When Trumpian politics and bad art collide

Welcome to a deep rabbit hole. 

There are others, I know, but this particular den drew me in this week, and I’ve only now emerged with a few more white hairs and a terrible rabbity smell.

Rarely do my interests in politics and literature come together in one story, yet it happened on Monday when Tommy Robinson posted a poem to his Twitter feed. Part of it reads:

Though all the world should grovel and bend
To the minions of deepest hell,
Our days of glory shall not end
Where brave men fought and brave men fell!

Naturally, the verse drew considerable scorn from people equating the man with the writing. Robinson is odorous and so, they assume, is the poem. Well, yes, both are, but the poem is also more interesting than that, not least because the very first thing that struck me is that it felt too “good” to be by Robinson.

Technically it’s extremely controlled but, in poetic terms, too controlled. Mark the stresses and you’ll see there are four on each line, almost perfectly following an iambic (da-DUM ) pattern.

Though ALL the WORLD should GROvel and BEND
TO the MINions of DEEPest HELL,
our DAYS of GLORy SHALL not END
where BRAVE men FOUGHT and BRAVE men FELL!

Achieving that is no simple feat, which made me think it’s written by somebody well-practised in verse. 

Google quickly solved that mystery. This is, indeed, the first stanza from a longer piece written by one “Joseph Charles MacKenzie“, who has been championing himself (as others have championed him) as one of the greatest modern poets.

Oh boy! Prepare to enter the rabbit hole. Turn back now if you’re not interested in the confluence of politics and aesthetics.

America’s MAGA Right has been culturally active in a variety of ways since Donald Trump won in 2016, not least the whole subculture of paintings depicting the former president. Most are either extremely well-crafted or hideous pastiches of classical art. They began with the now infamous painting by amateur Andy Thomas, of Trump playing cards with other presidents. The then-president even hung it in the White House. The best we can say of it is that it’s not terrible. That work came later, particularly from painter Jon McNaughton who has depicted Trump in various MAGA dream scenarios.

There’s one in which he beats up Robert Mueller. In another, Barack Obama is watched by all the former presidents as he stands on the Constitution. Then there’s one with Trump in a boat filled with armed fighters in the ‘swamp’ of Washington (an imitation of “Washington Crossing the Delaware”). My favourite is the one of Trump riding a Harley decorated with American flags, as Melania rides behind him. If you like artists working with dayglo paints, you’ll like all of these.

Such is the rise in this kitsch that it’s often hard to spot what’s real and what’s fake. The Twitter account,@GaryPetersonUSA, recently posted a picture of the “artist” lying nestled in Trump’s arms, with the former president heavily muscled and topless. It was celebrated and mocked equally by people who seemed to miss that it was a parody highlighting how much homoeroticism lies inside Trump iconography, if not hagiography.

Bad “traditional” art, then, has become a staple of the current political fight in the US and, as the Robinson poem attests, it is also spilling over into the UK. It is an example of the old New Formalism but with a very modern bent. 

You don’t have to be interested in poetry to follow any of this because this is a bigger argument about ideas and being so rooted in tradition that nothing else matters. In this simplistic world view: Liberals want woolly art that says nothing, wallows in ambiguity, is filled with relativism, has no moral purpose, and, basically, just lets everything hang out there. The New Formalists, by contrast, want a return to classical form and structure. Postmodernism, they say, has devalued art. We’re in the age of work that cannot be judged. It’s the primary school teacher applauding little Timmy for throwing his milk at the wall and thereby expressing himself in a sincere way. This is the world of “your truth” and “my truth”. It’s the world in which we can nail a banana to a wall and call it an “installation”. 

Alongside this, we’ve seen 
the rise of free verse, which is 
                            (wrongly but widely) 
promoted as any sequence of words 
conveniently 
split up 
with 
unusual
line breaks.

As with so much around identity politics and the culture war, this does have a degree of truth about it. Most people aren’t interested in poetry yet are very quick to render ignorant opinions. Yet many who claim to write poetry are also not interested in poetry. Free verse requires a deeper understanding of the language and mechanisms of poetry. Great free verse is being written. But a lot of it is abject and terrible.

Unfortunately, few people are in a position (or are confident/foolish enough) to say as much, fearing that they’d be called out for being ignorant or, worse, labelled a traditionalist. It means that there has developed a belief that anything that rhymes must be bad. This has established a kind of undeclared war within the poetry community between the free-versifiers and the rhymers, which is a crude and inaccurate proxy for Left vs Right.

In response to that, an aggressively traditional aesthetic has emerged, such as what we see with the writer of Robinson’s poem. And as we’ll see, much of it is about posture rather than content.

Joseph Charles MacKenzie is a shadowy figure who might not even exist. It’s exceedingly difficult to pin down the claims he makes in his biography. He claims to be the “only American to have won the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition (see Times Literary Supplement, London, Jan. 27, 2017)” but if you do check the TLS on that day, the mention of MacKenzie is in a piece about inaugural poems for US Presidents: “There are rumours that [the Trump inauguration] has chosen Joseph Charles MacKenzie, a so far bookless poet with a liking for classical forms.” 

He also cites that he’s appeared in UK newspapers but, again, those were references to his unofficial inauguration poem. It goes on. People of no rank have called his work “major poetry by a major poet” and described him as “the great lyric poet of our times.” Elsewhere people have praised Shakespeare for approaching the genius of Joseph Charles MacKenzie.

Let’s quickly cut to the chase: he ain’t no Shakespeare, though clearly, I also need to be careful what I say. There’s no end to the way these things can be mangled on some budget build-it-yourself website.

So just to be clear: Joseph Charles MacKenzie is a literary heir… but to the great William McGonagall. Let me direct you to his website where you can listen to somebody (I’m not even sure they’re not AI) with the oddest (and I mean so odd it’s hysterical and worth a listen) British accent, read his “Adhortatio Ad Carolum Tertium Regem” or “Exhortation to King Charles the Third”. 

It’s fascinating because on one level it’s an impressive devotion to an ideal of poetry that has always existed (the Scriblerian greats would have been happy to put MacKenzie in Grub Street). Ignore, if you can, the slavish (and at times nauseating) fawning and you’ll notice the verse sounds okay to the ear, has few forced rhymes, and it makes a sustained point.

Without a doubt, it’s verse. But is it poetry?

The writer is aiming for a tone not dissimilar to that employed by Alexander Pope in “The Dunciad”. He references Dryden, the first laureate, but also scorn towards later laureates, as did Pope, himself overlooked in favour of Colly Cibber, who became his chief target in his great mock epic. 

In this case, the target is Simon Armitage:

Thy kingdom’s casting off of Europe’s chain,
Could not inspire the current Cretin’s brain.
[…]

He stripped a monarch of her proper might;
Upon her death, no hint of grief, but glee
Is veiled in his sarcastic “elegy.”
And yet he takes an underservèd cheque,
And butts of sherry for his bovine dreck.

It’s barely worth highlighting the stupidity on display. Armitage’s “Floral Tribute” to the late Queen was anything but “gleeful” or “bovine dreck”. A double acrostic on her name, the poem’s first stanza ends with a sentiment which captures the sadness of that time: 

A promise made and kept for life – that was your gift –
Because of which, here is a gift in return, glovewort to some,
Each shining bonnet guarded by stern lance-like leaves.
The country loaded its whole self into your slender hands,
Hands that can rest, now, relieved of a century’s weight.

This might be free verse but it’s well crafted. Armitage uses ordinary language to convey, with a pronounced sensitivity, the feelings of the nation. There is no flashy wordplay to draw attention away from the subject. This isn’t about the poet. The rhythm of each line is established with a long stress towards the start (“made”, “which”, “bonnet”, “loaded”) which shifts to the long stress placed near the end of the last line (“relieved”) which propels us into the thematic rest. I would never claim it’s a particularly great poem, but it is full of interesting little nuances and tricks that engage the brain. 

MacKenzie, however, is all about displaying his technical mastery, writing to strict 10-syllable lines with almost no variation. In the 104 lines of the poem, only one (“Both harbinger and maker of the nation’s spring,”) does not have 10 syllables. Even Pope didn’t achieve that in the first 104 lines of his epic poem and perhaps that’s the point. MacKenzie is playing a cheap game of numbers; a metric as crude as his metre with which to make some crazy claim for greatness.

Great writing inspires through innovation and surprise but MacKenzie’s metronomic hammer constantly anticipates the next dead-on-arrival rhyme. It’s filled with turgid anachronisms, hackneyed “poetic” language, plus just bad writing. 

John Dryden to his Charles and I to mine,
Since modern Laureates are anodyne.
Not one, since Betjeman had left this earth,
Could put an end to inspiration’s dearth;

If equating himself to Dryden isn’t a bad start, he employs a clumsy inversion to make the line work. He then dismisses a series of fine laureates which includes Ted Hughes (the author of Crow had many faults but being a bad poet was not one). That “had” is only there to support the syllable count but detracts from the meaning. But most remarkable is how little there is to say – no alliteration, metrical tricks, or even an interesting idea. The best one could say of it is to reuse Orwell’s famous judgement of Kipling: “a good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious”, except maybe we could drop the word “graceful”. MacKenzie is good at stating his “obvious” with dulling effect.

And equally obvious: America’s MAGA movement must wait a little bit longer for the arrival of its first great poet, and MacKenzie should stop trying to honour our King. The poor guy has enough to cope with.

@DavidWaywell

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