{"id":132145,"date":"2012-12-15T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-15T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/uncategorized\/calvin-trillin-2\/"},"modified":"2012-12-15T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-15T16:00:00","slug":"calvin-trillin-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/arts\/calvin-trillin-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Calvin Trillin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When Calvin Trillin was forced by health reason to cancel his Seattle reading a year ago, the race to the White House was still gathering steam. The delay has its benefits, as he&#8217;s now completed <i>Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse<\/i> (Random House, $16). His poems, mostly rhymed couplets, are chronological. After a 2008 prelude (\u201cIn stories from the capital we read\/That now the GOP was close to dead\u201d), we march through the long, eventful Republican primaries (\u201cNo longer was it fair to introduce\/Michele [Bachmann] as &#8216;Sarah Palin minus moose&#8217;\u201d) all the way to the debates and Election Day, which the final poem celebrates. There are prose interludes, too, as when Callista Gingrich hilariously tries to convince Newt she&#8217;s <i>not<\/i> dying of dengue fever\u2014even as her husband is looking for a younger, non-dying wife number four. As a veteran writer in <i>The New Yorker<\/i> and beyond, Trillin has an eye for colorful scoundrels and buffoons; Romney an Obama are actually the book&#8217;s palest figures (one has no poetry to him, the other too much). Instead, it&#8217;s Bachmann, Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and company who most amuse the author. (In another prose pause, Santorum tells his kids of the Wii console, \u201cIt is Satan&#8217;s tool and is thus unclean to the touch.\u201d) The Tea Party just makes Trillin irate, and Bill Clinton makes him nostalgic (see: colorful scoundrels, above). After Clinton&#8217;s rousing convention oratory, writes Trillin of Obama&#8217;s follow-up: \u201cUpstaged? Well, yes, but by a speech with flair\/And not by Eastwood and an empty chair.\u201d BRIAN MILLER<\/p>\n<p>Mon., Dec. 10, 7:30 p.m., 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Calvin Trillin was forced by health reason to cancel his Seattle reading a year ago, the race to the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1280,"featured_media":132146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-132145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1280"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132145"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seattleweekly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=132145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}