https://avmarraccini.com A.V. Marraccini Sat, 31 May 2025 04:04:17 +0000 https://avmarraccini.com en https://avmarraccini.com/Yarvin-Poem-Close-Reading Sat, 31 May 2025 04:04:17 +0000 A.V. Marraccini https://avmarraccini.com/Yarvin-Poem-Close-Reading Since I have spoken and written about fascist aesthetics a lot recently, and since there is a lot of online debate about exactly what the recent Curtis Yarvin poem in Spectra Magazine betrays as both beliefs and craft failures, here’s a basic line by line reading. This is not a polished essay. This is the kind of first pass I do before an essay and many re-readings. However, I just wanted to show everyone how I as a critic approach this type of work carefully. -- AVM We all died in Covid. This line is not prima facie bad but it is unclear; is the author talking about the death of the soul? Being a Covid denialist? The reader just doesn’t know, and sometimes ambiguity can be a strong way to open a poem, but here it has no emotional resonance. Owl Creek Bridge. ThisAmbrose Bierce future, The characters in “Owl Creek Bridge” – set during the American Civil War, lament that “the Yanks are reaching the bridge”. Interestingly, Bierce himself fought on the side of the Union, but the story itself has a return to pristine nature as the image of heaven. This is a classic fascist motif in some ways; the unspoiled nature of the American landscape as a volkisch trope of possession. In others it’s puzzling because the story is misread in subsequent lines. Also, the line break here appears totally random. Syllabically, the lines don’t match, either in rhythm or in length, and a pause between “this” and “Ambrose” as the reader’s eye travels just breaks the thought and makes an uneven read, both sonically and mentally. Line breaks should have a purpose in poetry. Increasingly surrealAnd certainly virtual,Brings virtual children:Emigrants from an alienStar. Here to learnOur ways and take our place, Ah, the Great Replacement Theory rears its ugly head. This is where Yarvin’s beliefs become a transparent mechanism in the poem. No editor could have missed this. There is no reason for “emigrants” as a word choice rather then “immigrants” here, and like elsewhere in poem, Yarvin appears to be trying to make his language sound antiquated as a way of elevating it, but this doesn’t work. Again, no attention is given to meter, the lines appear broken for typographic reasons only. The repetition of virtual is curious; usually a repetition is a very occasional and deliberate poetic choice. Here it seems random. What work is this really doing for a reader? They come bloodied, blinking,Demanding, with their firstCauled eyes, instantObedience. And we are as dogsWhose master has come home:Souls made not justTo reign but also serve. Oh boy. First of all, a caul is usually the amniotic membrane around the fetal sac—it can be a fashion reference, but it seems to be used here without reference to either meaning, and fails. If this really is a poem about the birth of a child, Yarvin fails to link these thoughts together. These sinister “emigrants” somehow demand both obidence, and participate in the Aristotelian theory Yarvin references that some are born to be rulers, and others, slaves. This was widely used to justify slavery in the antebellum South and during the Civil War. It’s a dogwhistle, very clearly. Again, this verse just feels like prose where someone pushed the enter key. The sound reptition in “bloodied, blinking” isn’t carried forward, lines are of a totally random length in sound, and again, the author uses roughly 19th century syntax (“And we are as dogs”) in an attempt to impress that just reads as labored. This first service nowFirst painful, then menial—Work for a slave or a dog. Once again, the poem is affirming the natural place of slavery in the world, metaphorically and probably actually. A splinter of the cross!The male, of course, feelsFractions of this crucifixion,And consequent transformation— Doctrinally, Yarvin should probably hold off the Christological references until he can get them right. Everyone should feel fractions of the crucifixion, regardless of gender, because it applies to everyone’s mortal sin. That’s the entire point of the act as sacrifice! Mary Magdalene stands next to Mary and St. John at the foot of the Cross. There are often more women in painted Depositions, for instance, than men, and many of Christ’s earliest and most faithful disciples, witnesses to the actual crucifixion, were women. Sexism colors this use of Christ. “The male, of course” is not an of course to any reader familiar with early Christian history. The cross also doesn’t splinter. Christ’s pain is caused by nails. This is made very clear textually and the nails—and the sites of their bloodied impalement of Christ’s body, become significant in art and literature for millennia to come. If Yarvin’s goal here is to somehow imply modernity is mere splinters, the poem does no work to set up this metaphor, either linguistically or referentially. (NB-- I’m not Christian, just a compotent reader of basic theology and the history of church thought.) The em dash appears entirely at random. If you put an em dash in a line, there should be a long pause in thought or a break in theme, but the reader goes straight onward in the same thought without diversion. Perhaps Yarvin should read more Dickinson, but she was a woman an Abolitionist. Small for this third son,Who will never know meAt my own age today—In ‘77. Lol. First this poem tries to imitate the tone of the 19th century. Now it’s trying to be Very Online. Neither works, much less slammed together in a stylistic hash. Pick a lane. How is this the future?A world too strange for words,And my place in it strange,A haunt of hanging dreams—Remembering that I diedLike everyone in ‘20– This calls back to the earliest lines of the poem would be the strongest stanza, had the poet bothered to divide this into stanzas, which would have made it more coherent. Where was an editor here? The repetition of dates would be more successful had it also appeared at the start. Or with Jen in ‘21.The clouded newborn eyesOf our alien overlord, Video game cut scene text is not the literary standard. This line also fails as sound. Yarvin should read his poems aloud until he doesn’t have a tin ear. Bluing to his mother’s glass,Care nothing for the past,Our “beautiful oak door.”That was your dream, they say.Feeble as this being is,His every cell is perfect.Mine are raked with sunAnd smoke and meat, bitDecay and cosmic rays. The effortful use of “bit decay” suggest Yarvin wants to sound like Christian Bok or Jorie Graham who effortlessly weave the digital into their work, but instead, the diction and lack of consistency make this feel like word vomit that snuck into the poem, rather than a choice that is thoughtful. Raked, smoke, and meat, are all hard endings. Decay and cosmic rays break the pattern of sound so that the lines are less effective emotionally as well. They will not always doWhat I want: and this worldProve as fake as I thought.The child of late youthIs later partner in crime;The child of middle ageWill stand at your bedAs mine at their mother’s bed. The meaning of these lines is muddled, and again they just read like prose was hit with an enter key. A good editor would have condensed this to a shorter stanza, or cut it. The family is a nation;All politics is loyalty;All realities are false. Well, this is just straight up propaganda. Maybe you could get away with this if you were Ezra Pound, but honestly even Pound, a fascist sympathizer, was a lot more subtle about it. If you want to do William Carlos Williams brevity it can’t be for sloganeering. Is this a poem or a manifesto? If it wants to keep the metaphorical tenor of the early verses, this fails and breaks the mood. If it wants to be a manifesto, just keep it in the prose it already feels like. “The family is a nation” again refers to right wing political sources, going back to the Aristotelian oikos in the Constitution of Athens, but Aristotle, unlike Yarvin, at least let some limited people vote. His Greek is also more elegant than this, which is literally and figuratively, chopped. It’s like someone took a cleaver to Yarvin’s prose shower thoughts. In November the Pacific stormsFirst sweep brutally in,Hard rain and blue,Testing roofs and roots,Rooting April’s grass—Each California season Until now, the natural world has not been present in the poem in any significant way. This verse should call back to at least one early reference. Again, there is a use of an em dash seemingly at random, and again, if you mark the lines as metrical feet, they make no sense as divisions. This is also a cliché way of describing storms and rain, and a good editor would prompt a poet to supply an alternative here. Unimagined by the last.These waves are all we have.Let faithful mother bringForth faithful child—Though planets rot around us. Planets? This was supposed to be rooted in the earth last stanza, the one so memorably saved by the referenced crucifixion and drenched in the blood of the Civil War. Moving to a galactic scale in the last lines blunts any force the specifity of the location in the last one (California) might have added. This em dash shows no reason not to be a comma. “These waves are all we have” suggests the author is using Christ as a device but ultimately belives none of his own posturing about Christ, and makes the previous stanzas seem insincere. Which is it: the crucifixion meant something and absolved mortal sin, or you have no one, no god, only waves? “Forth faithful” could be promising but as with the previous stanzas, any attention to sound is abandoned. This is a weak and confusing close. There is a long history in fascist aesthetics of privileging the family unit and reproduction. Realistically, this is for making soldiers for a front line. Given that Yarvin hints at a new Civil War, and his sympathies for an antebellum slavery system, one assumes he’s fighting for the Right. A more interesting question this poem could ask is that, given his valorization of hearth and home, would he tear away this child, send this infant, to die for his abstractly articulated beliefs? As it is, the poem has no stakes, but does betray its biases. More importantly, it lacks mastery of sound, structure, grammar, and syntax.