Craig Santos Perez (Kenyon Review blog):
Why banish poets from the empire if empire can use poets towards its own ends? Use poets to wash over the empire’s crimes, use poets to feign respect for humanity, use poets to poeticize the ideology of empire. Blanco’s poem, “One Today”, is a poem of American exceptionalism and immigrant exceptionalism—of “one empire” built by many settlers on native lands. There it is, Mr. President, sitting there, for USE.
“It should not be the poet’s role to lip sync the rhetoric of empire.”
Nice touch.
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