Before approaching the subject of this essay, I want to say first that every member of the 2018 Forward Prize judging panel is a professional I respect. Their job is unenviable, given how much time deliberating on the 100+ entries must take, the visibility of the task and the inevitably large number of disappointed parties. It’s also worth noting that this is possibly the most challenging, exciting, ambitious group of books I’ve ever seen on a UK prize list, and I tweeted at the time how much good news it embodied.
What this essay critiques is our (white, influential, safe members of the community) collective willingness to overlook the exclusionary politics and destructive behaviours of poetry’s leading lights. This year has been an object lesson on how the abusive-but-powerful face few consequences, and those solely from grass roots activism. It would be fitting, then, that a poet pushing nakedly fascist ideology should gain the highest honour in our community. I hope beyond reason he does not.
I don’t say any of what follows lightly, and I should have spoken sooner. I write this late in the day because I selfishly feared for the professional and personal relationships it might jeopardise. The Forward Arts Foundation have supported my work with books, invitations to award ceremonies, and financially through my Patreon campaign. I write this in haste because Martinez de las Rivas is a tendentious and damaging thinker, his presence on the shortlist is diametrically opposed to the Foundation’s principles, and I fear what he might do with the international platform a victory would provide.
In his 1932 Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini narrated his own version of the contexts of Italian fascism, and how his fascism must operate:
‘Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right’, a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State.
The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.
…everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.’
First, a falsehood is established: in the nineteenth century, left-wing or liberal thinking went too far. Fascism is, by its nature, a response to an invented threat; the brutality European fascism aspired toward required a vast fiction to justify itself. These acts are explicitly embodied in the all-powerful State, the ‘spiritual values’ of the Church, and the body of a single, anti-democratic leader. Nothing outside this narrow definition of nationhood has worth; the nation’s acts of genocide, therefore, are not only justifiable but an inevitable conclusion.
Fascism places at the heart of its ideology a lie from which all else follows. No good faith discussion can be had against fascism, as it does not care for truth, only power. The possibility of good faith discussion is what is at stake. The specifically British incarnation of this ideology is founded on the myth of benevolent empire, and the god-given superiority of the white men who operated its vast mechanisms. The recorded facts, that generations of our ancestors willingly committed atrocities to fuel centuries of global dominion, and maintained our control of imperial benefits when empire was supposedly over, are aggressively denied; see the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, or the various European leaders who have told former colonial subjects to simply ‘move on’ from their centuries of suffering.
In an interview with Lucy Mercer for the LA Review of Books, Martinez de las Rivas makes his dedication to instilling his poetry with his politics explicit:
‘In part, it’s a book that attempts to come to terms with the intense fear of disintegration that drove Terror – the fear of nothingness. There are many poems about the dead or dying, so the idea of the body that suffers is important, as well as the body that might be consoled through care, through physical love — ultimately, through divine love. Other poems are concerned with the larger body of the state, and the importance to me of the coherence of that body, so readers might detect positions that are, perhaps, monarchist, Unionist, and Anglican.’ [emphasis mine]
I keenly await critiques from those conservative critics who complain of there being excessive ‘politics’ in the poetry of marginalised authors denouncing Martinez de las Rivas’ explicitly ideological agenda. Here, Martinez de las Rivas muddies the water of Christian compassion by erasing the poor and outcast for whom Christ’s consolation was primarily reserved. Bizarrely, given the anti-imperial, anti-establishment consistencies in Jesus of Nazareth’s thinking, Martinez de las Rivas draws a straight line between the physical body of the holy individual and the symbolic body of a national culture and State. He prompts the reader to ‘detect’ his own submission to crown, Church and State because his creative work is a vehicle for these positions, a means to a political end.
The fiction of a simpler, purer Britain appears repeatedly in Martinez de las Rivas’ framing of the degraded, incoherent, post-modern ‘urban’ and the regal, paradisal ‘rural’. Later in the same interview with Mercer:
‘As you suggest, there is a certain notion of England that is important, too. Hostile to the metropolis, hostile to a particular kind of urbane sophistication, loyal to a kind of Blakean vision of the English countryside as a precursor to, or allegory of, paradise.’
Given that the English countryside is heaven, what does that make the metropolis, and the people who live in each? Martinez de las Rivas continues:
‘Some time after Terror went to press I was toying around with images and motifs. I sketched a much larger circle into a document and infilled it with black, and I was suddenly aware of it as a presence separate from me; or as the objective expression of something intimately mine. […] And I can only conclude, from the text, that it means many things. In one poem it is a symbol of vengeance rising over London’ [emphasis mine]
Black Sun is titled after a figure which stands, most prominently in the poet’s mind, as a symbol of divine retribution against the country’s biggest and most racially diverse city; in the book, a solid black circle appears several times, most forcefully in the end matter, where the word ‘Judgement’ is repeated dozens of times behind it, before turning white on the opposite page. Given the appropriation by many conservatives of Blake’s Jerusalem, along with its myth of an English nation graced by Christ himself, it is no surprise to see him invoked here. Martinez de las Rivas embraces a myth of English purity and simplicity, ignoring the historical facts illuminated by Jay Bernard, for example, that England (and Europe at large) has never been purely white. Black Britons existed long before the modern conception of the term, Blake’s paradise was made possible by outsourcing its horrors to the victims of empire, Britain exported a vision of itself as true home to some of its colonial subjects as a means of cultural control. Martinez de las Rivas’ vision of his homeland is built around a vast fiction that centres white bodies and erases all else. Finally in the interview, he explains his reasons for so intensely imagining an England returned to a state of prelapsarian purity:
‘All of which — as much as I love Spain — has only served to intensify a kind of longing in me for an England that I remember and love intensely, but to which I have no real recourse now. So if that vision is overdone, there are good reasons for it.’
Again, the fiction that such a pure nation ever existed is necessary to justify his thinking. Martinez de las Rivas frames himself has the real victim: of modernity, of urbanity, of diversity, brought low by loving his nation too much. The violence his vision would necessarily entail – cultural cleansing, mass deportation, genocide, the return of the strong body of the imperial State – is erased by his one and only recourse to emotion. Either the cultural complexity of the ‘urban’ or the coherent national body may be preserved, and Martinez de las Rivas is clear which he would prefer. What exists outside his ideal State cannot exist, much less have value.
* * *
This line of thinking is nothing new for Martinez de las Rivas. Here is the first sentence of his essay ‘Conflict and Change in the Poetic Theologies of C.H. Sisson and Jack Clemo’, published in PN Review, issue 217 (May-June 2014):
‘In the last few years, ‘radical’ as an epithet in poetry has come to be shorthand for a very particular kind of writing: politically submissive to Marxist dogma, syntactically committed to what is now termed the ‘interrupted lyric’, historically associated in the UK with the Cambridge School, and metaphysically derived from a range of post-structuralist continental thinkers.’
As with Mussolini’s rendering of ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’, there is no substance to his definitions, no solid referent, though it presents itself very correctly and properly and would absolutely pass in polite conversation. Missing from Martinez de las Rivas’ opening thesis is the following: who uses ‘radical’ in this way, who is writing this kind of poetry, what evidence he has that they are Marxist, what being ‘politically submissive’ to Marxism means in practice, which Marxist ‘dogma’ in particular they are submissive to, what it means to be ‘syntactically committed’ to anything, who has used the term ‘interrupted lyric’ and about whom, how they are associated with the Cambridge School, who exactly the Cambridge School is, how these historical associations manifest, who the range of post-structuralist thinkers are, what the post-structuralist thinkers think regarding poetry, and how the poets’ writing is derived from those thinkers. And yet, for all the worthlessness of this sentence as a critical thought, a) you, and most certainly subscribers to PN Review, probably know exactly who he’s talking about; b) it takes far longer to break down and critique the vast number of fallacies he has committed than to commit them in the first place; c) in trying to understand what he means on a clause by clause basis, I have completely missed its substance and purpose: Martinez de las Rivas wants right wing politics in poetry, needs a strawman to justify it, and so has created one. While I sit here puzzling through his word salad, he and those sympathic to his airy generalities have already won. Here’s the next passage:
‘But postmodern theories of text and analysis have long since become commonplace in the discourse both of the academy and wider culture, and perhaps the truly radical now would be to see a deep political shift from the left to the right, or the substitution of a committed neo-Georgian ruralism for a (de)constructivist urbanism in the halls of innovative poetics. The fact that such unbreakable taboos exist reveals the limited aspirations of the so-called radicalism of the recent avant-garde, if, by that, we mean an art which might genuinely shake itself, and, as a consequence, us.’ [emphasis mine]
And here’s the payoff. Because contemporary poetry is in thrall to Marx, it follows that the only solution is to make it fascist. The wild conclusion is reached so quickly, and so quickly leads to another wild conclusion, that it is difficult to respond rationally (which postmodern theories? both academic and ‘wider’ culture? which specific aspects of wider culture? where are these ‘halls’ if not in the academy? if desiring right-wing politics in art is an unbreakable taboo, how did you just break it? why is ‘shaking’ desirable? Who is shaking and who is being shaken? etc). Note also how neo-Georgian ruralism (the revival of King and country) sits in opposition to the deconstructed ‘urbanism’; this counterpoint of regal solidity and urban degradation is a recurring theme. Again, Martinez de las Rivas does not define what ‘urbanism’ means, or what the ‘unbreakable taboos’ of the leftist avant garde are, because he knows his readers will make the leap. ‘Urbanism’ is a dog whistle, and it means all the unclean, deconstructed folk who live in cities. And we all know who lives in cities. ‘Unbreakable taboos’, meanwhile, is a very obvious nod toward the fictional narrative of left-wing sensitivity, usually made by people who destroy a country because their passports aren’t blue. This ‘nazis are the real punk rock / socialists are the real fascists’ narrative has been parroted by any number of soft focus profiles of ethnonationalists in national newspapers for years across the anglophone world. Again, these obvious double-standards are features, not flaws; the consistent element is that white men control of the terms of any conversation, and may change the rules as we please.
* * *
But Martinez de las Rivas is a poet, and it is only fair to discuss his poetry. Here’s the poem shared on the Forward Arts website, ‘At Lullington Church/To My Daughter’:
‘In my kingdom it is winter forever.
The snow falls & there is no time nor day –
no distinction between things, no compare,
no flaw to taint our rudimentary clay.
The falcon has flown away with history,
the bullfinch sheathed in ice & snow, the bare
branch shall never know its May,
nor husband teach the vanity of despair.
Nothing disturbs its peaceful sleep, no dream
of life, no hope, no falsifying dawn
alleviate the blank space within the frame –
no words to speak, no beauty to adorn.
Until she wakes and finds herself alone,
you are her rock, Lord. Lord, you are stone.
Lully, Lulley, Lully, Lulley.’
Martinez de las Rivas is correct: I detect his monarchism, Unionism and Anglicanism quite distinctly: this is a wish for paradise for the poet’s daughter, divinely provided and protected from history. I have no reason to believe he has lied about all his other beliefs about the necessary purity of the body politic. That final turn, in which the daughter wakes, alone but for the Lord’s presence, can only work if what goes previously is considered a positive, desirable space, or at least a safe one. I cannot read this poem critically without acknowledging the poet’s beliefs: it’s what the poet wants me to do, for one thing. I cannot engage with his theoretical dream of a white nation without seeing it in his practice, its ham-fisted reference to the historical falconry of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, another poem written by a high church Protestant with dreams of pure nationhood ruled by aristocracy, who also gravely feared the unclean, unholy masses ‘slouching toward Bethlehem’.
Here are lines from ‘To a Metropolitan Poet’, also from Black Sun:
‘Christ, I can’t stand these popinjays,
so deep in theory, so ostentatiously tolerant.
[…] This is so fucking point-
less, Tobe. You are not theirs, finally, or even
hís, that sees beauty where no other can.’
Martinez de las Rivas violently rejects the idea of sincere ‘tolerance’, the theories (which theories?) of these insubstantial dandies in opposition to his own, rock-solid, faith in a god that ‘holds the rod & sits in judgement’, who may well be a ‘portion of my / self’. The metropolitans stand outside his ideal nation, and barely exist, much less have value.
Here are lines from ‘England’, which opens the book’s middle section, a positioning Andrew Frayn identifies as ‘suggesting its centrality to [Martinez de las Rivas’] identity’:
‘Hermosa, let me try a final
octave turning south into a wind that stubbornly
flitters through torn pennants of sacking,
purrs in the steel tubes of the gate;
that drives each ponderous & docile cloud
slowly out across the State that is only
an image of the body inviolate,
the nation that extends through all time & space.’
The immaculate body is the nation, the nation is England, England is the eternal nation of heaven. Mussolini: ‘The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist… everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state’. In the poetry of Martinez de las Rivas, Christ’s body is the white nation, a totalising image of purity and political control.
* * *
Poetry is not truth. The world is confusing, human bodies are flawed and compromised instruments, and subject to constant, unpredictable change. The theories we construct around or through poetry are subject to constant revision as we attempt to forge better tools for understanding each other and the world we inhabit, in all its messiness and compromise. Fascism, white nationalism, ethnonationalism, totalitarianism all attempt to erase these complications, to reduce life and its value down to a singularity, a uniformity, that which is most easily controlled and exploited. They are marked by their capacity to appear normal, invisible where possible and virtuous where necessary, innocent in the face of imagined threats from within and without.
Martinez de las Rivas’ exaltation alongside three American poets, one Trinidadian poet and one Trinidadian/British poet is bitterly disappointing, and should not be allowed to pass without comment. He is not fit to stand alongside those whose writing has endured and clarified the very conditions his own writing so eagerly espouses. The Forward Prize is not only an award, though the award is substantial; it is an opportunity to become a power player in the poetry community, to headline festivals, feature in national dailies, boost one’s allies and, in however small a way, shape poetry culture in these islands. There is a one-in-five chance that this power will fall to a poet whose politics are violently retrograde and exclusionary by design, whose idea of paradise lies in the racist fantasies of the most reactionary English nationalism.
As I argued earlier, one reason white nationalism has been so successful is plausible deniability, the safety of nods and winks. There will almost certainly be people who read this essay and see nothing but conspiracy theory and speculation, rather than a series of red flags, the visible residue of a totalising ideology. That is fine. If that is where you are right now, I was never going to convince you. But at least, I tell myself as I write this, I have put it where we can both see it. Thank you for reading.
Postscript: it has come to my attention that Martinez de las Rivas wrote and published a poem called ‘elegy for the young hitler’. That feels relevant.
Further postscript: here is a photograph of Taylor Wilson, a neo-nazi convicted of a terrorist attack on an Amtrak train in America. Wilson is carrying the symbol of the Black Sun. The man on the right of the photo is James Fields, a neo-nazi who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
Dave Poems. 
Thank you for this.