Megan Baldrige

UNpresidented Megan Baldrige

The UnPresidented Presidential Campaign (from the preface) I had a dream in which I was examining candidate Trump's report card; I awoke anxiously clutching my pillow case but couldn't remember the contents of what I had seen. So I forced myself to imagine what Donald J Trump's pre-school teacher would have noticed about an outlandish student. Thus began a series of poems about Trump, the candidate, and eventually about Trump, the president. As I tried to understand Trump's unusual appeal, I felt a strong missionary urge- a poetic yearning- to approximate in poetry a small aspect of his presidential unprecedentedness. During a year in which I wrote more than 30 poems about Trump, I never imagined amassing so many poems about a man so inappropriately behaved. In fact, I continually tried to stop writing about Trump. But then he would do something so unpresidential and so ridiculous, and I would once again be pulled to put pen to paper. I hope that completing this book of poems about our unprecedented President, will allow me to move along. I am interested in the distinction of being a poet who learned how to write biting poems about unprecedented behavior and then was wise enough to graduate and learn something useful, like how to make purple pasta out of beets. Unpresidentally yours, Megan Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 2017