Shedding Poetry’s National Baggage

Christodoulos Makris writing for Versopolis:

…If and when it enters the public arena, poetry becomes a vehicle for the propagation of the nation state, a tourist promotion of sorts.

[…]

Increasingly in our aggressively nationalist times, inwardness is thought of as high virtue; insularity and stubbornness of vision are promoted as signs of a courageous up-holding of supposedly threatened heritage and values. But if an insular or marginalised community finds itself wielding a dominance of sorts, a force to be exerted upon the further-marginalised, where to for inwardness then? In what way is power to be understood?