I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

[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."

I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.

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.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

Meanwhile, the disgruntled "natives" of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.