"The hereafter may not last all that long"

James Tate was born on December 8, 1943, in Kansas City, Missouri. His first collection of poems, The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967), was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, making him one of the youngest poets to receive the honor. Tate’s other honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a National Book Award for Poetry, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry. From 2001 to 2007, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Read more about him, including poems newly added to our archive, with thanks to the Estate of James Tate:

 “Goodtime Jesus”
 “The Cowboy”
 “Dream On”
 “The Ice Cream Man”
 “Go Youth”
 “The Glassy Harbor”

Reflect on the last month of the year with poets born in December: 

“Untitled [Do you still remember: falling stars]” by Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875)
“It’s a Long Way” by William Stanley Braithwaite (December 6, 1878)
“The Soul has Bandaged moments (360)” by Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830)
“Elegy in Joy [excerpt]” by Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913)
“There may be chaos still around the world” by George Santayana (December 16, 1863)

“When we feel, we’re not feeling only the moment in front of us, we’re often feeling into the kind of depth of everything that has happened and everything we can imagine will happen. And so that—that ability—is what I’m looking for.”

Please join us in welcoming Claudia Rankine as our Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for December. Rankine is the author of several works, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2024) and Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry, and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. A Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in the fall of 2021. Read and listen to a Q&A with Rankine about her Poem-a-Day curatorial approach.

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [Mahalia Jackson is a genius.]”
“sound and fury”
“Coherence in Consequence”

Congratulations to Luisa A. Igloria and Aileen Cassinetto, 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows, on launching Dear Human, a microsite in partnership with Wick Poetry Center and Poets for Science. The site invites readers to share their voices by responding to excerpts from the anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, edited by Igloria and Cassinetto.