In the quiet, often overlooked corridors of contemporary verse, a detonation occurred mid-January. It was not a whisper of free verse, but a “Pibroch”-a classical Highland bagpipe form-that shattered the glass. Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s Pibroch for the Domnhall arrived with the force of an atomic device, scrambling the molecular makeup of a field long thought dormant. Published initially by the Society of Classical Poets and subsequently amplified by major British broadsheets and the New York Times, the poem did the unthinkable: it rhymed, it scanned, and it praised a controversial political victory.
For MacKenzie, this was no accident. It was a calculated strike against a poetic establishment he views as a corpse kept warm by machinery.
The Artificial Pulse of Modernism
The decline of poetry in American public life is not, in MacKenzie’s view, a symptom of changing tastes but a rejection of a non-entity. He argues that for sixty years, the thing called “poetry” has been a simulation, maintained only by the “artificial life support system” of government-funded academia.
Interview with Unofficial Trump Inaugural Poet Joseph Charles MacKenzie
Without the financial feeding tube of the NEA, he posits, the output of upper-middle-class activists-chopped-up prose that ends its life as an “institutionalized vegetable”-would have rotted decades ago. The modern “slam” is less an artistic endeavor and more a gathering of victimologists shaking fists in a vacuum. True poetry, the kind that educated readers recognize, has simply ceased to exist within the university system.
The remedy is not innovation, but a return to the root. Historia magistra vitae-history is the mistress of life. MacKenzie contends that traditional lyric verse acts as a mirror of history and a foil to the “convulsive turpitude” of modernism. It is the sworn enemy of relativism.
Satire and the Pibroch
When the Pibroch for the Domnhall surfaced, the literary elite scrambled to categorize it. Was it a hoax? A piece of “fake news”?
MacKenzie dismisses these labels as the desperation of alt-left bloggers. The poem is a Pibroch in the classic, bardic sense: a martial piece designed to praise the chieftain, rebuke his enemies, and exhort the forgotten clansmen. It is serious. Yet, it is also satire-not in the sense of a joke, but in the lofty, moral tradition of Juvenal and Boileau.
Critics, lacking the historical literacy to distinguish an anapest from a nursery rhyme, accused him of borrowing rhythms from A Visit from St. Nicholas. MacKenzie counters with the weight of Byron’s Destruction of Sennacherib and Scott’s Farewell to MacKenzie. The intent is clear to anyone possessing a third-grade reading level: the poem is a weapon of precision, praising victory and commanding action.
A Scorched Earth History of Inauguration
MacKenzie offers a revisionist timeline of American inaugural poetry, recognizing only three legitimate instances in the nation’s history.
The first was Col. W. Emmons’s Ode for Buchanan in 1857. The second was a text printed on a wagon during Lincoln’s 1865 procession. The third is the Pibroch.
Everything else is dismissed as “mush.” Robert Frost’s The Gift Outright is characterized as a tedious string of rambling couplets, its failure barely masked by Nixon’s top hat. Maya Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning fares worse in his estimation-a “heap of chopped-up prose noodles” garnished with tin-can metaphors. Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco are viewed not as poets, but as beneficiaries of bureaucratic profiling, producing work that proves the illiterate nature of the academic elite.
For MacKenzie, a true inaugural poem is a spontaneous eruption of the popular mood, not a dry exercise by a civil servant.
Credentials of the Spirit
The question of credentials often arises, usually implying a demand for academic certificates. MacKenzie holds these in contempt. A B.A. or M.A.-though he holds them from St. John’s and New Mexico-does not make a poet.
The true poet is vocational, raised by the Divine to amplify the Word. His validation comes not from a university department but from the authority of tradition. He cites his time with the Club des Poètes in Paris, working with Jean-Pierre Rosnay and the tradition of la poésie dite-poetry recited from memory. He recalls the validation of the Times Literary Supplement regarding his victory in the Scottish International Poetry Competition, a contest where he recited Whitman in the study of Norman MacCaig.
His influences are equally severe and exalted: St. Caedmon for humility, William Dunbar for Catholic lyricism, and Ronsard for perfection. The sonnet, he argues, cannot be mastered in English unless one has first tasted it in Italian, the language of its inventor, Giacomo da Lentini.
The future of poetry, MacKenzie predicts, lies in the collapse of the state-sponsored activist. It belongs to the poet of vocation, the restoration of the public institution of verse that elevates the soul to God and the mind to Truth.
Interview with Unofficial Trump Inaugural Poet Joseph Charles MacKenzie
