“All things fall and are built again”: Far Right Grievance Poetry
Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation! Some of the material I post in this column will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. This story in particular is part of that larger project examining the American far right’s interactions with texts—some self-authored and some misappropriated from mainstream culture—to build a new national narrative.
Talking about the Far Right Talking: Tales from Two Conferences
Last weekend in Jacksonville, Florida, I gave a presentation at the South Atlantic MLA conference as part of a discussion I organized on the American far right. The session was entitled “National Narratives of the Far Right: The New American Mythopoeia”—initial response to the call for papers was good, and we ended up running two sessions with about an hour of Q&A. The level of interest was really encouraging, and I think everyone left with new perspectives on the issues as well as the possibilities for this interdisciplinary field.
I opened with the following comment about another gathering a few hundred miles up the road:
Today, while we participate in this academic conference, another one is being held in Burns, Tennessee. But it’s not quite the same kind: its participants are encouraged to register under an alias, and the organization can no longer accept credit card payments. I’m talking about the American Renaissance conference, where some of the most well-known propagandists of white supremacy are currently speaking and making plans. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes these events, running since 1994, as “suit-and-tie affairs that attract a broad spectrum of participants from the racist right, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, Holocaust deniers and eugenicists.”
In the version of my paper shared here, I’ve added a few brief connections from a story published Monday on American Renaissance celebrating the 30th anniversary of this filthy glamhoth, a word created by Tolkien to designate the barbaric shouting and fierce hatred of a gathering of orcs. This year’s favorites are pictured above, including disgraced Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who now openly identifies as a “race realist,” or an ideological inheritor of the race science and eugenics that were refined in the States and exported to Nazi Germany.
Though the AmRen faction is distinguished from some other white supremacist groups by its strained pretension to academic credibility (a trait I explore further in an examination of their “book reviews”), their ideology and their work are trash.
“All things fall and are built again”: Grievance Poetry in the Construction of a Far-Right Narrative World
White supremacy, white nationalism, and far-right extremism are sustained not only through group affiliation and political propaganda, but through a broad collection of texts and a broad coalition of producers that create an erroneous yet fundamentally consistent worldview. This is part of a larger project examining the American far right’s interactions with texts—some self-authored and some misappropriated from mainstream culture—to build a national narrative.
Texts of all genres are employed in their mythopoetic construction, but overtly literary materials contribute two strategic elements: (1) a maligned American movement acquires authority through attachment to the conventionally “high culture” of poetry, while (2) creating poetry allows white supremacists to take the kind of civilization-rebuilding action suggested in Irish poet W. B. Yeats’ famous meditation on the regenerative power of art.
As Europe leaned into the second World War, Yeats critiqued the tendency to abandon art in dangerous times, as if it has no serious part to play. In “Lapis Lazuli,” he observed that while “old civilizations” are always ruined or lost, the cycles of history promise something new:
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
The gaiety identified here—perhaps this is the spirit of creation—seems both the result of cultural remaking, and its requisite cause.
In the final stanza, Yeats describes three men carrying a stringed instrument to a mountain sanctuary, enacting two of his perennial, entwined themes: the continuous gyroscopic dissolution and rebirth of civilizations, and an artist emerging to bring us back from the dark.
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Here I look at a small sample of poetry recently published by a subculture obsessed with its own perceived extinction: white Americans in a fever dream, fighting for survival on the dissolving outer rings of Yeats’ gyre. Thematically, these poems are mired in cultural and political grievance, while their very existence as art symbolizes resurgence and hope.
Cases include Mark Mazari, a Colorado white nationalist whose poems are published on the heavily trafficked American Renaissance site, and George Ray Houston, recently-deceased poet laureate of the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans. Such things and more exist.
MARK MAZARI, bard of the far right?
Mazari’s forthcoming book is calledThe Negligent Genocide. His grievances include whites experiencing “The Great Replacement” by immigrants; whites not having enough children to prevent the dispersal of their wealth and power; and whites passively accepting progressive policies. The term “negligent” indicts insufficiently “race conscious” whites shirking their part in the imagined battle for survival.
Since March, American Renaissance—self-described as “America's foremost white advocacy publication”—has posted ten Mazari poems. From the collection Poetry for Our Side, “Miscegenation & the Ethnostate” provides an entry point:
Who mix with migrants thus comply
with furtive genocide so sly
it has no need to kill;a separate state would sanctify
our race’s irises like sky,
doors to inventive will.
In a longer version of this discussion for my book, I discuss the poor technical quality and aesthetic merit of these verses—and why that matters to my analysis of far-right culture—but for this post I’ll stick with the themes.
Here, genocide does not spring from racial animosity—quite the opposite. Nonwhites readily “mix” with whites: Mazari uses that old term, “miscegenation.” This “furtive” genocide is so unlike an actual genocide that most people fail to notice, even those supposedly “killed” by it.
Mazari’s solution is the “ethnostate” of the poem’s title, here described as a white homeland where clear blue eyes reveal the race’s superior inventiveness. Similar white supremacist tropes were used last week by Sam Dickson, a speaker who has appeared at every AmRen conference. The organization’s summary of his talk is here:
[Dickson] said that many of our virtues and strengths have been turned against us, especially our predisposition to abstract reasoning, moral universals, and living in the imagination. With these, whites conquered the natural world . . .
But that white dominance is under threat. Mazari’s poem “Don’t Pray for America” argues that a North American ethno-state—a nation with “one blood” and "defined by natives” unironically identified as white—is the only way to avoid “cracks” in the foundation. “America” itself will die if whites succumb to the genocide.
Non-childbearing whites, increasingly confronted as a problem in white nationalist culture, do not escape Mazari’s critical net. In “Call for Self-Exile,” he complains that whites are pressured by “good manners or cultish sophistry” to think they should “die descendant free.” Whites without children should “abandon” the houses “white men built” for their “loyal progeny.” The conversation has shifted from the ignorant old slogan “America, love it or leave it” to a white nationalist sentiment more like “White America, populate it or leave it.”
AmRen founder and editor Jared Taylor’s opening remarks at their conference—delivered last Saturday morning at the same time I was giving my own talk—also employ this imagery of a “house” exclusively for whites. While developing his argument for racial separation, an American tradition he traced through the Pilgrims, the Revolution, and the Confederacy, Taylor advocated for self-segregation in white communities: “We must have a house that is ours and ours alone.”
“From US Citizenship” reveals interconnected attitudes about immigration: (1) though non-whites may gain “this badge of tin,” they will never be more than “fake kin,” and (2) non-white immigrants are not seen as additions to the population, but only the way in which “our kind’s replaced.” A companion piece, “Loving the Other,” defends “our love for kin” against progressives who say white pride is old-fashioned. In Mazari’s white nation, “collapse begins” when “the state” shows hospitality to “darker skins.”
Replacement is also a concern for Martin Sellner, a white identitarian whose dangerous activism in favor of “remigration” of immigrants has him banned from entering several countries. At the conference, Sellner encouraged, “Never make your peace with this vile project of the replacement of our people . . . call it out and destroy it.”
A running thread in Mazari’s poems is the pressure to accept progressive, post civil rights era culture, whether it’s patriotic kinship with immigrants or so-called “mixed-race” marriages. At the AmRen conference, Amy Wax spoke in more detail about her belief that Americans have been forced to pretend to believe in equality of the races. Instead, she said, "“We should all be facing reality and be willing to sacrifice for the truth.” The staff writer describing their conference wrote,
America needs revolutionary change, which must include at least the following: widespread recognition of the colossal societal implications of race difference, repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and official government sanction of the right of whites to go their own way.
After the collection Poetry for Our Side, Mazari posted five poems that take the general form of a Shakespearean sonnet. Though Mazari’s sonnets fail aesthetically and technically, it is easy to map a network of themes from Shakespeare’s famous “procreation” series onto his much lesser achievements. Such themes includes the obligation to produce an heir and the selfish foolishness of remaining childless.
Shakespeare virtually defines English artistic heritage. The way Mazari’s poems echo these texts and mimic their form—for his very different purpose—aligns with the project of appropriating and producing supposedly “white” art.
Shakespeare’s opening lines identify the problem taken up in his first 20 sonnets:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose may never die,
But as the riper should by time decrease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
Shakespeare blames his subject, a reckless and beautiful young earl who refused to marry, for being self-absorbed, and perhaps too content in self-pleasuring, to “pity the world” and give the world its “due” in an heir. A man who will not have children is “Thyself thy foe.” A man who won’t pass on his inheritance is “Making a famine where abundance lies.”
Through Mazari’s prism, the “fairest creatures” are white United States citizens who fail to “increase” the white population. A large ethno-nationalist faction considers whites who are not “white advocates” to be as great a “foe” as immigrants of color. The patriarchal far right favors a policy of “natalism” in which white birthrates must be increased and women’s primary role is giving birth.
Mazari’s “The Natalist” explores this gripe:
Childlessness has spread, a modern plague:
women ignore their body when it begs.Impoverished, foreign couples stay fecund
in our own irreplaceable homelands.We claim instead that parenthood is bland.
But genes we take for granted as ourselves
are lent by nature and not ours to shelve
Shakespeare’s Sonnet #8 argues that families made of “sire and child and happy mother” are “pleasing” while the single life is, literally, empty. He warns the renegade earl, “thou single wilt prove none” (14). Mazari makes a similar argument about people who end up with “none” because they choose the single life over raising children or caring for older generations. I didn’t find any cats in the poems by either man, but we’ve heard from some of our far-right politicians about the moral and civic dangers of childless people.
In “Housing Crises,” Mazari alerts us to the auto-genocide caused by a related failure. Since whites apparently think “building homes where futures can be raised” is “banal,” the nation no longer has “space for children who’d rejuvenate our race.” Instead, insufficiently race-conscious whites support social justice causes and mistake their own “displacement” for “diversity.” “Their countries’ [sic?] true collective heirs” are neglected to provide housing for a “global pool” of migrants.
In “The Secularist,” Mazari complains again about “other races” who “keep their homelands pure” while sharing “our state.” Diversity, he explains, “is genocide sans war.”
Shakespeare’s extended argument cajoles the earl to pass on his fabulous personal traits. For Mazari, this is about mass procreation to forestall “the end of white mankind.” While individuals die off, “races are immortal” if their “genes” are “well-kept.” Ethno-nationalism’s sexism is seen again in “Romantic and Pragmatist”: “genes” make white women “so refined” while white men inherit “inspiration” for their famous “problem solving” abilities. If race-mixing reaches a tipping point, the ending couplet earnestly asks, “How will the world cope?”; “How will it fare?”
Mazari’s most recent contribution to American Renaissance is “The Sinophile.” Blaming American media for trying to “reform” society rather than “reflect our norms,” Mazari complains that “Extinction’s beamed into white families’ dens” when “mixed race families” are shown. The relative absence of multi-ethnic representation in Chinese media will have permanent consequences in the zero-sum East-West existential drama that never seems to leave the minds of America ethno-nationalists: in 100 years, we learn, “the Chinese will exist and we will not.” One of Mazari’s least poetic turns is the description of white America’s final defeat as a “demographic Waterloo.”
Mazari’s poems are so bad in form that they are difficult to read as poems, and they reach us more as loosely imagined lists of grievances combined with his lame attempts at sarcasm. The speakers at the AmRen conference brought out all the same ideas in more elaborate form. But really, the short poems get the point across just as well, and that’s got to be part of their appeal.
POET LAUREATE of the LOST CAUSE
In keeping with Mazari’s place-based grievances, I’ll end with some poems I discovered last year while checking out the “Jefferson Davis Historic Site” in Irwinville, Georgia. The historical markers in front of an old white house explain that the President of the Confederacy was captured there en route to unite several fleeing armies.
The 1957 signs sympathetically describe Davis as “the revered leader of the Lost Cause,” whose “hopes for a new nation, in which each state would exercise without interference its cherished ‘Constitutional rights,’ [were] forever dead.”
Inside the house museum (which I’ve written about in more detail here), I found two books of poetry by George Ray Houston. Apparently Houston, who died a few months after I bought his books, was the poet laureate of two Georgia chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The poems range through some personal topics, but the majority lionize Confederates, reflect bitterly on the nation today, or both.
“Storm in Dixie” contrasts shameful modern whites with their Confederate ancestors. While “our gray clad heroes” gave their lives, “Today’s leaders bow in shame, / Politically correct cowards for public gain.” The “Rights,” “liberty,” and “freedom” of “patriots” are in peril. Houston forecasts a common fixation among neo-Confederates and GOP insurrectionists: a second civil war.
Below the Mason-Dixon, east and west,
The army shall assemble in battle attire,
With gray clad heroes to inspire,
An army of patriots we shall require […]Upon liberty’s foundation we stoutly stand
Against a tool of socialist rule
And defend our God across our land,
Defender of our symbols and monuments high,
We must fight for freedom or gallantly die.
The enemy is not the Union, but the dreaded socialism that will take their monuments, their God, their freedom. Though Neo-confederates only control spaces like this dusty museum, Houston contributes an ethno-state of the imagination, populated by the breath of poetry speaking its monumental tragic heroes into being.
“unpromising audiences”
The verses I’ve shared here are as rotten in style as they are in motive. None come from the “accomplished fingers” Yeats told us would rebuild whenever “old civilizations” are “put to the sword.” But the far right’s amateur poetry still enacts the same hope.
In Anglo-Saxon literature, the figure of the oral poet—possibly more of a literary device than a reality by that time—not only kept society’s memory but also gave it meaning: the artist was the scop, or shaper of the narrative. Put another way by Percy Shelley, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Unfortunately, such noble understandings of art—here, drawn from the British Isles tradition with which the American far-right forcefully identifies—also enable a cynical deployment of poetry, of all the delicate things we humans make, to shore up brutal visions of a white supremacist state such as we have been hearing from Trump’s proposed chief of policy, the uniformly vile Stephen Miller.
This is all consistent with the way George Orwell characterized “jingo” verse like Rudyard Kipling’s famous imperialist poem of 1899, “The White Man’s Burden.” In 1941, Orwell called this “good bad poetry” and wryly observed how such garbage can always “get across to the most unpromising audiences” when “the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand.”
Here we are, again.
This is such an important project, Laura. I look forward to reading the book. I hope, however, to avoid reading more of the just plain bad bad racist poetry.
I knew how insidious this cabal (and others like it) was but was blissfully unaware of the insipid poetry. Bad writing ability aside, the educated racists are the most dangerous, offering bigoted "intellectuals" an avenue that feels less "white trash" (for lack of a better term) than joining a "Trump train" or adorning a boat with tacky flags. I'm on hyper-alert but feeling rather discouraged at the lack of concern for where we're openly headed again in this country. It's never not been here, it's just worming its way into so many corners, instead of shrinking back into the black hole from whence it came. I may have to compose some woke haikus in defiance.