This essay is an excerpt from my debut poetry book that contains essays and poems.
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Purchase a copy directly (ebook and soft cover)
This essay was first published in Man’s World Issue IV
Someone, upon learning of my poetry journal, once asked me "What makes a good poem, on the Right? Is it content, style, spirit, or some combination of those?"
This is a very good question and gave me serious pause for thought. It also made me pause and reflect on the forgotten masculine nature of poetry. An ultimate goal for us all is to work towards a time and place where such classifications from an ideological perspective of ‘left’ or ‘right’ would be unnecessary. That the art and culture of the time would simply be beautiful and not require political interpretation. That the masculine exists without shame, alongside a genuine femininity.
Alas, we do not live in that age yet. Indeed my very inspiration for starting the journal was to push back against the leftist hyper feminine control of culture that permeates life today. The left themselves have been largely responsible for the politicization of life, and art is no different. Consider the 'art' of Tracey Emin. Her defining piece of ‘art’ is a bed she lived in for 7 days (My Bed). This performative degradation of beauty was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
Turner may have been somewhat of a 'radical’ for his time but to look upon his artwork today is to feel something profound. The power of the storm or the melancholy of the Man-o-war as it is towed towards destruction. To cast your gaze upon Tracey Emin's work does not invite anything. Most people will feel nothing, a few perhaps feel true revulsion. Yet the cultural 'elite' of our time are telling people this is art, and art worthy of acclaim at that.
Poetry is sort of lost in the same way. For us to answer what makes a good right orientated poem we must understand the lefts 'poetry'. There is an awful lot of explicitly political and victimhood poetry that has been produced in recent years.
The Wall Street Journal recently profiled the impact of one of these more horrible 'poets' and the influence she has had (http://archive.is/GRwXW). Her name is Audre Lorde. Lorde is a black lesbian. Her poems are transparent, they reveal her full of resentment, of hatred, of myopia.
All her poems I perused were intensely personal narratives of her life. Her raw emotions transcribed, anger at an imagined injustice, or affirmation of what she is, and is not. As the Wall Street Journal notes part of her very political promotion was to have people turn inwards and become driven and ruled by their feelings. To quote the article:
In another essay, she asserts, “Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.” She defines the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings.” If student activists seem irrational, they’re actually deliberately antirational, rejecting reason as “white” and “male.”
And if they seem self-absorbed, that is consistent with Lorde’s encouragement to turn inward. “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within,” she wrote. Lorde also claimed that in an oppressive society, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Ergo, when students enjoy crayons and cookies in their designated safe spaces, it is a revolutionary act.
So we see this Lourde as embodying much of what is wrong with poetry (that has been made leftist). It is selfish. It is obsessed with the political, it is about resentment. Her life as a black lesbian is all she wishes to write about. Of course there are other types of reprehensible poetry and art, disgust inducing but we need not dwell upon them, like Emin’s ‘art’ they leave people hopeless and empty.
Masculine poetry stands in complete opposition to this. It focuses upon Truth, Beauty, and Justice. It is there to inspire profound emotions and tell stories that transcend space and time. Perhaps one of the greatest masculine poems would be that of Beowulf. A mythic poem that tells of a hero overcoming great beasts. It is a narrative tale of something greater than the self, a founding myth of the Anglo-Saxons. Whilst we all know of Beowulf the tradition of masculine poetry did not die with the fading of epic mythical poems of our ancestors. Poetry continued.
Rudyard Kipling is another masculine poet who stands in complete opposition to the modern poets. I’m sure most readers know his poem ‘If’ but I would encourage them to look beyond that. His poetry from his days in the British Raj illuminates a forgotten history of that time that we all too often gloss over in favor of plain historical accounts of life. Poetry tells a more poignant story and it is part of the wider masculine flair for story telling as a whole.
Poetry and warfare often combine, for it was once poetry that cemented certain battles or conflicts in the public consciousness. Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade immortalized a cavalry defeat during what is today a largely forgotten war. It is also poetry that reminds us of the terrible losses of the Great War - school children today still learn about poppies blowing in Flanders Fields.
Where do we go from here? The idea of the warrior-poet is a popular one, and an inherently masculine one. Poetry must make a return to the male sphere. In much the same way men caroused and sang together so to did they speak of great deeds in the mythic poetic form. The spirit of it must be first and foremost. Poetry must not speak merely about the individual writing it but appeal to greater experiences and Truths we know. It should inspire profound emotion, Beauty, and it should not shirk from expressions of Justice. Poetry can be a vehicle for masculine values we espouse and live. It remains a poignant way to transmit ideas, I urge all men to take another look at poetry.
This essay is an excerpt from my debut poetry book that contains essays and poems.
Purchase a copy on Amazon and get it quick!
Purchase a copy directly (ebook and soft cover)
Can't wait to get a copy of this! Outstanding post - this kind of thing matters more than ever these days.
I know we want to do this but we have to be careful. There are so many dangers. The worst outcome is making something ridiculous, something contrived and dishonest, that will serve as evidence against the goodness of what we all want. You cannot write good poetry in a lie because it will be unnatural. I don’t know that we can yet write the poetry we wish we had. I think we have to go within like this Emin says. In fact I don’t know that any poet has gone anywhere but within. When we look back and read them it seems like they were looking outside, but I don’t think this is true. I think that they had more in them. They were deep where we are shallow; they were full where we are empty. If we try to lie and pretend we are not we will write lies like Emin does. That is her sin: she suffers like anyone with senses would these days but she lies and lies and lies to herself about why with this thing called “ideology.” That’s why her poetry sounds so horrible: underneath it you can hear the screams of humanity tortured on a rack of lies. The only thing admissible for us is to tell the truth. I can’t tell you what that means for you: if you have enough in you to write something vital and healthy again, then you should write it because it is true. But I know that often I feel despair, grief, and longing. I want to feel more than that, and sometimes I do feel more than that, but haven’t learned how to write poetry about it yet. Right now all I get are images: the sense of things waiting behind a dark veil or a mist. I believe that expressing the truth will draw back the veil one day, as long as I am as honest as I need to be, but I cannot make it happen.
I want nothing but good for you and your task. I want to claim it as my task too. We’re starting to know what we need and what we long for. I believe the only thing that will get us there is truth, which is to see everything both without and within. We need to bring more into us so that we may give it back, and we can’t do that without first admitting what we lack. We can write poetry about the lack too; we can write about anything that’s true, if we learn to see it. Let me believe in you.