Sensitivity to social justice might be a motivation for poems, but it is not the only one. Through the immediacy...

Sensitivity to social justice might be a motivation for poems, but it is not the only one. Through the immediacy of images, an improvised-sounding, rigorous musicality, and far-ranging sentences, conveys complexities of feeling and thought while avoiding didacticism and ideologically motivated polemicspoet does not ma...ke the dangerous mistake of addressing social inequality by turning politics into art. As the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin might have said, 'responds by politicizing art.' The danger of such a response, though, is that it can lead to art that disguises its participation in capitalist culture so that attention to poetic form only produces the illusion of resolution of real social conflict.