Small acts to remain sane in a world of madness, with mad men trying to burn it all down.

• Music
• Healthy food (for me and my house, it’s plant-based: thank you!!)
• Books
• Poetry

I could have left poetry off my list and had a perfectly-bulleted trifecta. That wouldn’t have done justice to James Tate and his strange book, The Ghost Soldiers.

Poetry as a means of remaining sane.

I use “strange” in a laudatory manner. This is unlike most of the poetry I’ve ever read. While not a connoisseur of this element of literature, I’ve read more poetry over the last year than the previous 50+ years of being a reader. Poets are also a different animal than the other writers I fill my reading for pleasure time with.

There are a myriad of wonderful descriptions for poetry. I liked this one: “a means of bringing the wind in the grasses into the house.”

I’m not sure Tate fits that one. But most of the time I’ve spent with The Ghost Soldiers has made me laugh, take notice, and experience joy as a result of his writing.

Tate died in 2015. From his obituary, the writer framed him as someone who “perfected a style of poetic narrative that, with disarming simplicity, led readers down strange byways and mined comedy in bleak situations.”

When I read Tate, I hear echoes of poems my son wrote, surrealism and whimsy in abundance, while out on what would be a final walk.

One of poems in the book, “Bona Fides,” is a wonderful exegesis of the way we clutch tightly to unrealistic expectations of other humans. Someone who once occupied an honored pedestal has fallen. And people being people, friends and followers, have turned on him.

How are your bona fides?

The narrator, deeply troubled by the death of this giant, “a great wit and raconteur,” is then knocked back again when rumors and innuendo begin circulating: his friend wasn’t who he (and others) thought he was.

Tales of sexual improprieties and then, plagiarism, and the masses turn away from Cornell (his friend who he admired). His books no longer are taken down from the shelves. He is now cast “into outer darkness” by these other people.

Then Tate has the narrator ask, “Who are you? Show me your bona fides.”

This resonated with me.

Feel free to give one of his other poems a whirl. Here’s a bit more on Tate, also.