Josh Corey's remarks about James Tate this morning are extremely astute. He sums up what I have often felt about Tate: the repetitiousness, the sameness of tone, balanced by the genuine pleasure one can still get out of Tate, in small doses. The Lost Pilot was (and still is) a very good book, and I continued to enjoy Tate quite a bit up to a point sometime in the mid-1970s. Absences was a disappointing book for me. The lack of intellectual depth hurt Tate; he didn't develop enough as a poet. Contrast him with Ashbery, who in separate decades came out with works like Self-Portrait, A Wave, and Flow Chart that took his work in new directions. It's also curious that Tate has become so derivative of Ashbery. After all, The Lost Pilot was published before the late Ashbery style was developed, so Tate was already an original poet in his own right. Why the need to be Ashbery-lite? Ashbery is a powerful influence on many poets, to be sure. Everyone from Tate and Albert Goldbarth to John Ash, John Koethe, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Lauterbach, and Susan Schultz.

Now maybe you'll say that Ashbery repeats himself too. I won't be reluctant not to deny it. But just when it seems that he has nothing left to say, he'll come out with a fine and surprising work.