James Tate is a poet of fine intuitive intelligence. His quick-hit/near-miss use of the poetic punch line has led him into wider imaginative territory and more cul-de-sacs than any other poet of his generation. His risks are a vital part of the take. That is why, for a lot of readers, Tate presents problems. He is a genius of the double take, double-think, whether it is humor needling despair or platitude succumbing to perception. He can edit an experience down to its most evocative chord…. But Tate can also be an adolescent, unable or unwilling to resist the easy turn, the silly contrivance, Rimbaud at thirteen…. Both categories are from the poet's latest collection, Viper Jazz. And although this new book, on the whole, represents Tate's most mature work, it still suggests that certain destructive impulses in much of the earlier poetry have yet to be resolved. Perhaps the "fault" is not entirely Tate's. He is one of the few younger poets with a following. One sometimes senses that at strategic points in many of his poems—for whatever complex of reasons—he chooses entertainment over engagement. Consciously or not, he acknowledges his audience, or plays to that part of his nature that would put his readers on. At any rate, he indulges himself at the poetry's expense. Tate's poems begin in pain, not emotional fudge. At some of these moments when the absurdities become all too clear, and in frustration with the facts, he tends to opt for fun. The ambiguities break down. The rewards for fancy, one supposes, are more immediate than those of imagination. What is required is an art that Tate himself is so often master of: to never allow the intensity to be in debt to the comedy. It is a story as old as satire, and, finally, Tate may come to be regarded chiefly in such a hybrid contemporary coincidence: tragical satire. Because the underpinning of the best work in Viper Jazz is an angst that demands analogy at the deepest imaginative level, while keeping its "difficult balance" at the top…. The maturity of the new poems is the result of a consistency of vision in which the double-think does not lose its poise. Overall, Tate is more sure of and more open about what his real concerns are. If the potential for insidiousness as suggested by the book's title is in apparent contradiction to the vulnerability in most of the poems, we must assume there is method in it. Viper Jazz is not simply the presiding metaphor, it is the book's prevailing attitude: it is Tate's gloss of his relationship to his material…. Tate has never said his say better…. [He] has been praised and blamed too long for the populist surrealism of Rock. He is a satirist, perhaps even a satyr, whose absurdist targets range wide around a persona whose tragic mask keeps slipping—and sad without hands, and unable to speak for the wind that chips away at him. (pp. 45-6)
Stanley Plumly, "Books: 'Viper Jazz'" (copyright © 1976 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Stanley Plumly), in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 5, No. 6, November-December, 1976, pp. 45-6.
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