No, this is not The Babylon Bee.
Aaron Barry is a white guy who originally wrote under the pen name "Jasper Ceylon." He spent months pretending to be a bunch of made-up black people to prove the poetry world is ruled by racist wokies.
Like academic James Lindsay's scheme to prove woke bias in the research world, he wrote intentionally bad and cringeworthy poems.
AND THEY STILL GOT 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!'
I can't show a few of his more explicit poems, some of which are definitely pornographic and not suitable for anyone's eyes. Anyone who clicks the links in the block quotes, be warned.
But he intentionally made them as horrible as he could imagine and still managed to get dozens of them published. Here's the one mentioned above:
😂
So why did Aaron do it?
He realized the industry was discriminating against him and he had no other way to get in.
Several years ago, the man calling himself 'Jasper Ceylon' was trying to break out as a poet, writing under his real name — which I'll share in due course — and he noticed that certain journals had what he described as 'really weird, and quite specific requirements':
'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.'
This isn't just the poetry world. It's the entire publishing industry.
Why haven't there been many great novels in the last 10-15 years? The type that define a generation?
Maybe because the industry is extremely racist:
But it goes farther than just one industry.
It's all of corporate America:
At first, Aaron couldn't believe that the dumb things he was writing were actually getting 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.' (Tofu Ink Arts Press didn't respond to a request for comment.)
Aaron eventually revealed the whole hoax on his Substack, which led to a flurry of anger from the publishers. He had this to say about the whole experience
The worst part: Every single poem got published.
Each poem made its way into digital and/or physical print (with the exception of one where the magazine went under [lol] before it got the chance to put 'Claire Brooke Hawksmouth/Sky Child's' beautiful work out into the world). Each poem received complimentary feedback from the accepting editors. Each poem helped build these personas up into 'legitimate' industry figures and afforded them additional publishing opportunities. (Just Google 'Adele Nwankwo' and see how prolific she became in a short span.) Before long, I was receiving requests from editors for additional poems. Rejections were virtually non-existent. I was being paid more for my acceptances because of my apparent BIPOC status. I was suddenly 'in the loop.' Hell, I even got nominated for an international poetry award as a magazine's top recommendation of the year.
Like I said, this isn't satire.
It's the actual state of things.
Aaron also got paid twice as much for some of his work because he identified as "BIPOC."
Pretty sure that's illegal! If anyone from the Trump admin reads this, you might want to read the full report and start making some calls.
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