Hapless Old Harridans Flapping Their Traps

Donald Trump doesn’t exactly leap to mind when one thinks of great cultural benefactors. The U.S. president’s proposed budgets have twice aimed at eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, and in early 2017, Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy advisor, aired the idea that the poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus” by Jewish American Emma Lazarus welcoming “your poor, your huddled masses,” shouldn’t be there. For their part, poets have been protesting the president, often through found text and erasure poetry that pilfers, repurposes, and mocks his language, like this couplet from the ironically titled The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, compiled by Robert Sears: “I built buildings that are 94 storeys tall/ My hands aren’t—are they small?”

But as the example of the famously conservative T.S. Eliot should remind us, poetry is not the exclusive preserve of liberal English professors and spoken-word...