The allegiance James Tate announced in The Lost Pilot, his first book, was to a surrealism that would inform and interpret the familiar. In his subsequent work, though that early pledge has not been forsworn, there has appeared with increasing frequency an acknowledgment of failure, a suggestion that nothing, not even surrealism, will work as a method any longer, even that language, or communication its bastard son, has become impossible…. It is typical of Tate's perversity that he defines absence in the terms of presence, but his method has always been devoted to the conjugation of opposites: the surreal with the real, the colloquial with the serious, entropy with energy. His non-sequiturs may become violently yoked aphorisms. More than any of his books, Viper Jazz celebrates the notion that no thing may refer to anything else, that the lines of communication are all down, that continuity may no longer be possible. Nothing is certain…. No single conjunction of word and meaning may be less valid than any other.
Viper Jazz is an uneven book, but Tate's method is uneven. His jazzy, improvisatory technique consists of luminous moments of virtuosity played against a flurry of accretion, a blizzard of one-liners. When the poems succeed, they succeed despite their method, as would the classics if composed by computers. The fortunate poems inform despite failures of communication; they flirt with the actual despite a marriage to negation. Their victories are startling, then, because of method, and for subject they often claim nothing more than method—they are about their own inability to communicate.
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