Excerpts: The political voice of the poet

         a lot of poetry has no overt consnection to anything that we might call political, but poets who willfully ignore the world around them risk marginality. Poets have to "read" the world, to respond to it viscerally, and to summon images of that world for readers. Poetry is not sloganeering, and poets.... rarely put forward direct solutions to problems. Instead, they offer a kind of understanding that is distinct, as well as useful, by creating a language adequate to the experience of their readers. In this sense, poetry matters because it can waken us to realities that fall into the realm of the political.

__ Jay Parini in Why Poetry Matters, 2008, p. xii