President Trump speaks simply, in jarring fragments as facile as they are loaded.
When transcribed, his verbal musings take on a strange quality, echoing the stylings of more deliberate free verse poets, who often traffic in the same artful ambiguity and austere verbiage, but presumably put pen to pad with greater intent than our president gives voice to his thoughts. Or do they?
Rob Long, a former screenwriter and co-executive producer of “Cheers,” edited and arranged a selection of Trump transcripts into the recently-released Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse, a gift just waiting to be given. Almost pocket-sized, Bigly interprets Trump’s interviews and speeches as provocative postmodern poems, introducing readers to dozens upon dozens of classics like “Good Wall,” “I Cherish Women,” “Win So Much,” “Table at Le Cirque,” and both “Morning Routine I” and Morning Routine II.”
In “Reading,” for example, Long versified one selection of a 2014 interview Trump did with a Brazilian magazine into an enigmatic five-line creation that maybe, just maybe, could pass for art under circumstances in which its author is left unnamed.
Reading
I don’t read much.
Mostly I read contracts,
But usually my lawyers
Do most of the work.
There are too many pages.
Why is the narrator so burdened by high volumes of pages? Does he limit his reading selections to paperwork by choice or are his prohibitive time constraints somehow a function of mandate? The narrator seems careful to avoid betraying emotion, but why? With so much left unsaid, and with what’s said having been expressed with such concision, the reader is forced to confront the narrator’s curiously dispassionate approach to the act of reading.
In an editor’s note, one of many sprinkled throughout the 150-page book, Long added, “Like Hemingway, Trump sees himself not merely, or even primarily as a litterateur, but as a man of action.”
Indeed.
The New Yorker was not amused, disappointedly discerning from Bigly that Long’s purpose was not to make fun of Trump, but “to make fun of poetry itself, and by extension, the imagined reader of poetry — the kind of thoughtful, liberal intellectual who might be expected to take offense at this book’s very premise.”
I fully disagree with that interpretation, but … so what? Must thoughtful, liberal intellectuals be shielded from thoughtful, conservative satire? (And is this really the way “liberal intellectuals” see themselves — as poetry readers?)
Far from enabling Trump, as the New Yorker review posited, Bigly neither helps nor hurts the president. It merely amuses everyone else with a sense of humor. It’s a 150-page book for an audience of people interested in poetry and politics, both of which seem to keep falling out of favor with the public. I would venture a guess that most people familiar enough with the material Long references to laugh at his work will be liberal anyway. Bigly liberal.
It is a book as innocuous as it is hilarious, and neither Republican nor Democrat, Trump supporter nor detractor, should sweat one second before stuffing it into the stocking of a loved one.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
