Kenneth Goldsmith says that utilitarian poetry fails as art

Kwame, I never said that nor do I believe it. Instead, I quoted Brian Eno as saying, "Art is everything we don't need to do," in which Eno was addressing the activity of making art. The results of that art, however, are another matter and, yes, it can and does affect lives. Linton Kwesi Johnson, though, I contend has much more of an influence as a politically-based musician-poet than he would if he were just a poet as music precipitates change more effectively than does poetry.
That said, I am of the mind that there are two models, both effective: the Ginsbergian and the Cageian. Ginsberg took his poetry to the streets and into the media to great effect; Cage refused the streets and, as an anarchist rejected the idea of protesting the US government on the grounds that such actions ultimately support a governmental system -- any governmental system -- by participating in it. Instead, his was a praxis-based resistance, one that emphasized disengagement as a model of change. He was despised in the more radical circles for this and was accused of being a bourgeois formalist.
The problem with Ginsberg (and one could add Abbie Hoffman or Bob Marley) is that they were so cooperative with the media that they were ultimately usurped and co-opted by it: "Allen Ginsberg wore khakis." In Marley's case -- and I'm speaking as an American here (I know as a Jamaican you feel differently) -- his politics lead to nothing more than another bong hit.
I felt allied with the Cageian approach for many years: I haven't voted since my early 20s with the hopes that if I enough of us didn't vote, the system would collapse. Wishful thinking, I know. But with the crimes of the current administration and the blood on its hands, I have no choice but to take a Ginsbergian route of engagement.
This might seem too facile, but I feel that whatever one does in their art is a political expression. Politics in art are simply unavoidable. I'm more interested in the oblique than I am in the direct, feeling that what we see in our peripheral vision is more substantial than that which we see coming head-on. At least it's been that way for me.