If that story’s not true, I don’t want to know. The legend goes that he just showed up, showed them his poems, and was admitted on the spot by the director of the program, Donald Justice. When he wrote that book, he was only twenty-two, a kid from a deeply religious Pentecostal family in Kansas City, who somehow found his way to poetry and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He had a legion of poor imitators, whom my friends and I called “lost pilots” after the legendary, eponymous poem of Tate’s first book, which won the most prestigious prize for young poets of its time, the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets award. He was revered by poets of virtually every aesthetic persuasion, from stern formalists to wild experimentalists.

Over the course of his career, Tate won every imaginable award available to American poets, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. One of those poems, “ Elvis Has Left the House,” appears in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue. But it turned out there were more poems, which have been assembled into a truly final volume, The Government Lake, to be published by Ecco in July of 2019. Most of us assumed that this was his final book.

When James Tate died on July 8, 2015, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind more than twenty collections of poetry and prose, including Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, published right around the time of his death.

Kate james tate