Jordan celebrates a group of Berkeley students who had gone on a hunger strike in protest against the passage of California's Proposition 209, a law ending affirmative action. Without mentioning the commonplace jokes today that hunger strikes are popular among today's Berkeley students and that many find them easy to join so long as they need to lose weight anyway and can sneak a piece of pizza when no one's looking, Jordan retells the events as if California's judiciary temporarily restrained the new law pending constitutional review as a result of the students' actions. No matter, they doubtless deserve celebration and praise. Invoking the predictable clich s of comparable revolutionaries from the Chinese students at Tienanmen Square to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Sandinistas to the IRA to the intifada , Jordan presents a telling conception of the essence of poetry. In other words, these poets are good poets because they communicate their ideas and feelings effectively .
Poetry is communication.
A poem is a message. Looking at the examples of the students' work reprinted in the article, I'm not convinced. In fact, to do so would presumably be to miss the point. The problem with this view of poetry is that it ultimately leads us nowhere. If poetry is designed to communicate a message effectively, prose can always do it better.