Bad Poetry Demonstrates How Identity Politics Ruins Everything

It has been nearly seven years since a trio of academics carried out the Sokal Squared hoax, also known as the “grievance studies hoax. Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian wanted to see if highly respected journals covering areas like feminist studies, gender studies, fat studies, etc. would bite on papers that were intentionally written as nonsense. Many of the journals did.

Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies…

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

If you echo the things the woke editors of these journals want to hear, you can get almost anything published. But of course that doesn’t just apply to academic journals. Last week the Free Press published an article about a poet who ran a version of the same hoax on the poetry publishing industry. Jasper Ceylon is straight, white and Canadian, but by pretending to be part of various more trendy identities he was able to get some very bad poetry published.

He has pretended, he said, to be Dirt Hogg Sauvage Respectfully, author of poems such as “non-b god or: what deity would be a TERF?,” as well as Adele Nwankwo, a “gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,” who has published dozens of comically bad poems in a wide array of indie literary magazines across the Anglosphere in the past three years, including one about a lesbian WWE-style wrestler that features lines such as:

“You wanna know how I feel after being cheated out of a victory over Pat Patriarchy at Survivor Series? I’m furious. I’m hot. Ooh, I’m so mad I could kiss a woman I don’t even like right now!”

Jasper Ceylon isn’t his real name either but he says all of this happened because he tried to get real poetry published under his real identity and got nowhere.

“I just was not in the demographic they would even consider accepting in some cases. They were openly advocating on their websites for the voices of the disenfranchised and all of this stuff. I’m like, Wow, it would probably be a lot easier to get in if I had some sort of connection to one of these identities.”

But by adopting a new identity, he could get absolute garbage published.

“The first poem to ever get picked up was the ‘yah jah gah hah’ one,” Ceylon told me, when we first spoke. He was referring to one of two poems he published under the name Adele Nwankwo in a print edition of Tofu Ink Arts Press, a publication dedicated to “amplifying the voices of the under-represented and marginalized.”

Ceylon was shocked that the poem—which begins with a Toni Morrison quote about “navigating a white male world” and contains lines like “voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip”—was accepted. “It was very obviously nonsense,” he laughed. “Just fake bad Creole.”

Earlier this year, Ceylon published a book of his intentionally bad poetry. To promote it he revealed the hoax to one of the sites that published his poems, knowing that would stir up outrage. It worked but it turned out there was even more to the hoax. A publisher was about to publish his second novel written under a pseudonym. Unfortunately, the publisher found out about his trickery and canceled the novel.

He revealed his real name to the Free Press. It’s Aaron Barry. That’s a name guaranteed to result in shut doors. But there is a lesson here obviously, for anyone who is interested.

Australian writer Matthew Sini, who interviewed Barry in the guise of Jasper Ceylon on his literature podcast Getting Lit, told me: “Ceylon’s project reveals a growing rot at the heart of publishing.”

“Vogueish privileging of increasingly arcane identity categories,” he said, “not only hurts the arts in general terms, it hurts budding artists, especially those who are from ‘marginalized’ groups . . . The soft bigotry of low expectations quite often cosigns these writers to an embarrassing spectacle of publishing undercooked and poorly constructed work. The Echolia Review project has proven that identity fetishization in the poetry world literally comes at the expense of the art form.”

I suspect these kind of hoaxes will continue every few years until the left’s fixation with identity politics wanes. Will that ever happen? I’m less sure about that.