【The Farmer’s Bride Requires Care! Part 2: The Organic Grand Strategy (2021)】
James Tate’s Last Poem
Look
Late last year, I saw John Ashbery give a reading at Pioneer House, in Brooklyn. At one point, he read a prose poem by James Tate, who died last summer. It was, Ashbery said, Tate’s final poem—so incontrovertibly final, in fact, that it had been discovered in the poet’s typewriter soon after his death. What Ashbery went on to read was terrific: as I recalled, it opened in a comic mode, riffing on all these bogus feats Tate claimed to have accomplished that year (hot-dog-eating contest winner, arm-wrestling contest winner, et cetera) and building to a quiet, rueful meditation on aging.
It seemed almost too perfect to have been plucked unedited from a typewriter, so much so that I wondered, in passing, if maybe it were a sly, prankish tribute. I knew, or I thought I remembered, that Ashbery and Tate had been close. “He has developed a homegrown variety of surrealism almost in his own backyard,” Ashbery had written of his friend in 1995—a variety in which we find “something very like the air we breathe, the unconscious mind erupting in one-on-one engagements with the life we all live, every day.” The poem Ashbery had read was so rich with those “eruptions” that I knew it had to be Tate’s.
I’m happy to say that Tate’s final poem appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, along with four new poems by John Ashbery. Below you’ll find a photo of the poem as it was found in Tate’s typewriter. His last line, given the circumstances, has a new resonance. What are the chances?
Search
Categories
Latest Posts
Barcelona Open 2025 livestream: Watch live tennis for free
2025-06-26 09:11'Buying London' is getting absolutely slammed. Netflix joined in.
2025-06-26 07:43Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT
2025-06-26 07:18The fat bears are already extremely fat
2025-06-26 07:05Popular Posts
The Story Behind the Home of Forgotten Video Games
2025-06-26 08:05Why wind turbines thrive in Antarctica and colder places than Texas
2025-06-26 07:45Kaiserslautern vs. Bayer Leverkusen 2024 livestream: Watch DFB
2025-06-26 07:45NYT Strands hints, answers for April 26
2025-06-26 07:02Featured Posts
Best Hydro Flask deal: Save $10 on a 24
2025-06-26 09:14Wordle today: The answer and hints for May 24
2025-06-26 07:51Pinterest predicts the summer trends, and some are 'Bridgerton'
2025-06-26 06:59Japan orders Google to stop alleged antitrust violations
2025-06-26 06:34Popular Articles
Seven Steam games whose reviews have changed a lot
2025-06-26 09:10Norrie vs. Kotov 2024 livestream: Watch French Open for free
2025-06-26 08:35Spotify discontinues their weird Car Thing device
2025-06-26 08:02'Cancelled' is cancelled now. We're giving people the digitine.
2025-06-26 07:58Skywatching is lit in May, says NASA
2025-06-26 06:40Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.
Comments (5818)
Steady Information Network
Fyre Festival and Trump’s Language
2025-06-26 08:46Motivation Information Network
Sony China refutes recent reports of smartphone withdrawal in China · TechNode
2025-06-26 08:40Mark Information Network
U.S. Justice Department moves to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation over antitrust violations
2025-06-26 08:36Style Information Network
ByteDance dives into multi
2025-06-26 07:43Unobstructed Information Network
CPU Price Watch: 9900K Incoming, Ryzen Cuts
2025-06-26 07:18