Interview with Unofficial Trump Inaugural Poet Joseph Charles MacKenzie
 

Many may find this interview interesting. I'm still amazed at the support Trump receives from the religiously faithful. Julie S. posted an insightful explanation some time back in the Trump Watch thread. Nonetheless, the contradiction still perplexes me.

Greg

One time a married man offered me money to come back to his hotel room with him. I declined, but he kind of looked like Joseph Charles MacKenzie. They all look like that.

This interview is everything I hoped it would be.

One week in mid-January this year, in the relatively obscure world of poetry, Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s “Pibroch for the Domnhall” exploded like an atomic bomb, shattering perceptions that rhyming and rhythmic poetry—poetry that common people appreciate or at least understand for a change—was dead upon the stage of history.

looooooooooooooooooooooooooool

This is a verse from his inaugural-ish poem:

The black man, forgotten, in poverty dying,
The poor man, the sick man, with young children crying,
The soldier abroad and the mother who waits,
The young without work or behind prison gates,
The veterans, wounded, all welcome the crowd
That fights for the Domhnall, the best of MacLeod!

By atomic bomb the interviewer refers to the toxic stupidity of this poet lining up like a fanboy for fascism. By common people he means the willfully uneducated. And by understanding he means equally comfortable with painting the world they have dreamed up on the inside of their eyelids.

I suppose it hardly needs saying, but the hyperventilating nonsense of his inaugural 'poem', insulted the memory of Walter Scott whose romanticism was, however Tory, rooted in a genuine passion for the long suppressed culture of his people and their past. It had a 'music' which caught at hearts, however perverse its historical cum political 'arguments'. The phoney nature of his rant here, in an interview of eye-rolling derangement, recalls, extremely uncomfortably, the almost messianic tone of 'official culture' under a past Ministry of Popular Culture and Enlightenment. 'Trumpland' becomes more chilling - and/or ridiculous - by the day.... and I'm no great admirer of allegedly 'modernist' poetry!

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."
--Carl Sandburg, "The People, Yes" (1936)

Sometime a blowhard narcissist will claim to be the best English-language poet since Shakespeare, and nobody will give him more attention than he deserves.

This is another one of those interviews that makes me feel like this is happening to me physically and socially every second of every day.

Reading the whole interview, this has to be a joke. This can't be a real thing.

Once again, Andrew, I find myself wishing this WAS fake news! However, I suspect only someone who thinks and speaks like this could write a poem praising Domnhall Drumpf. Bigly sad, I'm afraid.

I missed this interview when first posted by Julie... But did read it now and am appalled -- if indeed it is real. It feels unreal. But if it is, I better now the multi-face of the enemy of progress and Joseph MacKenzie is a part of it.

Maybe we must begin to think seriously about the very fabric of our lives as American and global citizens... and what it is that chews at our coats like moths. Maybe we are in for a true global people's revolution...
Maybe I'm tired and gonna go to bed.

Jim, I earlier discussed the unwavering support of some conservative Christians for Trump, but I didn't post a link to this interview.

Narcissists feed on attention, whether the attention is positive or negative. Whenever it's not downright dangerous to ignore them, as in the case of Trump, I think we should starve them of that attention. This is particularly true of Christian narcissists with persecution complexes, who constantly seek out opportunities to be immolated in spectacular fashion by the Left. They always claim it's for the glory of God's name, but it's for the glory of their own names. Let's not inadvertently give them the fame they crave by ridiculing them.

Yes, there's a certain entertainment value in such howlers as "the Times Literary Supplement of London did well to remind the world of my taking First Place at the Scottish International Poetry Competition"--yes, well done, TLS, what a noble service to a grateful world that was!--and "Traditional Catholic marriage is an absolute requirement for poets of amatory verse. Shakespeare proves this"--wow, who knew it was possible to overlook the obvious homoeroticism in Shakespeare's love sonnets?--but I've got better things to do today than snicker at pompous assery. (Or pompous half-assery, as the case may be.)

This was one of my favorite moments in this interview.

It was pure gold.

Oh my God, yes, Mr. Mackenzie is clearly a hack and crank, and thus it scares me a great deal that I agree with much of what he says in the interview. I'm surprised that some one of the conservative New Formalists wasn't invited to step forward and publicly lick Trump's butthole.

This is a prank, folks, by a fairly new group of millenniumish formal poets.

Is the Society of Classical Poets and its Top Ten lists and general air of Harvard Underclassmen - circa 1952 - also a prank? I hope so.

Quite a few credible American and International poets, that is, those who are published in many of the same journals as poets on the sphere, publish their work there. If the interview is fake, the site is fake. And I don't think that's the case.

Really? I went through the complete list of entries in the 2016 Journal, Gregory, and the partial lists (all they made available) for the next four years or so, and the only name I recognized was yours. Who'd I miss?

In this present Party the actual and the unbelievably stupid have converged so completely that conversations like this are taking place over dozens of subjects and articles every week. With this election it is like we installed one particular dog's vomit in the Louvre and now we have to walk through every alley and say, is that His?

Michael, I'm humbled. You have finally recognized my presence here on the sphere.

I wrote: "Quite a few credible American and International poets, that is, those who are published in many of the same journals as poets on the sphere, publish their work there."

Would you like me to PM a list of poets and the journals that have published them? It will be a little secret between you and me.

Sincerely,
Greg

No need to PM me, Gregory. No poet tries to hide his success, and I'm sure that others would be interested as well. Why does it have to be a secret? What is there about the Society that you can't discuss openly? Is it a poetical Skull and Bones?

Michael, you tease. Just when I thought we were getting close. I could tell you about the Society, darling, but then I'd have to...

I gagged down the whole interview, so hard to believe it's real. Here's a possible antidote: http://epicprotestpoems.com

There are a lot of delusional people out there, even in Poetryland. Why anyone should be surprised or upset about this is beyond me. I could even mention a couple of other names and publications, but I'd be sent to Eratosiberia for doing so. Like Mike, I recognized only a couple of the featured poets' names, both from here. And why not? Everyone wants to be published.

The editor, Mantyk, seems yo be associated with the decidedly dodgy Epoch Times. Frankly, I find the whole thing highlarious.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/author/evan-mantyk/

Not that it much matters but he's got this all wrong. The poem Frost wrote for the inauguration was entitled, obviously enough, "For John F. Kennedy's Inauguration" and was indeed a fairly undistinguished piece in couplets. However, because of snow-glare he couldn't read it and so instead recited from memory "The Gift Outright", which he had written and published back in 1942. "The Gift Outright" is unrhyming - and also highly memorable.

The transcription of the poem is not quite accurate, I think, but this is a good summary of what happened. I was in 8th grade and saw it on tv. At the time I was a little embarrassed--for all concerned and for the country--at all the milling around and confusion at the podium. But I was 12 and easily embarrassed by almost anything at the time.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/0...-inauguration/

It was Vice-President Johnson, not Richard Nixon, who offered his top hat for shade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInL2u0DP88

Cynics have said that Frost "staged" the whole thing to draw attention to himself. I don't think so. Apparently, the dedicatory poem was typed out on a regular typewriter; Frost would have required a large font given the visual conditions.

Thanks, Sam. I'd seen the photo but never actually seen the film of the occasion. I'm sure you were far more embarrassed than Frost was.

I took a quick look but dismissed the interview once I read as far as "Is the dominate [sic] style of poetry, free verse or modern, dead?"

If the interview on poetry is itself illiterate, that's all I need to know.