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The only belief that is salutary to poetry is the belief in poetry, which is never simple, and even less simple to maintain.  Now at the century's end, with the end of the ideologies and the imminent breakup of certain nations, the disease and the threat of the next century will be nationalism, ethnocentricity, and all forms of  excluding the other.  Under pressure of the expanding population, anyone not us will be seen as the cause of our misery.  In poetry, if only for a moment, we are all us, all others -- an us of others, and all of us talking.

--eliot weinberger [outside stories; new directions, 1992]