“I thought maybe I could turn the thing that has been weaponized into something beautiful,” says Gregory Woodman of Portland, the 29-year-old founder of the ad agency Weller Creative, who along with his business partner Ian Pratt have published The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump.
The 373 page book compiles hundreds of Trump’s tweets and is arranged in chapters such as “Loathings,” “Free Verse” and “Introspective Musings.”
Combining the measured contentiousness of Thoreau, the terse poignancy of Hemingway, and the incisive social commentary of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison, Donald J. Trump has emerged as one of the leading poets of his generation. Together with contemporaries such as Rupi Kaur and Haruki Murakami, Trump has helped bring about a revolution in twenty-first-century literary expression. Considered one of the most inventive poets in a digital world, Trump masterfully uses technology and the written word to reflect and shape the hearts and minds of his culture.
About 450 copies have been sold, “anecdotal evidence suggests a majority of sales are to conservatives” who see the book as “making fun of the art world and the liberal elite by using Donald Trump as the tool to wield against the art world.”
I trust Volume II is coming soon.
Interview with Woodman about the project at Willamette Week