Now that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, let's read his "poems"
There is a book, The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, which is a very serious collection of the statements of the former president of the United States adapted into verse. Abroad it is a small editorial case. Here it is unpublished. After all, even the great works of poetry must be read in their original language
(Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP / Getty Images) Ok, Donald Trump is no longer the president of the United States. He will found the patriot movement, not immediately but will soon return to conduct his own cross-media show, and it is clear that for a while we will suffer from phantom limb syndrome. Because there are no meetings scheduled, his Twitter account has even been suspended and in general, let's get used to hearing him much less than before; What do we do if we miss certain shots? Easy: let's read his poems.The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, published by the Scottish independent publishing house Canonegate books, starts from this assumption: what if The Donald, with its controversial statements, were nothing else than a poet intent on reciting verses? It's joking, of course. Or maybe not. Author of the work Robert Sears, former writer and humorist of Dave Eggers' McSweeney, and who has published another pearl like Vladimir Putin: Life Coach, a set of tips to face the small pitfalls of life as Vladimir Putin would do. (spoiler: with the hard way, taking as a reference real examples already documented). Translated: we are on the side of satire, and besides, there is obviously some grotesque in the ways and utterances of those who believe that democracy is a personal garden. But this time, more than on advice for a smooth existence, we find ourselves directly in high literature.
The book, in fact, is a very serious collection of Trump's statements, not only from the recent period but also from his previous life as a full-time tycoon, adapted - thanks to a job of cutting, sewing, fixing - in form of poetry. Nothing is missing: from the photomontage on the cover, in which the former president of the United States is portrayed as a new Percy Bysshe Shelley, posing on a lawn looking for inspiration, to the first words that here become the title of the poem, model Dante , which are then followed in a row, like verses, by other phrases more or less on the theme of The Donald.
And as the Guardian explained, it is not even the first time that someone associates the aphorisms of ours with literature , as in the case of writer Rob Long's Make Poetry Great Again; but The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump is certainly the most in-depth and fun work, in this sense. Thanks to the Trump Twitter Archive, the Trump Archive, and the American Presidency Project, Sears has built an archive that ranges from releases carved into collective memory to removed tweets, even going back to prehistoric interviews. And if the first edition of the volume stopped in 2017, with the latest update we get to collect poems until 2019.
The effect is hilarious: as in a real collection, the words open a window on soul of the author. He looks inside Trump, in his thoughts; only that one finds inside only misogyny, a relationship with nature that borders on pure contempt (ah, these topos of the great writers), bravado from "winners" against "losers", falsehood, incoherence. In short: that concentrate of values born of a toxic and even childish machismo, however and always arrogant, that the world has seen leaving the White House in the last four years, but of which we also have testimonies here dating back to 1990, even if it was not a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (original title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). The rest is done by a syntax according to Sears' own admission consisting of concise sentences, simple bordering on the elementary, perfect to be broken up and shuffled into verses, rigorously numbered.
Among the memorables: the pleasure of Everybody loves me (“Tom Brady loves me. / The people of New York, they love me. (…) / The bikers love me. (…) / The African Americans love me”); the muscles of the captain of I'm open-minded ("I use both iPhone and Samsung: / a great leader as to be flexible"); aiku for Putin; the experience as a revered master of "vagina is expensive", which already qualifies the character (s).
The (perhaps) bad news? That of the book in question - the first edition of which dates back to 2017, the one updated to 2019 - there is no version for our country, although it is still available for purchase in the international one. Perhaps this is why abroad, among other things, it represented a small literary case, while in Italy it is an unpublished one, in the sense that no one has talked about it. For the future, certainly an Italian translation would give a further touch of professionalism to the whole - can we imagine a layout with the text facing, say, John Keats? And yet it must also be said that The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump is such a pure and alienating work, that through the absurd it puts on paper the shots of a man who became president of the United States, to be read in the original language. Just like the great works of poetry, in the sense.
