Joseph Massey says he tries to avoid politics in his poetry. But politics has found him, whether he likes it or not.
Massey, 46, has just released his fourth self-published poetry collection, America Is the Poem, and it is blowing up on Amazon: Earlier this month, it was in the top 50, peaking at No. 14—out of 32.8 million titles available. (Books of poetry usually underperform. As of right now, there are only two in the top 100, both by Dr. Seuss.)
And he has some high-profile fans.
“You get it, and unlike most of us, you can express it,” Megyn Kelly said recently while interviewing Massey. She meant the poet’s ability to conjure up the meaning of America—its promise, its majesty, its failures and disappointments.
Massey’s poetry is poetry, so it necessarily hovers far above the political, the daily muck—it’s about timeless things, questions, the natural world in collision with the man-made world, the impossibility of encountering the same place twice. One can easily imagine him reading his great 2015 poem “Illocality”—Gray oscillates gray / And the mountain / A line lodged within it / Gone slack at the end—three or four beers in, in a dive bar in the East Village 60 years ago.
But really, Joseph Massey is very much of this moment. His story is not dissimilar to Vice President J.D. Vance’s, as told in Hillbilly Elegy: the broken working-class family; the chaos; the abuse; the long, tortuous road out of that brokenness toward something better.
On top of that, Massey, at the height of #MeToo, was canceled.