Poetry or poets?

I always prefer it when the relationship between politics and poetry is approached as a question. Mark Nowak’s June 6th post contains a couple of queries that in turn have generated a stimulating string of comments: “Does contemporary poetry have any desire to open a dialogue with my Denny’s waitress (or my former Wendy’s co-workers)?" and “What is the relationship between contemporary poetry and the working class, the working poor, and the under- and unemployed?" Am I alone in noting the hint of skepticism in Mark’s repetition of the word “contemporary"? As Mark and many of the responders to his post know, poetry has a long history of service to the disenfranchised—even if this history has yet to be fully written and doesn’t exist in conventional archival form.

At the same time, I wonder if the emphasis isn’t slightly off here. Having extensively wrestled with Mark’s question, I don’t so much think it’s poetry but poets who bear the responsibility for the dialogue he proposes. More specifically, institutions and organizations—not styles of poetry—are what create the context for this engagement. These institutions (a word I prefer because of the power dynamics it implies) may be informal or state-sanctioned (Kent Johnson’s responses mention the nation-wide poetry-writing project in Sandinista Nicaragua). I’m not sure how much poems are able to do this on their own, and poems that some people consider dialogic others find monologic and vice versa.
And then there’s the question of cultural politics. To rephrase the second of Mark’s questions: “What is the relationship between contemporary poetry and cultural under-representation?" I distrust any poet unwilling to use the word McDonald’s in her or his poetry, and yet I consider a number of Linh Dinh’s posts valuable political acts in working to translate between cultures (just as Mark has done for years with his journal Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics). From my point of view, this sort of cultural translation is more in keeping with poetry’s general capacities than a poetic version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed—which has been criticized by some, maybe unfairly, as a form of class tourism (a danger raised in a few responses to Mark’s post).
This all reminds me of a comment Sylvère Lotringer makes during an interview with Antonio Negri in the May issue of Artforum: “The multitude is to Empire, then, what the social classes were to the Nation-States" (note the past tense here), which ties into my initial post regarding the difference between Paris in May ’68 and Seattle in late ’99. Don’t get me wrong: there is no Empire without strong Nation-States. What are the forms of disenfranchisement—including class—shared by the multitude(s)?
I’m obviously not trying to set up an either/or here. I admire Mark’s political activism and his labor-oriented poetry, and I’ve said so in print. They are much, much needed. But at the beginning of what looks to be a very fruitful discussion, I’d like to see the relationship between poetry and politics kept as expansive as possible.
For instance, I spot a progressive politics in Lucia’s seemingly apolitical June 8th post on the American Goldfinch. “And the writing of a poem is also the act of taking a stand against the sadness." (Barack Obama’s rhetoric of hope and change rings a little in my ears here.) How many realms in life do people have left in which they aren’t told what to do? I’d like to think—naïvely, perhaps—that poetry might be one of them.