Counter-Currents
Poetry for the Age of Strife
Arthur Powell’s Skirmishes in the Atrium
Angelo Plume
491 words
Skirmishes in the Atrium is a new collection of poems written by Arthur Powell. Tucked inside the pages of poetry are also four essays: “Poetry as Common Folklore,” “Why Poetry Should Matter to Right Wing Dissidents,” “Stop with the Kipling,” and “Art and a Secular Soul?” The essays present compelling food for thought, particularly “Why Poetry Should Matter” and “Stop with the Kipling.” The decision to include them was a wise one, and their placement alongside the poems was done with evident care and intent.
As for the poems themselves, they are arranged in four thematic categories: Blood, Nature, Energy, and Anger. This collection is, as the poet writes in the dedication, “intended to feed your soul for the battle ahead.” One can easily imagine several of these poems set to the music of heavy metal, which is arguably the music of the “Right.” The poem “Beyond the Gates of Wien” and the opening stanza of “Rhodesia’s Death” recall the metal band Sabaton and their vitalistic songs commemorating great moments of European martial history.
You can buy Leo Yankevich’s poetry volume The Hypocrisies of Heaven here.
If all of that bombast is a bit too much for the reader, Powell calms the waters in the subsequent poems inspired by nature. In the essay “Poetry as Common Folklore,” Powell reminds us that during the First World War, “men in the trenches shared poems with each other, some silly, some sweet, some sombre.” With that in mind, the poems of Nature take on a deeper meaning. In our imagination, we can see a group of soldiers telling each other about their home towns, the landscapes of their provinces, the special places they left behind and hope to return to.
In the section of poems devoted to the theme of Anger, Powell touches upon the political. Like Irish rebel songs, these poems hit like a clenched fist. Take, for example, the final stanzas of “Forgiveness?”:
Is there no pride left here?
No fight or venom
To right the wrongs
To not live in fear?
Hollowed out men of hollowed out places
Suffering Stockholm Syndrome
They wash the feet of all other races
This is the kind of art our age desperately needs. It is a lament, but also an attack on the status quo and our wayward society. With lines such as these, men were inspired to take on empires of injustice. Powell understands that facts might not care about feelings, but feelings trump facts almost every time. We can argue the toss from sunup to sundown, but sometimes what a man really needs is to feel.
Skirmishes in the Atrium is yet another step in the right direction. For some time now, nationalists on the “Right” have ignored the realm of art. This was not always the case; in fact it is a rather recent phenomenon, and thus it should be easy to get the “Right” back on track. Powell does what nationalist artists ought to do: make art that is for us, by us.
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6 comments
“We can argue the toss from sunup to sundown, but sometimes what a man really needs is to feel.”
You got that right.
I believe most people are persuaded by their emotions first; afterwards they seek rational arguments to codify and buttress what they’ve felt moved to embrace.
And if that’s true, emotionally moving art is an indispensible complement to polemical works.
Leo Yankevich, published through counter currents, was a really good poet and translator. I’ve been rereading his poems lately.
Something off the cuff in his honor:
The White Nationalist to the Neocon
Was the crown less firm on your head for me, oh Prince?
Were your financial chicaneries less well hid?
Did Rockwell, Pierce, Lane ring in your ears
As HENRY TUDOR in bad King Richard’s did?
Were your wars and depravities only less in scope?
This was my hope.
Thanks for the review Pox!
I offer up my opening poem to the CC readers:
Blood Loyal
Blood.
It pulses and flows,
Brightest of reds
Rises in us
Mist descends
Nothing matters more
The ancients knew and swore.
Blood.
What we are made of,
Fathers and mothers
We pass it on and preserve
Loyal till the end
Nothing matters more
The ancients knew and swore.
Blood.
Nothing matters more.
Spilt,
Mixed,
Shed,
Nothing matters more
The ancients knew and swore.
Hope you will all consider picking up a kindle copy for a few bucks!
I bought the book. It’s really good! It makes me feel…jealous! Thanks to Pox for bringing it to our attention.
What a teasing review! Why “stop with the Kipling”? Kipling was arguably the best short story writer in the English language, and undoubtedly the greatest rightwing poet ever. We need Kipling everywhere and all the time!
I applaud new artistry on the Right, but if Mr. Powell …
Blood.
Nothing matters more.
Spilt,
Mixed,
Shed,
Nothing matters more
The ancients knew and swore.
wishes to displace Kipling …
Take up the White man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
…
Far-call’d our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
…
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
….
well, luck!
Gil Scott-Heron who wrote “Whitey On The Moon”, also famously said, “The revolution will not be televised.”
He was wrong, again. The revolution was televised with Sesame Street being an early example of an attempt to whitewash a Black ghetto. The Sesame Street scene pictured above with the boy astronaut has gone mainstream along with single parent homes and drug use.
The kid’s show was promoted by the post-Kennedy Administration, Great Society program of President L.B. Johnson.
To add a footnote to “turning a Rockwell painting into a Pollock” for those who may not know:
The name of the painting where, in reverse, Rockwell punked Pollock is called, “The Connoisseur.”
https://triviahappy.com/articles/norman-rockwell-made-fun-of-jackson-pollock-by-painting-the-same-way
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