The paper is a Meditation (variant on the manner of Aurelius and
Descartes) concerning the immediate situation, in the United States, of
poetry as a discourse of political engagement. As such, the paper is
a highly personal one. It means to offer an account of the peculiar
limits within which contemporary poetry in the United States is forced
to get carried on, as well as an explanation of the context in which
those limits were defined. It also suggests possible ways to exploit
the special resources of contemporary poetry (formally and socially
conceived) for political discourse and social critique. The paper is
most centrally concerned to illuminate the special kinds of critical
reflection which contemporary poetry, by virtue of its marginal
position, makes available. The paper's two main sections involve
the author's own reflexive analysis of his encounters with certain
texts by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Theodor Adorno, and Carolyn Forche
