The Paris Review just gave this guy a 2018 Whiting Award in poetry. Give it a read

The Paris Review just gave this guy a 2018 Whiting Award in poetry. Give it a read.

theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/21/2018-whiting-awards-tommy-pico-poetry/

Hold me, Veeky Forums.

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Other urls found in this thread:

theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/21/2018-whiting-awards-tommy-pico-poetry/
samzdat.com/2017/02/01/on-social-states/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Wow, looks like a whole lotta Tumblr idpol pop culture bullshit. I bet he thinks he's real hip writing everything like a social media post.

>cohosts the podcast Food 4 Thot
Give this man a Pulitzer.

Onstage I’m a mess
of tremor and sweat
I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the faces
of attention and danger

The fuck are you talking about. This man is speaking straigth from the heart. A true literary genius.

Poetry is dead. Long dead.

I don't get it. Is this really something to worry about? With the success people like him are having in the form of awards and the commercial success of the Rupi Kaurs of this world, are both lit academia and the commercial award gatekeepers getting hijacked by self-indulgence, angsty pubescent political activism and the kind of circle jerking you'd see in the film industry?

Is this really something to worry about?

I don't get your post.

It is, because it tells us that these publishers select based on personal opinion and politics rather than merit. That's how trash like this makes it through.

Well mate, I guess we'll just have to chalk it down to a failure of communication on my part or a handicap in comprehension on yours.
Is it a new precedent though?

>because it tells us that these publishers select based on personal opinion and politics rather than merit
publishers always published what they thought they would be able to sell

>Is it a new precedent though?
Seems to be. I've known people passed over for stuff like this who had objectively better work.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that either, but is there really no good poetry on these subjects? Is it all abbreviated, meter-less, bland pseudo hip-hop garbage?

Like any reputable Literary magazine in the Twitter age, the Paris Review too must adapt. This requires endorsing instapoets, eschewing white authors, demeaning with an ironic tone the foundations of western literature, giving Exit West a positive review, and using more pictures, colors, bullet points and bold fonts to attract braindead viewers and thus advertising revenue.

>Well mate, I guess we'll just have to chalk it down to a failure of communication on my part or a handicap in comprehension on yours.

...okay, dude.

Thanks for this post - it is earnest. I understand the need to adapt. But I guess I am surprised they took it this far.

Are there any literary magazines that wouldn't do this?

Not anymore, I’m afraid.

Then are we the ones that are wrong? Should we accept and embrace PC culture?

What's wrong with Exit West? I haven't really seen discussion over it on here

Right, so what I gather from your diagnoses is that whatever ends up getting acclaim has always been influenced by the few who actually cared about what gets acclaim. In the past that used to be a small group of people who, whether you agreed with them or not, had higher standards and were educated. The pool has gotten bigger now and it includes those who dabble in instaliterature marked by either naive activism, or self-indulgent melodrama, which is why formerly prestigious awards reflect these trends.

So reclaiming lit from that group would involve getting them disinterested in being the gatekeepers of literary prestige. I don't see that happening, since it's been 'democratised' to the point of critical relativism where no opinion is worth more than another. The way I see it, the only solution is for Universities to enforce the type of standards and education that used to weed out these people because they couldn't cope. If academia continues to embrace the non-discriminatory 'all high-schoolers are potential customers' business-model we're fucked forever.

No. As degenerate as we try to seem, we still have a deep-seated respect for literary history. And we hold one another to some sort of standard in terms of whether or not our opinions or interpretations are informed, hence terms like brainlet and pleb and kys faggot. And we try to argue and critique and write with Literature itself always in the back of our mind. Despite all of our irony and bullshit, it’s clear we’d put, under any circumstance, the craft and the canon over personal politics and likes.

With that in mind, there is a 0% chance Rupi Kaur or her instaprogeny have any such respect for the art. PC Culture actively seeks to denigrate literary history. Just google a few modern day syllabae from any institution of your choosing. They are not coming from literature to make their point. They aren’t expanding on anything. They’re dismissing the entirety of literary history as fundamentally flawed, oppressive, and myopic, and seeking to begin anew, from nothing. So to accept this fuckwits poetry, or the death of the Paris Review, as something positive is to dismiss the entire foundation. It’s up to you really, but I believe the great works of our past can have value and wisdom and insight, and I’m gonna do my best to preserve their integrity.

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Holy...can we sticky this?

>hey guys I think our conception of literary history and the canon is colored by relatively recent events and biases that have little to do with literary merit. Perhaps we should reevaluate the concept and try to choose reading lists for reasons other than middlebrow conceptions of history from the past half-century..

Wow such disrespect, much erasure. White genocide will be next! Conflating the poet in the OP with undergrad programs reworking their entry-level curricula is absurd and shows that you're just afraid of finding that what you think you know isn't actually that significant.

>Should we accept and embrace PC culture?
No. PC cultural cultural the antithesis of intelligent, independent thought. Literally the mind killer.

The only way is cultural revolution. We must kill the fags and reds and bring standards back into art.

Atone.

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When the reading lists they choose are inferior to what they were before, however, that's a problem whether you think their intentions are good or not. There is no reason significant works should be overlooked or even slightly downplayed in terms of importance for political reasons, and for entry level courses time that could be spent reading things like Shakespeare but isn't is time wasted

It’s absurd? How do you not see a correlation between the insertion of identity politics in University survery literature courses and the politicizing of all “literary” contemporary fiction?

We are the ones in the shadows; I wouldn't say we are wrong--because what's right?--however, it really begs the question: should we try to adapt? Use our knowledge of the cannon and history--even though today's culture is trying to throw it out, as so rightly puts it--to produce books/poems/stories that take all this understanding into account and move the lackluster culture forward. Clearly, stubbornness and bitterness are not going to benefit us, so it's either embrace--hopefully with some wit, or satirize, or, frankly, be left out--though, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world to be writing to future generations, instead of the present. If you are confident in your work and ability, you can die happy knowing that some day people will understand and praise your writing

This is lit. Go back to pol.

publishers dont give a fuck they are business people and will advocate whatever will sell the most

this isnt something to take personally kid

Kill yourself. There are no good right-wing artists because you’re all worthless lizard brain scum. The only true way to plant the seeds for another scientific and artistic renaissance is to wipe all of you from the face of the earth.

i mean it's not the worst thing on earth, assuming you don't automatically sperg out about the identity/social justice angle. That said the fucking awful text speak affectation is tacky and pointless and reeks of trying too hard to convey a millennial identity. Ofc no one on lit reads poetry anyway, they just wanna get mad about culture war bullshit

this is what worries me. That standing up against PC cretins is being hijacked by the populist right, which isn't really right wing and is also diluting the classical liberal right.

You have articulated the crux of the issue and the final nail in classical liberalism’s coffin.

Day of the rope is getting close, kike.

not him, but stop associating right-wing politics with the populist stream of trumpoid, putinoid, lepennoid retardation. The European classical liberals who have made the greatest contributions to our culture were all what you'd call 'right-wing'. Fucking retarded Americans being politically illiterate as always and poisoning the rest of the Anglosphere with their cretinism.

It just needs some stick figure drawing beside each poem to really set it off

Reminder that poets are failed songwriters.

most right wing philosophers of the 19th century were not classical liberals at all you fucking dipshit

babes, reread my statement and see if it has anything to do with yours.

it is not about significance. it is about tradition and lineage. It is about relations.

Please, provide an example of this. I want to learn more about these books the college kids are reading as part of 100-level literature courses that were written in a vacuum and had no influence on later authors.

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Chemo. Viva la Literatura!

“But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music
video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal
annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl
who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over
the past four months wanted to live 50% more”

Correlation? Stats please? Data seems skewed.

>whaaa my poetry is better than his, he must have won because of PC culture , poetry is dead!

Post your poetry faggots

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if you're gonna post bait, make it tasty

Honestly, seems besides the point.

Fuck off pinko scum

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The far right are the only ones who still care about art and poetry.Every single artistic award from now on will go to poc making shit art. Political correctness and it's garbage culture will never leave until we win. There is no centre, center left solution to this

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>me:
>Mark Strand was the greatest American poet of his generation
>Jennifer Chang is really on to something
>I do not and will not miss John Ashbery at all

This guy, I don't get him. Activist and faux texty words like "cd" for could. Typically young inbent self-obsession pretending to be profound for people who skipped profound in their training, if any. It's a world's tallest midget award. Trial balloon hiding editorial bewilderment before a chainsaw massacre world lit scene right now that resembles, linguistically, the wild west period between Chaucer and Shakespeare when English became a whole other thing. Paris Review basically saying, "we have no idea. How bout this? Is this cool?"

>The far right are the only ones who still care about art and poetry.
Not true. Your populist corruption of right wing politics and its erosion of classical right wing liberalism are what makes you as much an enemy to me as sjws and pc culture.

>this is what the uneducated actually believe

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>theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/21/2018-whiting-awards-tommy-pico-poetry/

In this thread, there seems to be a conscious anxiety about the corruption of the canon / degradation of taste coming to the fore lately (past 24 months) in the literary world. I think this is a very valid anxiety and something I wish were addressed more tacitly in the actual literary world, rather than ghettoized into Veeky Forums and made to appear as some crypto-fascist project. Harold Bloom is right to lament the decentering of aesthetics from judgments of the canon, and it doesn't make one a racist to say as much. However, where this thread goes wrong is to erase the difference between Tommy Pico's work and the likes of Rupi Kapur or whatever tf her name is. Kapur and what she represents is trash. All I've read from Pico is what's quoted in the paris review article. I must say it's very well-wrought work and I was impressed from what I saw. Formally speaking, a few things jump out at me, namely the shortening of language as a product of the demands of capital/normalizing efforts of state power & how he deftly (and with a very dark, angry humor!) comes down on the demands of genre and form generally (mostly re: Nature Poem). Theoretically speaking, I think we could definitely categorize his work as existing "In the wake" that Christina Sharpe writes about in her book of the same name, I think the framework she puts forth in that book would be a very effective lens through which to approach Pico's work here. In terms of his content, he's picking up a contemporary strain of conscious exploration of unconscious trauma and does this very well (see especially: yr dad's bad dad) + importantly touching on the medicalization of this very trend.

Iono that's a start for some exegesis on his work which I noticed was lacking in this thread. I'm not being a devil's advocate, I genuinely appreciated what I read from him and think his work is very appreciable in itself. I think on this board we shouldn't be so quick to denounce new up and coming writers. We should hold them to the same standard we hold everyone else in the canon, and this unfortunately has not seemed to be the case in this thread. I understand that it's jarring to see his abbreviations that *call to mind* the likes of a tumblr aesthetic &c, but a little probing of how those formal qualities are mobilized, I believe, shows them to have much more substance to them than anything one would find on tumblr.

Let's have a little more rigor on this board, guys. Twould be nice for a change.

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>caring about meaningless awards
>caring about the idiotic masses
>caring about society in 2018
not gonna make it

>I didn't get it because I'm not Marxist enough.

It was the center left and center right who allowed the (((far left))) to drag us down to where we are today. You have no solutions, just empty rhetoric that will take us nowhere. Our situation is very serious now and people are waking up to your stupid bullshit

>Twould
I stopped reading right there

>the shortening of language as a product of the demands of capital/normalizing efforts of state power
you wot?

>Science says trauma cd be passed down
this idea was instantly discredited

the 'center left and center right' are indeed empty rhetorical pits. They are not classical liberals, nor are they centrists though. They are mere opportunists and career politicians. This moment in time is an excellent opportunity to revive classical liberalism and European values, rather than galvanise the reactionary momentum into trailer trash populist politics, which is easier to do as most people are and will always be retarded. You are just as scummy as the PC culture you hate, mate.

Good, so you absorbed the meat of the post.

“Formally speaking, a few things jump out at me, namely the shortening of language as a product of the demands of capital/normalizing efforts of state power & how he deftly (and with a very dark, angry humor!) comes down on the demands of genre and form generally (mostly re: Nature Poem).“

My problem with his poems are that there seems to be very little concern for form. I admit that there is something enticing about capturing the language that is unconsciously tied to the text medium and placing it into a poem-space. But this isn’t new — Tao Lin and gang began exploring this about a decade ago. So, on it’s own it is not stand out. To your other point, speaking of trauma and the “legacy” if you will that black and native Americans carry — well I think it’s really hard to read anything that is in dialogue with that as genuine at this point. Being “in the wake” and invoking it is so common place that again, in and of itself there is no particular interest. Okay so let’s try again and figure out why the PR choose Pico for a prize? It just feels so painfully obvious that he invokes and displays all the right ideas — and is probably one of the more decent writers out of stacks of just published work. It doesn’t make his work worthy, it just means he is pointing to the right things at the right time.

The only thing this accomplishes is destroying the credibility of The Paris Review. Not sure why anyone gives a shit about a useless award anyway. It's like being mad that Bruno Mars won a grammy. Does anyone who matters actually care about awards?

You're so out of touch. Classical liberalism is dead and won't be revived, nobody gives a fuck about it. Everybody is on board with the multicultural neoliberal project. Only us "trailer trash" offer a way out.

>far left
there is no far left in america

you suffer from the same echo chamber syndrome as the people you hate. Not everybody is on board with the multicultural project. I don't know where you're from, but there is a long list of classical liberal, right wing public intellectuals speaking sensibly about this matter without intersecting with trailer trash populism. The list stretches from the shores of Liverpool to the ridges of the Carpathian mountains.

The poem is an outlet for personal, biographical, identitarian monologue. It is a stylized diary entry. It speaks to the artificiality of language and poetry in its abbreviations, formatting, and jumps in voice, yet simultaneously attempts to demonstrate a personal a political sincerity (particularly in evoking grievances of the native american identity.) It contradicts itself against its own intentions and beneath its own awareness. This poem does not work. It is bad.

why are americans suddenly bothered with multiculturalism nowadays?
american doesn't look more multicultural now than 60 years ago to me
if anything immigrants assimilated into american society

0/10

Depends on what you mean by "far left", but it's certain that the center of the gyre of the movement for multiculturalism, inclusivity and diversity is in America, as it is pretty much the guarantor of Europe at this point.

Blacks have never really assimilated well, and there's been a constant talk amongst the left of an "emerging democratic majority", so I'm not surprised someone finally took it upon themselves to do something about it. Mix this with mandatory diversity policies and the whole body politic becomes a powderkeg.

>And we hold one another to some sort of standard in terms of whether or not our opinions or interpretations are informed
no, the board does not do this at all
>hence terms like brainlet and pleb and kys faggot
brainlet is meaningless, the size of someone's brain doesn't strongly correlate with intelligence, its the density of connections in the neocortex that matters. pleb is a classist word that has no proper value to someone interested in knowledge, the vast majority of Roman senators and patrician statesman were philistines, unlearned sophists and common fraudsters in court and in business, they didn't have anything to do with culture or wisdom, rome was decadent, awful for the arts and those who champion it have to suck off Virgil, Ovid and Horace because there is nothing else to offer. Kys faggot is anti-social, sociopathic, and also overused, all you're doing is harming the weakest people who will actually listen to it, and then making the feeble spirits who pretend to knowledge think you're wrathful pompous usurpers of culture. There's absolutely nothing noble about the language you evil people use to establish dominance in your monkey cages, your threads.
>we try to argue and critique
excerpts are rarely posted, people type as if they're in a discord chat or conversing with friends after work, I don't think there is any moderate discussion of literary works at all. When it comes time to cite, to critique and reason, people copy the opinions of literary critics, their professors, memes on reddit and this site, and finally resort to bitter contests of wit, which amount to nothing but contrivances being sold as noble truths.
>despite all our irony and bullshit
you type like student body rep or a low level corporate lawyer/pr person, you speak with the same spirit as a media personality at Slate or Vox. The irony is that you have no place speaking for the board, you're wrong on all counts, the vicious incompetence of your mind permeates every aspect of this incorrect interpretation, and the diction is horrid, belongs at some rag not in discussions of culture
>we put thecraft and the canon over personal politics and likes
no the board does not do this at all.
>With that in mind, there is a 0% chance Rupi Kaur or her instaprogeny have any such respect for the art
You don't have any respect for art at all. You're an ape gesticulating like his long dead masters used to do. Its doubtful you could produce a single insight into being or becoming or knowledge or humanity or beauty or truth.
> PC Culture actively seeks to denigrate literary history
So does structuralist right wing capitalist culture user, why are you playing sides here? why be unbalanced? aren't you above the plebiscite?
>So to accept this fuckwits poetry, or the death of the Paris Review, as something positive is to dismiss the entire foundation
the literati have nothing to do with culture, they're parasites, after-effects of culture.

you're a fraud

Mother of god are you ever butthurt. Do you know you're throwing words into the wind?

Your structural understanding of the board pejoratives is fucking laughable. The only connection the term brainlet actually has to the size of the brain is etymological. And to call kys faggot antisocial is redundant at best, irrelevant at worst. It has as much to do with homosexuals as brainlet has to do with brains; it does as much damage to homosexuals as brainlet does do idiots: absolutely none at all.

Say it with me: I D E O L O G U E

Alright, give me your solution, how are you going to change the culture and stop the rabid sjw's? how are you going to stop mass migration and the replacement of the European population?

so the problem is basically WASP no longer being on top of everyone else?
if blacks haven't assimilated is not certainly because of their african culture, which they have lost

this is what I meant by there being nothing behind the user's response at all
>butthurt
yup, typical sado-masochist institutional rape terminology. you people could never create or maintain culture, your bodies are weak, the mind is dying, your soul's have left you. There's not compassion, no love of Self or of wisdom, you're hateful cannibalistic monkeys. Pretending to care by reading means nothing, all your rites of erudition are just straw dogs.

The problem isnt that the WASPs are no longer on top, the problem is everyone acting like they still are, WASPs and nonWASPS alike. Oppression cant much exist without oppressors.

the way I understand this board is, everyone posts but no one is really part of Veeky Forums

Veeky Forums is simply a representation of whatever you want it to be depending on your current psychological state

>how are you going to stop mass migration and the replacement of the European population?
fix libya

Again, youre nothing but a linguistic-positivist. You deconstruct other systems while you sit atop your own. And you have the gall to call others frauds.

>classic liberal, right wing intellectuals
Ooooh, fuck off. Your milquetoast anglo "conservatism" lost every damn culture war that mattered without even a whimper, and now you're running around like headless chickens and trying to be "sensible moderates" i.e sheeple. The conditions for classical liberalism to flourish are dead, the faith in progress, it's gone and it's not coming back. They have the exact same problem that the center-left does - even if power were handed over to them, they'd have no idea of what to do with it.

Actually, I'd argue that Veeky Forums is pretty much one of the few internet places with any kind of collective tradition or culture even left, at least it's aware it has it (thanks to vigorous bullying of newfags). My body and mind are pretty fine at the moment though, thank you.

The problem's unsolvable m8. Those people are narcissists, their whole damn identity revolves around the fact that they're opressed. Even if all of their hated oppressors disappeared tomorrow they'd find new ones as an excuse not to exercise any responsibility, it's a habit.

I agree with you except the big leftist ideology right now has utterly coopted faith in progress. Its central to the conflict between social identities

The whole "making history" because you gave a brown person an award shtick

>your milquetoast anglo "conservatism" lost every damn culture war that mattered
Imagine the contortionism of delusion one has to perform to believe this. Fucking imbecile.

Fuck off. I'm personally uninterested by any pastas that are not hilarious

Press F for fiction

>Implying any crises are necessary for mass migration to occur
?

IMO it was shit

Well, truth to be told, conservatism was never much of a player in the culture wars in the first place. But look at history - the John Birch Society, then the Buckleyites, for example, then followed by the neoconservatives - what you see is exactly an adoption by conservatism of the latest left position. Of course, the conservatives at least won on the economic front, so grats.

>what you see is exactly an adoption by conservatism of the latest left position.
I can see why it may appear that way, but what I see are mere career politicians and opportunist whose only drive is to further their careers. I really do think people are reading too much into it when ascribing political motivations, or making way for the 'latest left position'. This does, however, prove your point. Conservatism, as a manifestation of classical liberalism is dead. But it's also what the West has been founded upon and i think it's a great time to galvanise all these scattered reactionary movements and revive it, before populists destroy us all.

>what I see are mere career politicians and opportunist whose only drive is to further their careers
Hmm-hmm, but this says nothing about why those politicians are adopting those positions to further their careers in the first place, does it?
Anyways, you should read this to clarify your thoughts: samzdat.com/2017/02/01/on-social-states/

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are you promoting your shitty blog?

>But it's also what the West has been founded upon
No, Jesus. The West was founded upon Christianity, liberalism only came after Christianity was shattered in a sea of blood, an attempt to continue the good in Christianity when its institutions became discredited. Where do you think liberalism's praises of individualism, inherent human dignity and rights come from? Read your Locke.

No.

>this says nothing about why those politicians are adopting those positions to further their careers in the first place, does it?
But we haven't talked about that, have we? Unless you are implying that their motives are entirely political, which I think is silly. They're doing it for entirely human reasons - because they have the kind of temperaments that drive them to seek fulfilment in such a manner. Anyways, I've bookmarked your link and I will give it a read later on.

I wasn't speaking with surgical precision there. And yes, I do agree that Christianity is one of the bedrocks of the West, but claiming it is THE thing that the West was founded upon also lack surgical precision. I'll concede that it may have had more of an influence on it than anything else, but I find measurements of such things imprecise, useless and the stuff that masturbatory pub sessions are made out of.

so you admit that I'm correct, thanks user
>Actually
doing it again, you people have no way of thinking for yourselves, stop using other people's speech patterns as hand railing when you can't figure out how to approach a line of logic you fucking dumb animal
>I'd argue
guarantee you wouldn't be able to provide a sound valid argument if I put a gun to the head of your first born
>Veeky Forums is pretty much one of the few internet places with any kind of collective tradition or culture even left
Veeky Forums's tradition is anti-social and its culture is pure evil nihilism. taking solace in the existence of a temple to diabolic proclivity in the asshole of Satan's mycelial sprawl is pathetic
>at least it's aware it has it (thanks to vigorous bullying of newfags)
has what? evil? the ability to meme people into being boy-girls? encouraging suicide, parisitic NEET behavior? making jokes about rape and spreading disgusting sexual habits to young people? bullying scientologists and calling christians moralfags? spreading internet fascism that's just corporate fascism that benefits people who want to euthanize most of you? subsisting off of your own insanity here user, no argument to be found. Not even a whiff of reason
>my body and mind are fine
the mind of this one is almost dead, body couldn't be much better
>thank you
cut off your tongue for me, servile impish nigger

Ahaha, legend mate. You've made my day. God bless.

>existence of a temple to diabolic proclivity in the asshole of Satan's mycelial sprawl
tfw you wish you'd written that

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>The poem is an outlet for personal, biographical, identitarian monologue.
Then what's Joyce? Yeats? Woolf? Shakespeare?

> It is a stylized diary entry. It speaks to the artificiality of language and poetry in its abbreviations, formatting, and jumps in voice, yet simultaneously attempts to demonstrate a personal a political sincerity (particularly in evoking grievances of the native american identity.) It contradicts itself against its own intentions and beneath its own awareness. This poem does not work. It is bad.

Aye mate so ye believe in art for art's sake then? Just as dumb as I thought

Poetry started to go wrong with Walt Whitman. Even the Romantics didn't want to throw out regular meter, and time has proven them wise.

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