James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943) is an American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri and is a professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts.
Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to carve, invert, and play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecd...
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James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943) is an American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri and is a professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts.
Tate's writing style is difficult to describe, but has been identified with the postmodernist and neo-surrealist movements. He has been known to carve, invert, and play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.
Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." Despite the early praise he received Tate alienated some of his fans in the seventies with a series of poetry...
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