[Gregory Palmerino]

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

[Orwn Acra]

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.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

This interview is everything I hoped it would be.

[Aaron Novick]

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

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

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.

[Nigel Mace]

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!

[Julie Steiner]

"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.

[Aaron Poochigian]

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.

[Michael Juster]

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

[Michael Cantor]

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.