James Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk

James Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk is certainly an entertaining read. Tate seems like the kind of poet that tells us a lot about the nature of humans, though perhaps not quite as much about human nature. He’s been described as a
surrealist
and, while I don’t think I would have described him as a surrealist before reading the article, it is easy to find surrealistic elements in many of his poems such as:

THE LOVELY ARC OF A METEOR IN THE NIGHT SKY

At the party there were those sage souls
who swam along the bottom like those huge white
fish who live for hundreds of years but have no
fun. They are nearly blind and need the cold.
William was a stingray guarding his cave. Only
those prepared for mortal battle came close to
him. Closer to the surface the smaller fish
played, swimming in mixed patterns only a god
could decipher. They gossiped and fed and sparred
and consumed, and some no doubt even spawned.
It’s a life filled with agitation, thrills,
melodrama and twittery, but too soon it’s over.
And nothing’s revealed because it was never known.

Many of Tate’s poems are sardonic, light, and generally amusing, all the time seemingly dead-on descriptions of certain kinds of human behavior. This poem is certainly an amusing analysis of the party scene if you don’t dig too deeply, though there’s little in it that I am likely to remember longer than an hour or two.

Other poems, though, hit much harder, forcing us to see deeper psychological truths:

SUDDEN INTEREST IN THE DEAD

Never once in all those years did Jack
visit his mother in the madhouse. After he
was a grown man and his mother was still confined
there was nothing to stop him from visiting her,
but he did not. It left a black hole in him
that nothing could fill. He traveled, he drank
too much, he loved, he painted and wrote, but
he would not visit his poor, insane mother.
When he was at last notified of her death, he
didn’t shed a tear. He began to shake and shudder
and was soon carried off by wild beasts.

There’s certainly nothing funny about this poem, but it has a frightening logic that rings true, reminding us that those things we try the hardest to avoid can leave huge holes in our psyche. Perhaps it strikes me so strongly because my mother refused to visit her grandmother in the nursing home when she was suffering advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, a disease that finally struck my mother in the last stages of her life. It’s also a reminder that no matter how hard we try to deny the reality of some things they will have an effect on us. In fact, trying to avoid a problem rather than confronting it directly may be the worst possible strategy.

In a poem like “From the Morning Twilight to The Gloaming” Tate sounds an awful lot like Mark Twain, offering the same kind of biting insights into our religious beliefs.

FROM THE MORNING TWILIGHT TO THE GLOAMING

In church last Sunday the minister shocked
the whole congregation by telling us that we were
all lazy and selfish and venal and that we were
all hypocrites and didn’t give a damn about the
poor. He was shaking he was so mad. He said
we didn’t deserve the Lord’s love and forgive-
ness. He said we could rot in hell for all he
cared. That’s when I threw my hymnal at him.
Many of the women were sobbing rather loudly,
but I could see plenty of the men had had more
than their full and were ready to do something
about it. A bloodthirsty lynch mob was forming
in the aisles. I know these men, they’re good
citizens, good fathers and husbands, who take
their religion seriously, but if you mess with
them they’ll kill you. The minister, seeing
the fire in their eyes, broke out laughing and
assured the congregation that he’d just been
kidding them, having a little fun with us.
A little nervous laughter started to build and
it broke loose into a collective roar that
couldn’t be stopped. We all agreed later that
it was the best sermon he had ever given and
we loved him more than ever.

The poem is strongly reminiscent of the scene where Huck Finn attends a church service where the feuding Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons seemingly embrace a sermon about brotherly love yet proceed to kill nearly everyone involved in the feud in the next few days. The disconnect between what we say we believe and what we truly believe is so profound that at times it’s hard not to reject these beliefs as total hypocrisy. Of course, there’s an additional irony in realizing just how little effect this scene in Huck Finn has had Twain’s readers.