George Scott , the first baseman who once played for the Boston Red Sox called his homeruns "taters.
I keep thinking that’s what I should call the poems by James Tate. I heard Tate read at a book festival in Vermont several years ago. I fell in love with his dark humor. At some of my own readings I would recite "Rapture" and other poems from Tate’s Memoir of the Hawk. Yesterday, I sat in a Borders bookstore in Silver Spring, Maryland reading The Ghost Soldiers and shaking my head. Take a look at "The Lost Tribe" or "The Native Americans." I love taters.
In some of my new poems I’ve been attempting to be as daring and surprising as Tate. It’s like being a jazz musician after hearing Charlie Parker play. Soon you discover why you have ears.
I left Borders humming the "Jan’s Scary Novel" tater. It had those memorable lines:
"It’s all about bunnies?"
I ask incredulously. "Bad bunnies," she says, "Very bad bunnies."
George "the Boomer" Scott
— E. Ethelbert Miller