James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943, Kansas City, Missouri) is a literary iconoclast, best known as a Pulitzer prize-winning and National Book Award-winning poet, educator, and man of letters. Tate's writing style is as unique as it is difficult to describe. He has been known to carve, invert, and play with phrases culled from news items, history, anecdotes, or common speech; later cutting, pasting, and assembling such divergent material into tightly woven compositions that reveal bizarre and surreal insights into the absurdity of human nature.

poem about his father who died during the second world war