A lastbench stand against a continuing Trump term by Randy Horton
review of lastbench little magazine’s special North American edition with a focus on Donald Trump’s presidency
a review of lastbench little magazine’s Special North American Trump protest edition
In any reasonable world, Donald Trump would be a fading memory, a night of bad judgment followed by corrective measures to set things right and be on our way. After all, Trump was so hated that he lost the 2020 election to a mediocre and unloved candidate by the largest margin in American history. And yet Trump and Trumpism hang over the globe like a putrid miasma. seeping into the fabric of society and, most sadly, the folds of our brains. So we must continue to confront any threat he represents while also holding the current administration to account for its own transgressions and wild lurches from the moral arc of the universe. Poetry isn’t the answer, of course, it can’t be, but it may be the salve we rub on our feet as we limp to a new horizon (or possibly an abyss, but let’s keep hoping for a horizon for now). Poetry is penetrating, succinct, reassuring, amusing, and sometimes terrifying, which is why it helps us work through our thoughts and emotions. So it is that the November 2020 edition of Lastbench is devoted to Donald Trump, and we must still care. The opening essay, “Fight Fascism with Poetry,” says the aim of the collection “is to capture historical consciousness as it arises, and instigate against the status quo as it plunges into ultra-right orthodoxy.” The poems that follow reflect the anger, grief, disbelief, horror, and amusement that accompany the Trump phenomenon. So cartoonish is the Trump persona that we laugh to keep from crying, of course, but sometimes we also have to cry to keep from laughing. There is the sense throughout that we can’t believe this is really happening, but we must keep reminding ourselves that it is. The collection includes 24 poems, and I’d like to quote a little of each to give an idea of the depth and variety of the work, but that’s clearly not feasible in a short review. While Trump has produced plenty of outrage among the left, the centre, and the establishment, many of the poems here reflect more grief than anger, but there’s plenty of anger to go around. For example, Jennifer Lagier laments, “America splinters along / ideological fault lines. / As democracy sputters, / suffocated by ignorance, greed, / Lady Liberty weeps.” A figure like Trump is so obscene that only a limerick seems appropriate to commemorate his reign. Tom Montgomery connects a few to give an extended form that begins, “There once was a guy they call Trump / Whose hair was a big reddish clump.” I don’t normally enjoy limericks, but the vulgarity of the form seems entirely fitting to capture the spirit of our age. In the post-Trump era, many of us feel the America we knew is lost, and we’re not sure we can recover it. Cheryl Latif echoes our fears (and possibly Langston Hughes) with the lines, “weary of celluloid images depicting women as prey / i find the boogie man loose in broad daylight / the monster out from under the bed / shadows at my back / and i am searching for America.” This edition was written and edited before the election, and ends with the exhortation: “Remember if you elect the marmalade man you invite the ensuing trouble.” The guest editors, Lyn Coffin, Rose Drew, and Dustin Pickering, were adding to the hue and cry against a second Trump term. Trump was defeated last November, so this rally should seem superfluous, but these aren’t ordinary times, and the threat of a second Trump term still hangs in the air like radioactive fallout. Stay strong, and take comfort in poetry.
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