European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture
My essay 'Shedding Poetry's National Baggage' was published in the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture (Versopolis) last week. The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is an online literary journal funded by the European Union, aiming to create an anglophone publication platform with a focus on continental Europe and the world beyond. Commissioned by SJ Fowler, new Executive Editor of the Review, my essay takes the form of eight fragments cumulatively examining relationships between poetry and nation(alism) on various levels, and with references to personal experiences and to writers, poets & artists, current and historical, with an internationalist outlook. The essay was originally conceived in late 2014 in response to an invitation towards a Europe-wide anthology, now seemingly abandoned, of pieces on trans-local writing. I began re-editing it in early 2017, and presented a version of it at the Language & Migration symposium in NUI Galway