Squeezing a message into a 140 character tweet sometimes results in what might be referred to as poetic compression, but rarely does the product qualify as poetry. More commonly, the compressed phrase is awkward, even confused. However, sometimes one finds a gem. Take as an example the last sentence in a recent tweet by Donald J. Trump.
“The Dems scream death” is a pithy, well-turned phrase, combining both the act of screaming the word “death” and the scream which can accompany death. Those words are followed immediately by the phrase “as OCare dies,” repeating the death image while simultaneously referencing the Republican assertion that Obamacare is in a death spiral. The word “OCare” has an antique, almost Elizabethan quality which adds to the poetic resonance of the passage. A rich, complex interplay of words and images is contained in those seven deceptively simple words.
Did Trump intend the sentence to have a poetic ring, or was his phrasing borne of the necessity of keeping the message to 140 characters, which happens to be the exact length of the tweet? One might as well ask, is an especially evocative Haiku beautiful because the poet intended it to be so, or is the beauty of the poem an accident caused by the constraints of the seventeen syllable, five-seven-five form? Since I readily grant the author of a splendid haiku credit for the work, who am I to deny our president similar credit for the felicity of his phrasing?
Now, let’s take this analysis a step further and look at the rhythmic form of the eight syllables. The line, it turns out, is written in perfect iambic tetrameter—four iambic feet.
An iamb contains two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed. A well known example of a poem written entirely in iambic tetrameter is Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. Here is the opening couplet of the poem.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
If you overemphasize the stressed syllables, the meter becomes evident.
I THINK that I shall NEver SEE
A POem LOVEly AS a TREE.
Doubters might believe, incorrectly, that any eight syllable line can be read in four natural-sounding iambs, that the reader can put the stress points on any syllables with equal success. I recommend these doubters attempt to read the couplet aloud stressing the first syllable of each poetic foot and unstressing the second. They will find it doesn’t work. The president would likely describe their attempt as FAKE METER, and rightly so. An iamb is an iamb is an iamb.
Here is Trump’s carefully wrought line with the same visual overemphasis.
The DEMS scream DEATH as Ocare DIES.
As a fledgling poet, Trump was most probably wise not to attempt a rhyming couplet. Better to create one perfect line than to degrade the effort by reaching too far. However, even though I am aware of the danger, I will attempt a rhyming couplet in iambic tetrameter.
Our Senate wingnuts wouldn’t dare
Vote to end Obamacare.
An observant reader might have noticed I dropped the unstressed syllable at the beginning of the second line. Though that results in seven syllables rather than eight, an omission of that kind is accepted poetic practice. Shakespeare dropped the occasional syllable in his sonnets (which are written in iambic pentameter) and elsewhere, which is good enough authority for me. That being said, I will be the first to admit my lines are little more than doggerel. Regretfully, I have not reached the level of mastery of our Versifier-In-Chief.
Truth-In-Advertising Full Disclosure: David Safier is not a doctor, medical or philosophical, but he has been known to play one in the past on Blog for Arizona and is now attempting a similar imposture on The Range.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2017.
Colbert did a bit of satire on that tweet last night! 😉
…because there certainly aren’t any serious policy issues about which the American public needs to receive valid facts and analysis. Most citizens have little leisure time available to consume commentary, and what time they do have available, they should be asked to fill with scoffing at Trump’s various high-profile idiocies and analyzing the meter and literary devices in his Tweets.
Still waiting, David, for your “compare and contrast” of higher ed financing in various developed economies and for your explanation of why our efforts to create universal health care in the U.S. did not produce a single payer system. But perhaps competently addressing those policy topics would undermine your goal of promoting Democratic policy compromises that produce better yields for the banks, the insurers, and the pharmaceuticals than they do for the citizens who are asked to vote for “Democratic” politicians.
(If I thought it was worth my time, I would calculate the % of NYTimes and Washington Post news alerts I receive that begin with the word, “Trump.” But it is NOT worth my time. Neither reading the articles, nor calculating the degree to which our media “watchdogs'” time is spent avoiding reporting on wages, entitlements, worker safety protections, regulation of the banking system and other paltry matters that reporters seem to think are of such negligible importance to the citizenry. It’ll be interesting to see what’s left of the country three years down the road after so much of the citizenry’s attention has been wasted on Trump, as though we could afford to waste time available for advocacy in a country this troubled and on a trajectory this disturbing.)
“A man has got to know his limitations.”-Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry
There is some Trump coverage that would be useful: e.g., taking the campaign promises he made that persuaded working class and middle class people to vote for him and investigating — entirely without ridicule, without snark — to what exact extent his policies, appointees, and actions in office are delivering on those promises and to what exact extent Trump’s administration is actually benefiting Trump’s economic class at the expense of labor.
That is the Trump-related reporting that needs to be done. Not Russia conspiracy theories, not “Ivanka took his seat at the G20 summit,” not “Kushner looked stupid in his bullet proof vest,” not “Melania isn’t living at the White House,” not “he was childishly delighted with the military displays in Paris” and certainly not “here’s a metrical analysis of one of his Tweets.” How can the constant mockery and condescension and the inability of distinguished media titans (NYT, WaPo, even WSJ) to report on him using the tone usually reserved for discussions of the U.S. President do anything but confirm in the minds of ordinary people who voted for him that the “mainstream media” doesn’t see or understand the economic issues they believed Trump would address? It seems likely that the approach being used will just confirm their belief that the “mainstream media” should not be trusted because they are on a non-stop, mean-spirited, elitist witch hunt.
The economic threats this generation of Americans face are real. The unreported story which, nevertheless, many people who work for a living understand, is that since Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Democratic Party has not only failed to better the lot of the working and middle classes, and it has failed to defend them from abuse and damage in debacles caused by failures of regulatory oversight like the housing market crash and the pending student loan debt crisis. A significant percentage of working Americans have home mortgages and a growing number have burdensome, even crushing, student loan debt. 2008-2016 made clear the extent to which elected representatives of the people were failing to put reasonable checks on the financial sector, as Obama presided over an unprecedented bailout of the banking system at taxpayer expense and the Justice Department’s failed to prosecute those responsible for — and profiting from — the disaster: you know, people like the banking executives who proposed to pay themselves bonuses with taxpayer-funded bailout funds, within a year of crashing our economy with worldwide repurcussions.
In this context, ridiculing Trump won’t persuade people who voted for him based on his promises to increase their prosperity, opportunity, and security to jump on the bandwagon pulled by the Democratic donkey who looks more and more like a self-involved JACKASS every day. It will probably just intensify their hatred of “the elites.”
Job well done, David Safier et al. Keep up the good work.
There is a man is the White House…someone that we all know…who has the you know what of a Mouse. As often as he tried….as often as he cried…this poor little thing would NOT Grow.