I am very pleased to have another ‘Trump’ poem published here, and again at the feisty forum of the International Times.
I found yesterday in a reconnaissance through my PC files that I have a body of poetry written in response to The Donald, and I have collected these under the ironic title The Inspiration of Trump. As with Genius, most are found in his own distorted words, themselves a reflection of his – being ironic again – thinking.
I wrote here about the P.E.N. Anthology of Poetry from 1973 and that night I watched the amazing, unsettling programme Nixon on Nixon, In His Own Words on TV – recounted largely about that same year but also into 1974, the words of Nixon himself on the Watergate affair truly frightening in reflecting the same denial and arrogance of Trump today [it is more expansive and complex than this…]. Nixon of course had more guile and inherent intelligence compared with Trump, but it is both astonishing and deeply disturbing that the abuse of power would seem to be as commonplace today as it was then.
What I did wonder was how much poetry was written explicitly about Nixon and Watergate at that time compared with the amount about Trump today. Interestingly, there was only one direct political poem in the ’73 P.E.N. anthology, and that was Michael Hamburger’s poem Newspaper Story.
I did find today this reference to The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon, a volume compiled by Jack S. Margolis and published in 1974. These too are found poems taken from the Watergate tapes, so, and not surprising, the methodology is the same. The book is no longer easily available, but three original copies are for sale on Amazon marketplace starting at £166 [or $65 from .com]. Here’s a poem from the book,
IN THE END
In the end
We are going
To be bled
To death.
And in the end,
It is all going
To come out anyway.
Then you get the worst
Of both worlds.
gravyfromthegazebo 