By STEVE PAUL
(c) 2025
Courtesy William Stafford Archives, Watzek Library, Special Collections, Lewis and Clark College.
Stafford first crossed paths with James Tate in the late 1960s, around the time the younger poet, still at the Iowa Writers Workshop, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first book, The Lost Pilot. They corresponded and met up over the years on one campus or another. Stafford was famous for hauling out his camera at every writers’ gathering, and in browsing a vast collection of his photographs I’ve come across several pictures he took of Tate. This one, Tate at right, dates to roughly 1976, probably at Iowa. I haven’t yet identified the other poet in the photo (left), so if anyone has a clue, please let me know. In the late 1980s, when I was book review editor of the Kansas City Star, I happened to interview Tate at least twice. (There was also one dinner in Kansas City that I recall, though I don’t think I was taking notes.) Here are the two resulting stories from The Star. In 1992, I responded quickly to news of his Pulitzer Prize and got him on the phone before he’d heard from anyone else. The stories first appeared April 3, 1988, and April 8, 1992.
