My reading of “The Promotion,” by James Tate: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CNFyo0WH8bV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Many years ago, I liked the idea of poetry, but didn’t know very much about it. I understood it vaguely to be a sort of word-acrobatics, borne out of the same concept as how you can write “purple giraffe” and your reader will immediately be assaulted by that image, only somehow trickier. I’d written some (hopefully, thankfully long lost) poems for my high school creative writing class, but that was about it. Now I was getting a biology degree so I could teach high school science, but filling the gaps in my schedule with English and writing classes. I took Intro to Poetry Writing excitedly---finally, the secrets of this arcane form!---and pretty much immediately entered a prose-poem phase, as many do, I suspect. With the margins of poetry still very undefined, I found refuge in this style that was neither lyrical poetry nor flash fiction, nor short story, but something else entirely. Not yet understanding the nuance of line breaks, I could avoid thinking about them entirely.
After shuffling through my dozen paragraph-length prose poems, my professor suggested that I read James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys, which I got from the UNH library immediately and began reading on the lawn. I loved whatever these whimsical jolts of surreality were, not-quite-prose-poems, or perhaps not poems at all, as some have decried them. The poet Charles Simic even referred to them (amicably) as “anti-poems.”
The truth is, I’m not really much closer to sharpening the margin between what is a poem and what is not, and I’ve decided I don’t care. Something about “The Promotion” stunned me that day, and continues to do so, even though it contains decidedly un-poetic language: there’s a glut of repetitive phrases (“good food, food from his table,” and three instances of the word “time” within two lines near the last third of the poem) and a matter-of-fact voice throughout that obscures rocky turns of phrase like “a bunch of high-rises.” It’s punctuated perfectly, and the line breaks seemingly occur as at the page margins and for no other reason. But there was something hiding behind all that.
Many of Tate’s other poems follow in the tradition of prose poets like Russel Edson, who would often raise the curtain on a poem’s little weird world with something like “a huge shoe mounts up the horizon,” or another thing equally Dali-esque in its bulbous, dripping surreality. With “The Promotion” and several others in White Donkeys, Tate is a little more reserved in his weirdness, more Borges than Dali: a man hears there’s a statue of him in town. Some businessmen say some very businesslike things; a bear enters a pizza parlor and eats some pizza. It’s an uncanny kind of weirdness that’s not born out of impossible dream imagery, but rather just an intensified normality. It all feels just possible enough, but the way Tate presents it is almost too real, like the roomful of executives talking only in corporate-speak: it’s so realistic it enters the realm of the surreal, so normal that it’s weird, like saying a word or phrase over and over until it becomes nonsense to our ears (a very early Tate poem consists of only the line then we’ll get us some wine and spare ribs repeated twenty-four times).
Another of Tate’s earlier poems begins “The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” which he later clarified in an interview he thought of as “the ultimate horseshit,” something so ordinary that it transcends into something strange and meaningful. There’s something there that was very appealing to me, in the idea that these poems didn’t need to spring from some supreme truth, but could instead begin from something very ordinary, and extend towards truth from there, on a path chosen purely by whim. It underlines the idea that really, everything is weird, and if you intensify something just enough, you can squeeze a truth out of it.
“The Promotion” is a little less ordinary than some of its companions: A dog is reincarnated into a human. To be perfectly honest, anything with a dog in it is going to get to me: If there’s a dog involved, I prepare myself to be sad, should things not turn out perfectly okay for the dog. And so yes, I always tear up thinking about the now-human dog describing the end to his idyllic life at a burial down by the stream. It’s weighted by the firm conviction with which he relates this life: “I had all the love any dog could hope for.” And I believe it. It’s like white-picket-fence American Dream idealism, but for a dog. He has work, purpose, and food; “[the farmer] may have been poor, but he ate well.” He even goes on to say, as he grows old, “I was dying slowly, a little bit at a time,” which is of course redundant and should sound deeply depressing, especially with how suddenly such a line comes in after a dozen other lines of pastoral bliss. Yet it just comes off as accepting. The now-human narrator knows enough not to insert any complex human existentialism onto the dog. Death is neither depressing or terrifying when you’re a dog, it just happens. He doesn’t even use the words death or die, just “And then one morning I just didn’t get up.”
The kicker, of course, is that the ‘promotion’ to humanity turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing. As he cries by the window, looking out from his high-rise apartment at all the other high-rises, Tate’s now-human laments his office job: “At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak to anyone all day.” That’s the line that truly gets me, in its evocation of pointlessness and alienation. It’s the timeless “we’re really floating on a space rock paying bills” feeling we know so well, especially when contrasted with the small simplicity of the working dog’s life. Now, I don’t think everyone wants to abandon work and be listless and sedentary---maybe some do, whatever. It’s the contrast of the gray, depressing cubicle job (a “fake email job,” or one of David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” perhaps) with the job of the dog, who might’ve only been able to see shades of gray, but whose work had purpose and fulfillment. I personally think that there is a bit more nuance than this black-and-white, country vs city, “cottagecore vs. dour Matrix” dichotomy. I wouldn’t mind living in a high-rise that looked out on other high-rises, so long as it wasn’t a part of a bleak cycle of making money for someone else and little more.
The saddest part of this now deeply sad poem is in the uselessness of the life our narrator has been promoted to. All the great complex human understandings he is now capable of are drowned out by the loneliness he has also been granted the ability to feel. He can’t be blamed for this, of course. The human experience is infinite, but Tate simply chose his answer to the question, “what is one of the most normal, expected human existences this dog would probably find himself in? What’s the horseshit?” and so that’s where, naturally, the dog ended up.
So if we are left here with the ordinary horseshit, where does the transcendence come in? Where’s the truth that exists beyond it? When I think of this sad ending, and how I hope to never know that feeling, I first think about my own work of course, in which I find a great deal of meaning. But I also think about the work of making art in general, work that is productive but not (necessarily) tied to profit. Part of the reason I like this poem so much is because its existence, along with the other poems in the collection, stand in opposition to its imagery: There are special, strange things in the simple, dour, ordinary horseshit. The trick is just to have the time, the energy, and the desire to look for them, and wring them out.
Thanks for reading. Next month: old joy and wistful heartache