The poetry of the New Right

Plus: The future of Tangier Island, the largest subterranean city in the world and more

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If you haven’t read James Pogue’s essay in Vanity Fair on the New Right, as he calls them, do so. It is that rare thing today — a balanced and informative piece in a legacy publication.

One thing that caught my eye was Curtis Yarvin’s interest in art and poetry. Yarvin is a forty-eight-year-old ex-programmer and blogger “who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right,” Pogue writes. He likes to write poetry, usually under the name of Mencius Moldbug, and is the poetry judge for the…

If you haven’t read James Pogue’s essay in Vanity Fair on the New Right, as he calls them, do so. It is that rare thing today — a balanced and informative piece in a legacy publication.

One thing that caught my eye was Curtis Yarvin’s interest in art and poetry. Yarvin is a forty-eight-year-old ex-programmer and blogger “who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right,” Pogue writes. He likes to write poetry, usually under the name of Mencius Moldbug, and is the poetry judge for the Passage Prize, a new arts award with $15,000 in prize money for poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art.

Yarvin published the winners of the poetry contest on his Substack, Imperial Melodies. He may be a careful student of modern and contemporary verse, but the winning poems are odd — two parts movement jargon and one part angst (except for one poem of light verse) written mostly in free verse (with some in loosely rhyming lines) and in one case iambic tetrameter. The second-place poem, for example, reads in part:

The stairs down out into the street become
a silent warzone between
Tremors in my mind of different futures.
None are beautiful and all degrees of slavery.

I am weak and cannot write beauty today, Lord.

The clinician patronizes my anger
as misplaced fear and denial of my subliminal
concession to our emerging biosecurity state.

He is right that I am afraid, Lord.

This is coterie poetry, with its ready-made words and ideas, and it usually doesn’t make for great verse because of this. The exceptions — the personal poems of John Donne, which he sent around to friends, and Frank O’Hara’s New York poems — prove the rule. There is something almost simulated in these poems rather than something living, which may or may not be something they share with the New Right itself.

In other news

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley wrote on Twitter that he would consider himself as an “an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years.” B.D. McClay responds:

If you want to be Kant or Wittgenstein, no amount of willing can get you there. You need something else. What makes the wish not to be “just another Ivy League professor” a tragicomical statement is that institutions like the Ivies are not meant to make or house Kants or Wittgensteins, let alone Platos, anymore than the Iowa Writers’ Workshop aims to make Tolstoys. They are meant to make survivors — of the careerist type.

Gary Saul Morson reviews David Satter’s collection of essays, Never Speak to Strangers: And Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union:

Most Western journalists and academics have offered a misleading picture of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia because they have failed to probe beneath the surface. Almost all Soviet-era journalistic reports, Satter observes, either paraphrased official positions or conveyed information provided by “independent” sources who were, in fact, KGB plants. Academics refrained from challenging official accounts because they feared losing their visas and finding themselves unable to complete the research on which their careers depended. Satter was different, and he was, in fact, expelled from the Soviet Union in 1982. Allowed back to the new Russia in 1990, he became in 2013 the first Western journalist to be (once again) expelled from it.

What does the future hold for Tangier Island on the Chesapeake Bay?

James Eskridge cuts a defiant figure as he rides around Tangier Island on his motorbike. The weathered, garrulous water man known to all as “Ooker” is the mayor, spokesman and public face of one of America’s most endangered communities. Buffeted by rising sea levels and relentless erosion, Tangier is not so slowly sinking into the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay, threatening its ancient community of crab-hunting, God-fearing, Cornish-sounding fishermen with extinction. The Chesapeake, site of the first British settlements in America, has some of the highest relative sea rise on the planet. If Tangier disappears beneath its waves, America will lose a living link to its pre-revolutionary past.

Remembering the battlefield priest:

It was a fine spring day for a funeral. From every corner of Edinburgh they had come, filling the little church to capacity. By 2:30 in the afternoon, there was officially no more room. Half an hour later, the church hall was opened up to admit a fraction of the massive crowd gathered outside. Loud-speakers carried the service throughout the building as the people listened in reverent silence, hanging on each word. When it was done, the Rector’s body was carried down the Calvary Staircase, which led up to the Warriors’ Chapel he had commissioned in memory of the district’s honored Great War dead. The project was near to his heart. As a battlefield chaplain, he had watched many of them die himself. The cortege emerged into the light of Jeffrey Street. There they were met by the mourning throng, stretching so far and wide that the city fathers had to close the streets. They were men, women and children. They were old and young. They were poor, many of them. Perhaps most of them. Such was the living legacy of Canon Albert Ernest Laurie, D. D., M. C., Rector of Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It is eighty-five years to the day since he died, literally, with his boots on.

Simon Heffer reviews Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence A History of the British Empire:

It is just as well that Professor Caroline Elkins, at the start of this hefty book, uses the indefinite article when she writes that she is presenting her readers with “a history” of the British Empire. Such a phrase might drop a hint to someone browsing in a bookshop that whatever he or she is about to receive it will not be either thorough or objective: it cannot aspire to be “the history.” And indeed it is not. Every crime and outrage committed by the British, or their agents, around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their nation had an empire, appears to have been catalogued in these pages, though Elkins is inexplicably light on some of the atrocities committed by early white settlers in Australia against Aborigines. Any good the empire might have achieved — and even a beleaguered Kenyan dissident is quoted later on in the book as admitting that the British did do good things in that country — has almost no place in these pages.

“An archaeological dig in Turkey has uncovered what researchers believe is the largest subterranean city in the world.” Tessa Solomon reports.