Kill the President

By Pip Wilson  

Reviewed

 

'Kill the President'

Review by Douglas Houston

Douglas Houston, PhD, Welsh-born poet, editor and reviewer, is the author of several collections of poetry: With the Offal Eaters (1986); The Hunters in the Snow (1995); and The Welsh Book of the Dead (2000). Widely published, he has been a contributor to many reference works, including Blackwell's Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, and the Oxford Good Fiction Guide (co-editor). He is a co-founder of the VERBALS series of poetry events in the United Kingdom.

Pip Wilson’s ongoing long poem ‘Kill the President’ has strong lines out to both literary tradition and contemporary political realities in its tale to date of presidential dementia. Like Byron, Wilson dons the tight suit of an eccentrically complex regular verse form, then amazes with the acrobatics he performs in it.

The narrative is headlong, wildly entertaining, and Byronically shot-through with quirky authorial asides as it presses towards whatever end, if any, its epic development is to reach. Wherever it’s going, it’s going places . . . the furthest point in what he’s posted to date finds the President of the USA in deep with his main man and webmaster, the 12-year-old Timmy Mundine. Their website is clocking around a billion hits a day and the action is definitely set to go global in a big way. The poem is the only way of finding out how this comes about. The facts that the President has taken to wearing Native American headgear and has developed an inadequately articulated obsession with bacterial organisms as the true inheritors of the Earth are major motifs in the super-charged narrative mechanism. 

A stanza from Timmy’s first meeting with President Irving Lumwedder will serve to illustrate the interpenetrations of modern history and fiction that ‘Kill the President’ achieves as it moves forward with conversational speed and mobility:

"So, got the tape running?" Timmy's forthcoming: 
"No recorder, sir. Just can't afford it." 
"OK, Timmy, use mine. Yeah, this one works fine. 
Some predecessor of mine, before he resigned, 
whenever he talked, he'd record it ..."

As the poem progresses, it maintains an energetic dynamic between the televisual speed of its development, its restless movement between scenes, images, and characters, and its grounding in Wilson’s updated but rigorous practices as a poetic craftsman. He never forsakes formal regularity but demonstrates extraordinary degrees of technical elasticity in maintaining the sound-byte pace with which it bounds along and with which it projects the media-circus context in which the action is set. 

It is a short step from where we are in the fortunes of the American Empire to a Lumwedder scenario. In the poem, as in fact, the hierarchy of White House staffing has no alternative structure. When the Prez appears to go wacko, yet retains his air of casual control and relaxed good-old-boy charm, who shall intervene? Timmy is won over by his avuncular ease towards him and the vast presidential bandwidth he can make available. Young Timmy is the future, the computer-savvy coming generation, pursuing the excitement of technological potential at the expense of content and riding high on presidentially sanctioned time off school to keep the hit count rising. 

Pip Wilson has demonstrated his admirable capabilities as a poet already in the more conventional lyric and reflective verse he’s published online and in print. This one, though, is big: the expansive depths of its background significances bear up the fast-moving entertainment of wild and witty surfaces. The twenty-first century has not, to my knowledge, produced any long poems of any note, but I’m slipping a tip to literary history to keep an eye on this one.