if the horse isn't dead yet...

found this quote from agamben at back of the New Review (a new journal out from Otis College of Art and Design).

The original cohesion of poetry and politics in our culture was sanctioned from the very start by the fact that Aristotle's treatment of music is contained in the Politics and that Plato's themes of poetry and art are to be found in the Republic; it is therefore a matter beyond dispute. The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry.
--Agamben "Project for a Review"

and then these two quotes on form from Susan Schultz's No Guns, No Durian...

One category I've developed is the prose poem as essay (comes after description, story, parody, memoir and the rest). You might consider your poem a place in which to develop ideas, rather like a stadium in which you're seeking out periodic curves and finding them beneath sine wave hills.

and

That we write collages may dispirit us, letting in the very material we want expurgated, or at least investigated.