In 2012, the Californian poet Joshua Clover, recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, professor of English at University of California Davis and regular contributor to The New York Times and The Nation, had this to say about the politics of poetry:

Clover was arrested in 2009 for his participation in student protests at his workplace and has been one of the most involved activists in and sensitive commentators on social movements flourishing in the wake of the 2008 global recession. His conclusion – that recent theoretical politicisations of poetry be dismissed as ‘bullshit’ – is likely not, then, the bluff refusal of the reactionary, rejecting any political force falling outside the status quo. The targets of Clover's engaged statement, those particular Theory-based and language-centred conceptions of the poetic, are more carefully addressed than the sweep of his list would seem to imply. As Clover has put it elsewhere, ‘Certain things will have to be actively destroyed on the side of capital … And they will not be destroyed with language.’ The one-word critique of the grand potencies of poetry we have come to learn ‘by heart’ is a response to a tradition, active since Romanticism, that treats the political efficacy of poetry as an already existing fact.