Interview with Leo Yankevich

Interview with Leo Yankevich

By Greg Johnson

Editor’s Note:

Recently, I interviewed leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich on poetry, politics, and his new Counter-Currents title Tikkun Olam and Other Poems ^[2].

What is formalist poetry? What is the new formalist movement?

Formalist poetry is essentially metrical poetry, whether it be rhymed or unrhymed. 99.99% of English-language poetry published up until 1900 was formalist. Even the early 20th century modernists, such as Ezra Pound, were highly competent formalists who, in addition to metrical poems, wrote free verse as a revolt against the stilted poetry of the 19th century Victorians. His famous motto “make it new” applies to both free and metrical verse.

The new formalist movement is a revolt against the amorphous post-modernist free verse that has been the dominant mode of poetic expression in the aftermath of World War II. It is formalism resurrected with a contemporary voice.

Which poets have inspired or influenced you the most?

W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Roy Campbell, and Dylan Thomas.

Who do you think are the best living poets?

I’d place myself on the top of the list, of course, followed by Richard Wilbur, and Joseph S. Salemi.

Who are the best non-formalist poets?

Among the dead, Robinson Jeffers.

Among the living, I don’t know. There are millions of them. Besides, I don’t consider them poets. Rather, writers-of-prose chopped-up-into-lines.

Who are the best literary critics and historians? Have any critics influenced your work as a poet?

H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and Cleanth Brooks. I can’t say, though, that they have influenced my work.

What is the relationship of art and propaganda? Art and politics?

All art is propaganda whether its creator intends it to be or not. Most art today promotes decadence, homosexuality, and miscegenation. The art of the ancient Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, promoted health and a philosophy that aimed at perfection.

What is your view of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

I hold Solzhenitsyn in very high esteem as a writer, soldier, and man. His books tell the truth of the inhuman Gulag and his long poem Prussian Nights depicts the barbaric behavior of Soviet rabble soldiers, who, inspired by the anti-German propaganda of Ilya Ehrenburg, raped and murdered their way through Prussia in 1945. As a young captain in the Red Army he witnessed the barbarity first hand and was later brave enough to write about it. Here I quote 5 lines:

The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.

One of the central themes of your new book Tikkun Olam is the destructiveness of Jewish power. How did you become aware of this issue?

As early as I can remember, I knew who was behind the Katyn Massacre: the Soviets. However, in 2001 I began looking into who these “Soviets” were ethnically, and I discovered an article written by the late Dr. William Pierce on the topic. This led me to listen to his broadcasts. Week by week he removed the shutters from my eyes. Later, the writings of the superb prose stylist and classicist Revilo Oliver improved my vision on the matter.

What do you think of the writings of Count Potocki of Montalk?

Certainly Potocki was a character akin in many ways to myself. I, too, am descended from nobles (Polish-Lithuanian) on my father’s side. My paternal grandfather’s surname was Jankiewicz (Yankevich is a transliteration). And my paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Jetkiewicz. However, although I am theoretically a count, I make no claim to the Polish throne!

My good friend Joseph S. Salemi acquired a handful of Potocki’s books for me. I must admit that I am disappointed by the quality of his poetry, which is about a tenth as good as the poetry of fellow right-winger Roy Campbell.

Potocki, however, was a brave man and a good European. Although in 1943 the London Polish community was well aware of who was responsible for the Katyn massacre (the Soviets) it was the Count who brought it to light in the English-speaking world with the publication of his Katyn Manifesto, for which he was placed under surveillance by Scotland Yard.

What impact do you hope that Tikkun Olam will have on readers?

I hope the book will help them understand what has been inflicted on Europid man in the last 100 years and where our race and civilization are headed if we do not stop the darkening tide imposed upon us by the eternal enemy. After they understand this, I hope the book, through repeated readings, will fortify their desire for victory in the struggle for our people’s preservation.

What do you think will be necessary for Europeans around the world to regain control of our destinies?

First, we need to have our own all-pervasive media that gets the message out on a daily basis. Second, we need 10 thousand academics like Kevin MacDonald, and a thousand filmmakers like Mel Gibson, and 50 poets like myself. Thirdly, our people must be ready to sacrifice themselves and to suffer career assassination.

Which European nations have the best chance of doing so? Which ones have the least chance?

It is my belief that the European nations who have been battling with bordering non-white hordes for centuries have the best chance for survival. They include Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Germany, Switzerland, and Austria are capable of regaining their destinies. Alas, I cannot say the same for the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. I foresee within the next 50 years, waves of whites moving into Eastern Europe to escape the ghettoes of London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Stockholm.

Thank you.

 

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Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/interview-with-leo-yankevich/

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New from Counter-Currents!
Tikkun Olam & Other Poems

Counter-Currents is proud to announce the publication of our eighth title:

Leo Yankevich
Tikkun Olam and Other Poems
Second Edition
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2011
104 pages

Read the title poem here 

Hardcover: $25

Paperback: $16

E-book: $5.99 (not available for pre-order)

Available January 16, 2012

Tikkun Olam and Other Poems collects 55 poems and one translation by leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich. Originally published as an E-book only, this is the first print edition.

Advance Praise for Tikkun Olam

Leo Yankevich’s Tikkun Olam is both devastating and heroic. The poems devastate with their unflinching depiction of the horror of the last one hundred years—the murders, the political lies, the cultural debasement, the degradation of European identity—and at the same time they are heroic in their open accusation of the force that ultimately lies behind it all: the insidious, self-serving impulse to “mend the world” in accordance with an anti-Western agenda. Yankevich’s book is unsparing in its vividness, but difficult to put down. He bravely directs our gaze at the infection that is killing us, and he does not allow us the comfortable option of turning away in forgetfulness.—Joseph S. Salemi, Editor, Trinacria

“Reading the powerful, ironic poems in Tikkun Olam—Hebrew for “the mending of the world”—in this new enlarged edition, visions of Goya’s Disasters of War come to mind.

“Leo Yankevich wants the truth—wants it out—and uses all his considerable power as a poet to get it out, bitter and bittersweet. “Those who do not know history are doomed to re-live it,” said, I believe, Santayana. Yankevich wants us to know history, so that we need not re-live it. Is this a futile dream? But someone must do something to halt or at least to slow our simian march to doom, and Yankevich does what he can in this dark true book.

“The murderous testosterone-drugged alpha-males portrayed in Tikkun Olam are not utter monsters. They are humans—husbands, sons, and brothers. They are us, or parts of us, and it is their residual humanity that is horrifying.

“This is especially clear when Yankevich takes on infamously unattractive personalities and manages to find in them the germ of humanity that is just alive enough to make stark and painful how much of their humanity has been cast off. His portrait of Rudolf Hess comes to mind. I think, too, of those menders of the world who begin their mending with the murders of the Czar, his wife and children.

“Tikkun Olam is filled with characters—human, all too human, not quite human, alive and suffering in their various tragedies—brought painfully and beautifully to life by Leo Yankevich.”—E. M. Schorb

“Leo Yankevich’s rich formalist poetry sings while it mourns. His poems bring us face to face with powerful and provocative images from more than one of those darkest of modern times–times when a terrible inhumanity was unleashed upon a culture, a folk, a Heimat. In tones both eloquent and raw, it asks of its readers no more and no less than what is regarded as the sacred duty of all those who survive: Remember. Do not let this be forgotten. This too happened. Yankevich, like Percy Shelley and Roy Campbell before him, is a courageously outspoken poet, and one who is destined to be remembered as an important classic long after his politically-correct contemporaries have forever fallen out of popular, and poetic, favor.”—Juleigh Howard-Hobson

CONTENTS

Part One
1. Tikkun Olam ^[2]
2. Moscow, 1928
3. Holodomor, 1932–33
4. Red Star, 1933
5. Barcelona, 1936
6. Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel
7. Kolyma, 1937
8. Lorca’s Death

Part Two
9. Neighbors, Eastern Poland, 1940
10. December, 1942
11. Vengeance is Mine, Says the Lord, 1943
12. With Blood on his Hands . . .
13. Koniuchy, Eastern Poland, 1944
14. Saint Bartholomew’s Church
15. 1945
16. Gleiwitz, 1945
17. Somewhere over Germany, 1945
18. Veteran’s Hospital

Part Three
19. After the Explusions
20. Ezra Pound Enters the Tent ^[3]
21. Dissident, 1962
22. Poland, New Year’s Day, 1982
23. A Hater Learns About Love
24. The Loneliest Man
25. The Death of Communism
26. Bukovina, 1989

Part Four
27. Sarajevo Sonnet
28. Draza Bregovich
29. Butugychag
30. Gulag Burial Marker
31. The Abandoned Station
32. The Last Silesian
33. An Interview with the Oldest Man In Europe
34. The Łemko Steeple
35. Starless

Part Five
36. A Plurality of Worlds
37. Water
38. The Poet of 1912
39. Anonymous Rex
40. How to Get There

Part Six
41. Spreading Democracy
42. Jenin, 2002
43. The Terrorist
44. After the Old Masters
45. No Flowers, No Doves
46. Two Dates
47. On the Beheading of Eugene Olin Armstrong
48. The July Sun over Lebanon
49. On the Lynching of Saddam Hussein
50. Black Ops ^[4]

Part Seven
51. A Warning to Dissidents
52. Halloween, 2006
53. The Condemned House
54. Understanding the Holocaust
55. Vision
56. Monomatapa on the Detroit River

About the Author

Leo Yankevich was born into a family of Roman Catholic Irish-Polish immigrants on October 30, 1961. He grew up and attended high school in Farrell, Penn., a small steel town in the Rust Belt of middle America. He then studied History and Polish at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, PA, receiving a BA in 1984. Later that year he traveled to Poland to begin graduate study at the centuries-old Jagiellonian University in Krakow. A staunch anticommunist, he played an active role in the dissident movement in that country, and was arrested and beaten badly on a few occasions by the communist security forces. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he decided to settle permanently in Poland. Since that time he has lived in Gliwice (Gleiwitz), an industrial city in Upper Silesia.

Ordering Information

Hardcover: $25

Paperback: $16

E-book: $5.99 (not available for pre-order)

Available January 16, 2012

 

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Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/tikkun-olam-and-other-poems/