why I turned to Tate’s work today. To remind myself of those three words: I call it. The I is important there. It means that we can each call a same thing differently. To call a same thing differently…isn’t that one of many definitions of art?

I think again of Zora Neale Hurston, collecting field recordings for a novel that would be, at times, critically lambasted in her lifetime, long before it was celebrated after her death. I might be jaded, but it’s not hard to imagine some glossy salesman of the future describing AI models as anthropologists in and of themselves, given how large language models are trained by listening to and reading and digesting, over and over again, our many and various words.

I think that AI will be divisive (and thus, tragic, and thus, awful) for this exact reason: it does the work of anthropology without seeking to understand. It is engaged in replication, rather than understanding. When Hurston was out in the field conducting recordings, it was with, I imagine, a deep and impossible desire to understand a sensibility so well that she could write from within such a sensibility. This is an impossible task, but it is so utterly human and so utterly beautiful. The impossibility is important. We cannot fully understand everything, but we still can try. Making art, often, means hanging out in that gap created by the impossibility of all our trying. A large language model does not engage in such impossibilities; it engages simply in the ability to replicate what it has heard, only with an ever-growing list of various prompts. Because of this, what is generated by large language models will always serve as a mirror held up to ourselves, where we can choose to see what we dislike the most about the various styles of the world. As with most things generated by those with power, such divisiveness will end up being a feature of AI, not a bug. It will tear us apart.

But the real reason I can’t stop thinking about all of this—whether Tate’s poems or the recent AI controversy—is that this year in teaching has been a difficult one. Probably the most difficult one in my life. It began, at my school, with a kind of curiosity about AI and ended with—among many adults and students—an acceptance of AI. It happened so fast. My school now often encourages kids and adults to utilize AI as a tool—a phrase that feels so overused it reeks already of a hollow cliche—and makes the assumption that any work done at home by a student is almost certainly aided by AI. My most jaded self believes we are not far from the College Board designing some sort of AP Artificial Intelligence curriculum, or from the same institution using AI to generate the assessed readings on the AP Literature exam. In just a few months, we have moved from begrudged inquiry to near-unanimous acceptance. It has reached the point where I, in thinking of my curriculum next year, fear I might be deemed to radical and noncompliant if I insisted—as I am planning—on an entirely tech-free classroom, a year spent entirely with paper, pencils, and pens.

I don’t have a point other than to say I don’t know if I have ever felt under the grip of something so all-consuming and frightening in my life. As often happens in the midst of such world-changing events, whether the introduction of new technology or the opening stages of a global pandemic, schools are some of the first places where the consequences of such events are experienced. I have felt, in this year, descended upon by something ominous. I have felt scared and woefully underprepared. I am almost at the point where I don’t really care if you are mixing metaphors, as long as you are trying to make metaphors at all. I know; I know; I know. I should insist on something. I try to. I promise. But it is a difficult and hard-pressed thing to do, to insist. And all over the country, those with power—whether school administrators or university presidents or tech billionaires—are making it harder for people with less power to insist on anything, to practice the art of calling a thing a name, to be anything other than someone force-fed some alienation-generating app sold to us under the guise of ease (and often with the stakes of our employment tied to such a thing). We didn’t need this; we really didn’t. We were fine writing our own stories. Making our own music. Borrowing and revising and figuring it out. Reading and rewriting and thinking aloud. The point of style is just to have it, not to have it a certain way. And we had it.

And yet, I know that, as I finish one school year in these weeks and begin another in a few months, I must work up, over and over again, the long endurance of insistence, even if it’s just to say here, in this one small room, we make our own words, and call the world what we will. I call it loving, James Tate says. I call it this, I say. What do you call it? And you? And you? And you? Who else, but you?

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