Passage Prize and Malice
I posted the Passage Prize (poetry contest) winners on Imperial Melodies.
I have a podcast up with Michael Malice. (I visited Malice, in fact, in Austin. We did… questionable things. Monsieur Malice is not for everyone—but frankly, there is not a lot of him on this podcast.)
I’ve opened comments on the Ukraine post. It’s a civil war, so please be civil!
"I actually graded the upper third or so of the poems—anything I felt was basically competent. If you did not get a grade, I was not sure what you were trying to do and could not evaluate your work as a poem."
The real question is, what was Lomez trying to do with this competition if the actual dissident art is derided as wignat nursery rhyme, which evidently started to fatigue your sorry little stirrups? He markets the competition with the viking motif, militaristic imagery, warning of a fake and gay culture, as well as stench of death all around us. So what is chosen for first place? Why a poem about old age! Forget about the long house, let's find a hospice. The $2000 first prize goes to a 12 line poem (when the guidelines gave us a 10 page limit). It also uses the locution "I've forgot" - bad grammar for poetic reasons of course.
But wait, it gets better. Not only is it devoid of any propaganda, dissent or motivational energy, it's quite literally gibberish someone pulled out their arse, as Mr Yarvin admits: "It’s important to note that this poem, so far as I can tell, means nothing at all. It has no actual logical content." In other words, it won because it's the same nebulous crap that Mr Yarvin is adept at. Rather than him saying "Almost all poems suck. Rhyme makes it much easier to suck" why doesn't Yarvin just admit that it's a skill he doesn't possess, and that the dyslexic "prosody" he is capable of is just lazy bluff work like other post-modern art. You'd never say Frost's and Kipling's rhyming poetry sucked, but of course they were from a different time. It's almost as if the culture has...... degenerated...... wait a second..........
Congrats to 3rd place winner Noble Red, the only worthy finalist in my opinion. Kind of hard to be very dissenting and write anything dangerous in such a short amount of space, let alone do it in an artistic form. But he came close to something the competition implicitly and explicitly called for.
Nothing about the winners' work is pushing any envelopes, just more edgy anon posturing like most of what the dissident right restricts itself to and capitulates to when an actual chance comes along. This book deal evidently is too precious to risk anything of substance. Just astonished the amount of bootlicking that went on during this contest. Ten and a half weeks to arrive at these shoddy and blasé winner picks, while punters heaped high praise on the effort of judges to just read shit... now that is a level of sycophantry to which I am glad I did Not Submit.
The people demand more details of the questionable things to do in Austin, my lord!
Also Malice really should've come back on camera with a coffee and sandwich in hand, hahah... Did you even notice him missing?