James Tate, who has died aged 71, was one of the most original and inventive American poets of his era, whose sense of humour and love of the tall story calls to mind an earlier Missouri-born master of the fable, Mark Twain.

The title poem of Tate’s first collection, The Lost Pilot, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize of 1967, is a haunting elegy for the father he never met. Vincent Appleby was shot down in his B-17 bomber over Germany in 1944, when his son was only four months old. The poet imagines his father as “a tiny, African god” endlessly orbiting the earth, while the son stares into the skies. It ends ambivalently with a recognition that he can neither communicate with the lost pilot, nor forget him:

… I cannot get off the ground,

and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling

to tell me that you are doing

well, or that it was a mistake

that placed you in that world,

and me in this; or that misfortune

placed these worlds in us.



It is one of the great poems of mourning, and an astonishing achievement for a poet who was only 22 – the same age as his father was when he died.

But Tate, who took the surname of his second stepfather, arguably wrote his best poetry after the turn of the century. Memoir of the Hawk (2002), Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004) and The Ghost Soldiers (2008) offer an enthralling compendium of unlikely stories put into the mouths of narrators who can at first seem ordinary enough, but who slyly lead us into the realms of the implausible and the uncanny. These volumes had such an influence on the future Oxford professor of poetry Simon Armitage that he set about composing a whole volume of poems, Seeing Stars (2010), that pay frank and admiring homage to Tate’s wacky narrative mode.

These last three collections are made up of poems that often verge on prose, and invite us into a world in which the everyday, or “normal”, is subtly but relentlessly transfigured. The character in one, Bounden Duty, even receives a call from the White House, in which the president asks him to “act normal”, something he at once finds impossible to do. Half parable, half anecdote, the poems dazzle and delight with their inventive energy, deadbeat humour and exquisite turns of phrase.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Tate spent most of his adult life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he taught poetry at the University of Massachusetts while never losing his mid-western twang.

He was brought up by his mother Betty Jean (nee Whitsitt) and his grandparents. Betty Jean remarried three times, but his first two stepfathers were violent and abusive: his memoir The Route as Briefed (1976), describes the first as a gangster who would let off his .45 indoors, while the second, a salesman, frequently beat his mother. On one occasion, the 16-year-old Tate held a gun to his stepfather’s head to ward off an attack.

Tate struggled at school, graduating 478th out of a class of 525. Nevertheless, in 1960 he was offered a place at Kansas State College of Pittsburg (now Pittsburg State University), and while there fell in love with poetry, in particular with the experiments in everyday language of William Carlos Williams and with the imaginative exuberance of Wallace Stevens. His own work can be seen as a fusion of the two: it is insistently colloquial – and indeed much of it is set, like that of Williams, in small-town America – but its imagery and narratives present the reader with an endless series of surprises.

While studying for his fine arts master’s at Iowa Tate became increasingly interested in European surrealist poetry, and his work, along with that of the Yugoslav-born Charles Simić, was influential in pushing American poetry away from the home-grown tradition of the confessional lyric towards more cosmopolitan and less predictable styles. Inspired especially by the innovations of the prolific New York poet John Ashbery, Tate’s poetry developed a crazy-cartoon, anything-may-happen explorative quality. Delivered deadpan, and with perfect comic timing, his funniest pieces, such as How the Pope Is Chosen, often had audiences at his readings laughing uproariously.

His bizarre and hypnotic poetic riffs are also, however, liable to switch registers when least expected, and turn bleak, or disturbing, or painful – but never personal: his poems exist on their own defiantly distinctive terms, and after the early The Lost Pilot make little direct use of incidents from his own life.

An iconoclast and an original, Tate won both the Pulitzer prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award for his Selected Poems of 1991, the National Book award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), and the Wallace Stevens award (1995).

His marriage to Liselotte Jonsson in 1972 was dissolved in 1986. He later married the poet Dara Wier, who survives him.

• James Vincent Tate, poet, born 8 December 1943; died 8 July 2015