"Strange Days: James Tate’s THE GOVERNMENT LAKE"
by Doris W. Cheng
Anyone who’s ever watched a movie with me knows I’m apt to leave the room right before the best part. “I can’t do this!” I’ll say—right before a spy’s cover is blown or a lover’s secret feelings revealed—and run to the kitchen where, sitting alone, I Google the movie’s ending. I’d never understood why I found these intense moments so unbearable, almost physically painful, until I came across a German word a few years ago: fremdschamen, literally “external shame.” It’s the embarrassment you feel when you see someone embarrassing themselves. A vicarious feeling, resulting from a surfeit of empathy.
Fremdschamen is the reason I can’t read novels lately. I’ve certainly tried. Sheltering at home, I have enough time on my hands. But there are only so many people I can care about these days. I’m wary of new long-term relationships, even the fictional kind. I think of Marie Howe’s poem “Why the Novel Is Necessary But Sometimes Hard to Read,” when the dying brother confesses he can’t read anything anymore: “Come on; Come on, he said, waving his hand in the air. / What am I interested in—plot?”
Yes, novels are hard right now. Which is why I’m finding James Tate’s The Government Lake: Last Poems such a pleasure. Tate, who died in 2015, gained early fame for “The Lost Pilot,” his autobiographical poem about his father. But it’s his later work that I find most interesting. Referred to as surreal or absurdist, it’s imaginative and heartbreaking, spiritually inquisitive and laugh-out-loud funny. The poems in The Government Lake, published posthumously last summer, have a narrative quality; they read like flash fiction. Their language is spare and unembellished, bypassing the lyrical flights most people think of when they hear the word poetry. Yet these verbal capsules contain universes—seemingly ordinary worlds that transform, as a matter of course, in unexpected and mysterious ways. A woman gets a stomachache and lays an egg. A man gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a seahorse and floats out to sea. I’m finding them to be perfect reading for a pandemic. They suit my short attention span; they fit easily between breaking news cycles. But they are deep, echoing the questions about mortality I nurse in the back of my mind: What is the nature of our reality? When reality dissolves before our eyes, what do we see behind the veil?
In many of Tate’s poems, death is not an end but a slippery and impermanent transition. One of my favorites is “Roscoe’s Farewell,” in which the family dog dies and comes back to life multiple times. “We thought he might live forever,” the speaker says, but as soon as he begins taking the dog for granted it dies a final time, turning to dust. “Out of Breath” is marked by an existential self-consciousness. The narrator says, “I sat in my office thinking: What would one do if one were me?” He gets in a car driven by his son, whom he almost doesn’t recognize.
‘Whose life is it?’
I said. ‘That’s the trouble, nobody knows,’ he said… ‘Stop the car. Let me
out of this car. You’re not my son. My son would never say a thing like that,’
I said. ‘Well, you’re not my father. Get out of this car,’ he said.
Frequently, the narrative voice expresses bewilderment at his surroundings. As the speaker of one poem says, “I can’t even remember what it is I’m supposed to do.” The mutability of all things—of identity, relationships, life, death—is a thread that runs through this collection. The poems in The Government Lake were written near the end of Tate’s life. They seem to be musings on what it means simply to exist, on what’s left when the trappings of our lives are stripped away.
But Tate never allows things to get too heavy, which is why he’s so much fun to read. His imaginative leaps are utterly surprising and delightful. Figments become real, like the pretend sister in “O Josephina” who elopes with the brother Joseph, or the ghost child in “Transparent Child” who turns out not to be a ghost, just an ordinary “see-through baby.” Conversely, reality itself often seems as if it ought to be imaginary. In “The Prayer,” a divorced couple fights over their dog, realizes it has disappeared, and prays for its return, only, “We opened our eyes and there was a / camel standing there.” Anything is possible in Tate’s poems, but he’s careful not to lose us; he always brings us back with a wry poke or a smile that tell us everything’s okay. Take the last poem he ever wrote, found in his typewriter: “I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished / this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island. / No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding.” This is what Tate does best: he gives us a contemplative, poignant moment, and then, before we can be swallowed by the gravity of the occasion, offsets it with humor.
Reading Tate seems especially appropriate right now. Reality as we know it having been upended, these days it feels as if we are living in one of his surreal poems, where the figurative becomes literal, and the things in our daily lives—shuttered stores, empty streets, masked faces—are weighted with symbolic significance. The virus itself feels like some sort of metaphor, a figure of speech come to life, whose meaning we have yet to discern. Maybe I’m waiting for an authorial hand to drop a reveal, a punch line, that will make it all clear.
In the meantime, I leave The Government Lake on the kitchen table, where my nine-year-old reads it over breakfast. She finds it entertaining but not that remarkable. Objects that talk? Phone calls from the dead? Not so different from school on the computer and corona cooties forcing people to stay six feet apart. She sees what lies beneath the surface of the world: a fundamental, unfathomable strangeness.
Doris W. Cheng is a Taiwanese-American fiction writer who writes frequently about family, race, immigration, and identity. She received an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and teaches fiction and poetry in New York and New Jersey. Her stories are forthcoming or have appeared in Witness, Berkeley Fiction Review, The Normal School, The Cincinnati Review miCRo, The Pinch, New Delta Review, TSR: The Southampton Review Online, CALYX Journal, and other literary publications.
