The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness.
[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."
One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.
Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.
Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.
