I mentioned before that my own attitude towards political poetry
is ambivalent.  This ambivalence shows in that fact that though
I've emailed to this list a translation and a message rejecting
political poetry, I myself haven't been able to refrain from
writing poetry which is overtly or covertly political.  I've
sent recently to this list one poem of my own which has political
implications, and I'll send another one soon.

   With that as preface, I'll make a few more comments from the
contrarian position which I adopt more to encourage discussion than
because I totally believe in it.

   Douglas Oliver's eloquent defense of political poetry is
supported by impressive catalogs of political poets past and
present.  But the argument is undercut somewhat if we examine the
differences between the lists of current and past names.  The poets
of the western world from classical times through the 19th century
were an important part of the mainstream political dialogue of
their societies.  This central public role of the poet has lasted
into the twentieth century in some Western nations:  Yeats has been 
mentioned here, and one also thinks of Russia and Greece,
where a number of prominent poets have come to various sorts of
grief for writing against tyrants.  But in modern English speaking
countries, poetry is as peripheral an art as butterfly-collecting,
and it doesn't really matter how good the political poetry is,
since no one who can do anything listens to it.  Most members of
the public would not even recognize the names of the current
political poets whom Douglas Oliver lists ("Amiri Baraka -- uh,
didn't he used to play for the Knicks?"), but everyone in Russia
knows who Mandelshtam was and everyone in Greece knows who Seferis
and Ritsos were.

   In our own times, the arts which really are well integrated into
our culture are film, TV, and popular music, and, in great contrast
to poetry, these arts are indeed part of mainstream political
dialog:  films, TV shows, and song lyrics have all become national
political issues, at least in the U.S.  The problem is that these 
art forms are all, like poetry in the Roman Empire, under the
direct control of the corporate state.  And this is why, just like
Augustan poetry, our our films, songs, and TV shows are allowed,
and even encouraged, to challenge the prevailing establishment
values within carefully controlled limits, in order to allow the
restless elements of the populace to let off steam and to give the
intelligentsia the illusion of effective dissent, without ever
really doing anything which will budge the foot which is pressing
down on all of our necks.

   I'm a little surprised at the disagreement with Chomsky's
argument that an artist ought to speak the truth about injustice
to an audience who can do something about it.  I mean turn it
around:  are we to believe that it is the moral and political
obligation of the artist to speak the truth about injustice to an
audience who can't do anything about it?

   I think the morally and intellectually respectable argument for
an artist's withdrawal from public engagement can be found in    
Confucius, where he advises, "When the Way prevails under Heaven,
then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide."  Here as
often, Confucius's mystical language really amounts to something
pretty common-sensical:  he is saying that you have an obligation
to improve your society so long as the conditions which obtain make
it reasonable to believe that improvement is possible, but when
things have gone so fundamentally wrong that there is nothing
anyone can do to make them better, then it is time to retire with
your principles to your study and to try to preserve the good in
yourself in hopes that it will be able to come forth again when the
darkness has passed.  Confucius's advice is,  as  usual,  unheroic,
practical,  and  wise.   It's not hard to imagine how he would have
classified our contemporary Western  society,  in  which  the  Five
Relationships  have  all become corrupted into the One Relationship
of buyer and seller.   

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