Worshipful Company of Fletchers [Paperback]

James Tate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1995

Masterfully drawing on a variety of voices and characters, James Tate joyfully offers his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his "Selected Poems."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Winner of the National Book Award in 1994, The Worshipful Company of Fletchers is fresh and startling. Like his doppelgangers Jeff Koons in sculpture and Stephen Malkmus in rock music, Tate is a self-consciously cool comedian of contrivances, devising bizarre situations and dressing them in a camouflage of the familiar world. To read Tate is to hear as music the ongoing negotiations between language and reality. In this book his main amusement is a game of categories, culminating in "How the Pope Is Chosen":

After a poodle dies
All the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-eleven.
They drink slurpies until one of them throws up
And then he's the new pope.

With a devil's aplomb, Tate inverts cliches to infiltrate the vocabularies of power in such mischievous poems as "A Manual of Enlargement," "Little Poems with Argyle Socks," and "What the City Was Like." The latter seems to caricature the late William Stafford, with its description of a salt-mining operation behind City Hall. For quality control, "someone / named Mildred" tasted each grain "until she became a stenographer / and moved away," thus devastating the community because "no one could read / her diacritical remarks." In the poetry of James Tate--or that of John Ashbery, Mark Levine, or Russell Edson, all of whom Tate superficially resembles--one looks for clues to the poet's mission. Perhaps a few hints come in the final poem, "Happy as the Day Is Long," in which the speaker feels sympathetic toward the Russians who created a language to communicate with aliens "but never get a postcard back." If it were uncovered that Tate was an inhabitant of another world instead of a middle-aged man from Kansas City, few of those rewarded by The Worshipful Company of Fletchers would be surprised. --Edward Skoog

From Publishers Weekly

No other writer is quite like Tate (Reckoner). His earnest verbal anarchy is visual, musical and difficult to characterize or resist. Jazzlike, he seems to invent experience, not just poetry, and the effect is exhilarating for a reader. What is his work about? Envisioning possibilities, and then criticizing, selecting and amending these. Reading a poem is like entering into someone else's rant or vision; one passes through many surprising points of contact in a cloud of apprehension. The encounter for a reader is incongruous, quickening and qualified by Tate's sardonic sense of mischief. "We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes," he suggests in "How The Pope is Chosen," and in fact Tate conducts himself rather like a germ: fugitive, vital, typically disruptive. The charm of his quick-witted exploits is considerable-but "charm" doesn't really describe the intense pleasures of a high-riding imagination that pauses to observe that "a melancholy bug preens its antennae" or to report that "a child has left home and fallen asleep/ on her pink valise beneath a tulip tree."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 81 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (December 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880014318
• ISBN-13: 978-0880014311
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And again, and again, and again..., December 8, 2008

By 

M. Davidson (Shorewood, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Paperback)

Over and over I return to this, one of Tate's most powerful collections. In "Worshipful Company of Fletchers", the poems possess that convincing and captivating power to not just construct their own world , but to play within it and stretch the rules of their own making. In the poems, Tate's perceptions and insights make complete sense, and when applied outside the bounds of Sigmar Polke's beautiful painting on the cover, the poignancy of this work resounds even louder. It's often that I return to this collection seeking that artfully piercing insight of Tate, and I am never disappointed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading, January 30, 2008

By 

H Van Doren (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Paperback)

In James Tate's post-Pulitzer volume, "Worshipful Company of Fletchers," he presents a collection of lyric poetry that offers a constant sense of movement, as though he is guiding readers on a series of speculative journeys with the promise that we could wind up...anywhere. Reading Tate requires trust - trust that his "auto-suggestive" flow of language and ideas will result in a payoff - and it does...there is a payoff of discovery within these pages, his poems. In "Porch Theory," for example, he provides the familiar image of a porch, yet in this fairly short poem, we discover that the porch represents several generations of a family. Like his other works, this piece boasts an effective flow. There are wonderfully warm images of ghost stories, rainy nights, children sleeping, the physical sagging of the porch itself, dinner parties, a sleeping uncle, a playful pet and cocktails being served. Importantly, Tate repeats the visual of wicker across the stories of each generation, tying it with the actions of his characters on the porch: "More children / climb on the wicker couch, and grandmother / stares at the croquet set / in the corner, remembering the parrot / her grandfather brought back from the Pacific." This is important because we realize the wicker is permanent, yet the porch's inhabitants are not. We come to understand that Tate's "Porch Theory" is symbolic of life and death, but that he is celebrating the sense of immortality achieved with the arrival of new generations. This becomes evident midway through the poem with the lines, "The willow itself is finally dying...`Look at those clouds,' / someone says. `The face of God is in there, somewhere.'" Regardless of an individual reader's spirituality, Tate's intention is clear. This is a poem of hope, and it carries the sense of movement and speculative journey that ties it with other poems throughout the book. While "Porch Theory" takes place in the setting of one family's porch, it achieves the promise that we could indeed wind up anywhere because so much occurs within - from its ghost stories to its cocktails and, ultimately, in the memories of the grandmother. Through her, we don't "wind up" on the porch at all, but with the visual of a parrot in transit from the Pacific. This is the payoff. It is why we trust a poet with Tate's intuition and talent, and it is as rewarding as an afternoon of daydreaming on the porch.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tate will one day be seen for his incredible talent, we hope, December 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Paperback)

The thing that makes me laugh is that Tate has one of the most unique and insightful ways of looking at the world, and yet he is read so very little. It's a classic case of the public at large not catching on to what is really happening in this world. This book in particular shows a wealth of maturity in his work that didn't really show up until the Eighties. He is able to sythesise the forms of speech that people use to plump themselves up so well that you can only identify with him as a fellow observer. In particular, the poem 'I Got Blindsided' is a high point.

While the field of study into Tate's work may be a little sparse now, I believe that he has the skill and attention to the details of American life which will make him one of the truly great writers to come out of the age of the hippies.