“All things fall and are built again”: Grievance Poetry and White Nationalist Culture Building

Texts of nearly all genres are employed in the far right’s mythopoetic process—that is, their build-out of a parallel world complete with cultural, historical, and political dimensions. Participants are, arguably, connected more by this textual fabric than by any other means, since it can work to create the kind of shared mental images of community described by Benedict Anderson as quintessential to nationalist feeling.

 
This article is the second installment in a six-part series (read the first installment here). The case study in this article draws from a set of about twenty American poems written by Colorado-based white nationalist Mark Mazari in 2024-2025. Some were published on the author’s Substack, entitled The White Identitarian Sonnets, but even more appeared on the daily audio feature of American Renaissance, one of the longest-standing websites dedicated to “race realism” and “white advocacy” in the United States. The promotion of these poems on American Renaissance suggests a belief that engagement with overtly literary texts—with poetry being “literature” in its most obvious form—contributes some strategic value to, and validation for, the white nationalist project.

The promotion of these poems on American Renaissance suggests a belief that engagement with overtly literary texts contributes some strategic value to, and validation for, the white nationalist project.

I see this working for them in two ways. First, poetic creation allows white nationalists to consciously engage in the kind of civilization-rebuilding behaviors associated with art. Second, it is a way of gaining power: a maligned cultural movement acquires (or feigns) some intellectual authority by attaching itself to the conventionally “high culture” of poetry. Both achievements matter for external perceptions, but they also matter for confidence-building and a sense of elevation and legitimation within right-wing cultural spaces.

Accomplished Fingers: Valuing Art

Before confronting these new white nationalist poems, I want to take a detour and briefly revisit one of English literature’s true and beautiful works, which, as we will see, is relevant to what follows.

As Europe leaned into the Second World War, Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote his famous meditation on the regenerative power of art, “Lapis Lazuli.” Critiquing his countrymen’s tendency to abandon art in dangerous times, as if it has no serious part to play, the 1938 poem observes that while “old civilizations” are bound to be ruined or lost, “put to the sword” with their wisdom forgotten, the cycles of history always promise something new:

The poem mentions the “palette and fiddle-bow,” “poets,” and several characters from Shakespeare, all continuing in their cultural work. Yeats admonishes us not to forget, in times of political and material crisis, that high art is a civilizational building block; the gaiety identified here is the spirit of artistic creation.

The final stanzas describe a carving on the blue stone for which the poem is named, a gift from a friend. Three men carry a stringed instrument to a mountain sanctuary:

The scene witnesses two of the poet’s perennial, entwined themes: the continuous gyroscopic dissolution and rebirth of civilizations, and an artist protecting us from despair in the midst of it. The closing vision of gaiety seals the connection between aesthetically, morally valuable works of art and the survival of human culture.

With that reflection on the civilizational-sustaining function of art in mind, I turn to a selection of recent poetry from a subculture obsessed with its own perceived extinction: white American racists who envision themselves overwhelmed and assaulted by a new, incoming civilization, fighting for survival on the dissolving outer rings of Yeats’ gyre (Figure 1). Thematically, these poems are mired in the same fragile fictions of “white genocide” aired by men like White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, MAGA stalwart Jeremy Carl, and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. But we must bear in mind the other part of their cultural work: the very existence of such texts is an affirmative sign of cultural resilience on the far right.

“The White Identitarian Sonnets”

From the first collection released on American Renaissance, entitled Poetry for Our Side, the six-line poem “Miscegenation & the Ethnostate” provides an entry point:

That this is terrible poetry perhaps needs not be stated, but just to be clear on its meaning: The first stanza depicts the modern face of “miscegenation”—that is, the mixing of races through marriage and sex—feared by white nationalists. When whites “mix” with nonwhites, those migrants accomplish their secret agenda, in this case a genocide apparently achieved through a genocide by mixed race births rather than by white deaths. Part two proposes an “ethnostate” as a solution: a white homeland preserving the clear blue eyes (“irises like sky”) that are a sign of superior inventiveness, a white supremacist trope mentioned in more than one of Mazari’s poems. “Don’t Pray for America” argues that a North American ethnostate—a nation with “one blood” and “defined by natives” who are unironically identified as white—is the only way to avoid “cracks” in the foundation. “America” itself will die if whites succumb to this genocide.

Non-childbearing whites are consistently challenged. In “Call for Self-Exile,” Mazari complains that whites are pressured by “good manners or cultish sophistry” to think they should “die descendant free.” Such whites are exhorted to “abandon” their “first world” lives—represented as houses “white men built” for their own “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.”

A Bard for the Other Side?

William Shakespeare virtually defines English artistic heritage, and his sonnet sequence includes some of the most recognized lines in poetry. Though Mazari’s numerous sonnets immediately fail aesthetically and technically, his aspiration to the form is easy to detect. A network of themes from Shakespeare’s famous “procreation” series can be mapped onto these texts, such as the obligation to produce an heir and the selfish foolishness of remaining childless. Mazari’s echo and mimicry of Shakespeare’s art—for his very different purpose—aligns with the multi-stream project of appropriating and producing art not just by white people, but exclusively for white people.

Mazari’s echo and mimicry of Shakespeare’s art—for his very different purpose—aligns with the multi-stream project of appropriating and producing art not just by white people, but exclusively for white people.

Shakespeare’s opening lines identify the problem addressed in his first 20 sonnets:

The poet blames his subject, a reckless and beautiful young earl who refused to marry, for being self-absorbed, and perhaps too content in (self-) pleasure, to “pity the world” and give the world its “due” in the form of a beautiful heir. A man who will not have children is “Thyself thy foe.” A man who will not pass on his inheritance is “Making a famine where abundance lies.”

But through Mazari’s heavy-handed white nationalist lens, the “fairest creatures” are white American citizens who fail to “increase” the white population. “The Natalist” explores this gripe: 

Several of the poems focus on the combinatory theme of whites contributing to their own erasure, while immigrants receive too much support and protection. In “Housing Crises,” Mazari alerts us to the auto-genocide caused by a related failure: Since whites 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’ true collective heirs” are neglected only to provide housing for a “global pool” of migrants. In a poem called “First Protests” (published later on his Substack as “On Appropriate Disobedience”) he describes “our forlorn rage at seeing migrants fill our homes and streets.” 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 in the Sonnets cajoles one young earl in particular to pass on his fabulous personal traits. But Mazari’s procreation poems encourage white births to forestall “the end of white mankind.” Individuals will die off, but “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. In the advent of race mixing, the ending couplet earnestly asks, “How will the world cope?”; “How will it fare?” The fear of racial extinction features again in “A Real Man Cares About His People,” where Mazari pits the man who “saves kin from evolution’s urn” against the “effete” whose “fear of manliness” somehow draws him to those “distant in blood” and results in “deracination”—it’s a short poem, but as with Jeremy Carl’s attempt to explain how whites are the most oppressed group in the United States during his February nomination hearing, more words wouldn’t make it any clearer.

A Mazari poem that resonates with Carl’s anxieties about losing the “majority common culture” is entitled “The Sinophile” (a person with a fondness for China). 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. This especially artless poem argues that a relative absence of multi-ethnic representation in Chinese media will have permanent consequences in the zero-sum East-West struggle that never leaves the American ethno-nationalist’s imagination. 100 years from now, we learn, “the Chinese will exist and we will not.” Mazari describes the final defeat of white America as a “demographic Waterloo.”

Unpromising Audiences

In Anglo-Saxon culture, the oral poet not only kept society’s record but also gave it meaning: this esteemed artist was the sçop, or shaper, of communal narrative. Put another way by the nineteenth-century English writer Percy Shelley, in his “Defence of Poetry,” “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley also speculated that poetry, by strengthening the imagination, increased our moral capacity. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” he wrote. And what is more, “Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man.” Such understandings of the creative social and political powers of art are drawn, along with Yeats, from the British Isles tradition with which the American far-right identifies.

Nevertheless, the far right’s clumsy, amateurish verse still enacts the same hope—that their participation in art will help to cement their civilizational goals, not least of which is control over a common national narrative. English writer and critic George Orwell used the phrase “good bad poetry” to characterize jingoistic productions like Rudyard Kipling’s racial-imperialist poem of 1899, “The White Man’s Burden.” He wryly observed that, despite their failed aesthetics, such texts can “get across to the most unpromising audiences” when “the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand.” But the brainwashing does not have to happen before bad art can land: the atmospheric winds of extremism blow in all directions. White nationalist production of poetry functions like the rest of their bad faith simulacra of true culture, as empty shells engineered precisely to “work up” the “unpromising audiences” we’ve seen cheering on the violence of ICE, posting Alligator Alcatraz memes, and calling fake tiplines to deport kindergarteners.

The far right’s clumsy, amateurish verse still enacts the same hope—that their participation in art will help to cement their civilizational goals, not least of which is control over a common national narrative.

Critical pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux’s recent article on “MAGA aesthetics” in the United States provides an adjacent conversation to this kind of white nationalist culture-building process. In a sweeping review of some of the current administration’s most egregious examples of public violence, terror, humiliation, and hostile obscenity, Giroux notes that America under Trump “is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display.” All of it contributes to the “sustained cultural indoctrination” achieved by a “far-reaching apparatus of socialization and propaganda” to educate citizens into fascism. My own brief look at white nationalist poetry broadens the same lens to recognize another mechanism among many simultaneous means to the same ends, running as tributaries into the same swelling river of white nationalist narrative and myth.

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Laura Jeffries is Professor of English at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where she teaches British literature, literary responses to imperialism, and writing about contexts of American race and ethnicity. Publications include articles situating Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in its original American magazine provenance along with its afterlife in white supremacist meme culture; the intersections of British religious and political history; and language use among young women posting on YouTube. She writes Narrative Nation on Substack and is developing a book titled “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative.  Contact: laurakjeffries@gmail.com.

Image made using “KELVINATOR APPLIANCES 2,” by 1950sUnlimited licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Cross Lighting 2005,” by Confederate till Death licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; “BELL TELEPHONE 1960s,” by 1950sUnlimited licensed under CC BY 2.0.