Trump Rant – Irish Times 7th January 2023
Although I’ve always been a highly political person, as a poet (in four previous collections) I’ve fought shy of ever conflating the ethically engaged with the overtly engagé.
Because, ironically, (it seems to me), the thing about successful political poems is that you must really feel the politics. Emotion, deeply allied to an attitude or felt ethic, is a must: opinion, sentiment, position, lifestyle or identarian choice, may be necessary, but they are surely not sufficient alone. But such allied feeling is sufficient, if also informed by a truly politico-ethical imagination.
So why and how my sudden explicit pivot to the “total political assault” (or Brechtian street-fight) called Trump Rant?