December 8, 1943

The poet James Tate (December 8, 1943 to July 8, 2015)  taught English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His work earned a Pulitzer (1992) and a National Book Award (1994). We get a sense of a typical swerve in his writing from a poem "Aunt Sophie's Morning" which was published in his Distance from Loved Ones (1990). Some lines therein:


A spinster swats a worm on her tabletop.
It was heading for the waffles or the coffee.
She's read about this....
...
They come in the morning when you are barely awake
...
Maybe you pick one up thinking it is lipstick.
....
Or maybe they just curl up in the fireplace
And shine until your favorite cat is legally dead.
They're not bad worms, she says, they're just different.

James Tate in an interview with the Paris Review gives this summary of his intention in writing:

We could spend a night with friends, laughing and drinking and toasting and saying how wonderful life is. Simultaneously, we all know that we’re enshrouded in tragedy, lies, and all kinds of evil. Torture, for God’s sake! And heaps of evil beyond what we can contemplate, and yet life is wonderful for those of us who haven’t been directly affected. So we walk around balancing the two all the time. I, for one, am not giving in. I am not going to walk around in tears all day long. I still want to have a good day if I can.
In my poems, I try—God knows, probably unsuccessfully—to bring that home.

James Tate is another example, possibly, of the effects of tornadic air pressure shifts, at critical times. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri.