How Trump is making poetry great again
Whatever the result of today’s vote, one thing can be said for the US president – he’s inspired some superb verse, says Tristram Fane Saunders
Last week, Bruce Springsteen recited a poem on his online radio show. It was by one Elayne Griffin Baker (nope, me neither) and it wasn’t very good. But it did tap into a popular idea: “There’s no art in this White House./ There’s no literature, no poetry.”
It’s true that Donald Trump hasn’t positioned himself as a patron of his nation’s poets. Unlike Kennedy, Clinton or Obama, he did not invite a poet to read at his inauguration. Since his election, there’s been nothing like the 2009 “White House Poetry Jam”.
In fact, the only verses Trump has publicly praised are the lyrics to Oscar Brown’s 1963 song The Snake (about a woman who takes in a frozen snake she finds on her way to work, only for the snake to regain its strength, bite her and kill her), which he sometimes recites at rallies as an allegory about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration.
And yet inasmuch as the bombing of Guernica was good for Picasso, the Trump White House has been very good for poetry. For the political artist, it helps to have a vivid target, and Trump is undeniably that. It’s as much about personality as policy. I can’t recall a single poem about Mike Pence; he is, in the mind’s eye, a man in a suit.
Fortunately for the satirists, Pence shares an office with a larger-than-life Rabelaisian grotesque, easily pictured eating cheeseburgers in bed while watching Fox News and tweeting. Trump is, as a literary character, colourful – both figuratively and literally. As Terrance Hayes writes of the permatanned president: “Are you not the color of this country’s current threat/ Advisory?”
Since 2016, Trump has inspired a flood of new poems. Some of them are doggerel, of course, or just straightforward name-calling – particularly the potshots from this side of the pond. “News-maggot, lie-monger, tongue-trickster, crap-grubber,” former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy calls the president in Swearing In, a poem from her most recent collection Sincerity.
But in America, some of the most accomplished writing of recent years has been directly inspired by Trump’s presidency – it’s been a minirenaissance of political verse.
For these poets, Trump holds a warped, funhouse mirror to his
country. He is “A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection/ Of your own,” Hayes tells America, in his TS Eliot Prize-nominated collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
Much of this new Trumpoetry advances the idea that Trump’s personality, and, in particular, his self-centredness, has a corrosive effect on the world around him. In a recent Telegraph column, Charles Moore put across the same idea succinctly: “Thanks to him, the negativity at the heart of all egotism is wounding America.”
In The Hell Test, a prose poem from Daniel Poppick’s Fear of Description, this wounded country is symbolised by a ruined estate where the poet would trespass as a teenager – “meadows and mansions, little monuments of infrastructure dotted along its outer edges: an abandoned stable, a shattered greenhouse, a rotting pump overgrown with flowering vines…”
As an adult, in 2009, he sees the same estate in a news report, and learns that it’s Trump’s failed development Seven Springs. Years later, the poet returns to Seven Springs. In the middle of a field, he finds a broken skylight in the ground, and climbs down into the darkness: “I was under purchased earth, and everything was open.”
If Poppick gives us Trumpastoral, a fallen landscape, Shane Mccrae offers a fallen language. “America you’re what a turnout great/ Crowd a great crowd big smiles America”, he writes in his poem The President Visits the Storm, inspired by an address Trump gave to the survivors of Hurricane Harvey.
As Mccrae’s pentametric word-salad shows, Trump might be the only politician you can mimic just by imitating his syntax. The president’s oratory style–his repetitions, selfinterruptions, tightly restricted vocabulary, fragmentary clauses and unfinished sentences – destabilise speech in a way that’s not completely unlike the work of the avant-garde Language poets of the Sixties and Seventies (though they wouldn’t enjoy the comparison).
It’s fertile material for writers who enjoy mixed-up turns of phrase, such as Paul Muldoon. Position Paper, a poem from Muldoon’s most recent book, begins with an epigraph from Trump: “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative. So you can put that in, and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good.”
From there, Muldoon launches into a series of amusingly mangled clichés: “Loose lips tie knots./ Don’t put the cart before the storm./ Don’t wash your dirty linen in a watched pot./ The leopard can’t change horses in midstream.” It’s fun, but these are the kind of malaphors the Irish poet has been playing with for years, and would apply just as well to the era of George “I know how hard it is to put food on your family” Bush.
There’s more originality to Timothy Donnelly’s poem The Death of Truth, from The Problem of the Many. In his nation-defining book Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sang “the body electric”. Donnelly’s speaker, half-trump and halfprophet, has come to “sing/ the body mac and cheese, deep-fried”, offering his own philosophy: “What you can’t get, disvalue/ loudly in public.” In virtuoso terza rima [the rhymed three-time stanzas used by Dante], he offers a new take on the New Testament:
“Gather round now, real estate. Come and make a planet
real again. Bible says Ananias sold a spot of property
to make a cash gift to the apostles, which was unfortunate.”
Ananias, of course, set aside some of the cash for himself.
“[Paul] asked where the rest was and why
Ananias let the devil take up residence in his heart.
The devil rents. That’s what I’m hearing. He said to lie
about this is to lie not to him, but to the Holy Spirit,
and boom! Ananias bit it. Dropped dead on the carpet or
probably dirt floor at this point. If it’s me, I like carpet,
but that’s just me. Did I say Paul? It was Peter. Peter,
Paul. Same difference. [...] The moral of the story is:
Don’t give anything away. Only acquire. Lie constantly to
Lie better, live longer.”
After all, Donnelly’s speaker concludes, “Art lies all the time, and look: nothing happens.” It’s a nod to Auden – “Poetry makes nothing happen” – and perhaps a glum comment on the inefficacy of all these poems.
For all the despairing humour, linguistic verve, and sheer passion with which they portray a wounded America, I doubt they’ve swayed one vote.
Trump might be the only politician you can mimic just by imitating his syntax