Poetry is timeless and can be retroactively, heartwrenchingly, predictive, as this haunting circa 1970 piece by James Tate divulges

James Tate (1943-2015) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a prolific career, publishing collections in six different decades, starting in the late 1960s. The Oblivion Ha-Ha, from Little, Brown and Company, became his second published collection, in 1970.

Examining the collection with a fresh pair of eyes in 2016, Lisa Russ Spaar wrote this for the Los Angeles Review of Books: "What strikes me about The Oblivion Ha-Ha is less its surreality than its blend of desire and indifference, the terrible and the humorous, the cliché and the revelatory, the comedic and the tragic."

Tate's work, she adds, "offers the consolation of absurdity, of the ludic, of the collision of worlds, of the intrusion of one world into another."

It's interesting that Spaar, herself a poet, wrote that piece in 2016, the year in which we were fully amid a collision of worlds, a devastating intrusion that drives deeper and crueler by the hour now, a decade later. And so it was that I was inspired by a recent Bluesky post by Peter Montgomery to reshare the Tate poem from page 71 of The Oblivion Ha-Ha that appears in the above photo. You can listen to it here and I'll also type it out below:

The President Slumming

In a weird, forlorn voice

he cries; it is a mirage!

Then tosses a wreath of scorpions

to the children,

mounts his white nag

and creeps off into darkness,

smoking an orange

I hardly think you need me to point out the modern allusions that now seem to emanate from those seven lines, those 32 words, penned more than a half-century ago. It's actually spine-tingling.

The whole collection isn't like that, of course. So if you're looking for a pleasant, thoughtful diversion, I highly recommend Tate's volume. Or perhaps you'll look up one of his much-praised later collections. Three more snapshots of poems from The Oblivion Ha-Ha follow; I especially especially love the last one, which is why I put it as the closer.

Mommy Orange is the only Orange one I acknowledge.