Beginning today in Washington D.C., a group of poets have assembled for a weekend devoted to the performance and celebration of socially engaged works.  Hosted by Split This Rock, “Poems of Provocation and Witness” is a four-day national festival held every two years. Poets and activists will converge from across the country to read and recite; attend panels and workshops; and network with writers, community organizers, and youth organizations. Their goals are “to speak out for justice” and “to demand that our government stop spying on us.”

Split This Rock—taking its name from Langston Hughes’s poem “Big Buddy”—intends to build a network of those who aspire to greater influence in public life by using poetry to advocate for social change, defend rights of freedom of expression, and renew consciousness of social responsibility in a diverse and complex world. Even in advance of the 2014 Poetry Festival, Split This Rock’s impact is already considerable: The March issue of Poetry Magazine—the oldest English language monthly periodical of its kind, and one of the nation’s most venerable—published a portfolio of work by the festival headliners.

Advocacy for social justice and social responsibility, defending human rights, bearing witness to the diversity of human struggle and experience—noble goals, I’m sure we can agree to that. But Split This Rock is also dedicated to “revitalizing poetry as a living, breathing art form with profound relevance in our daily lives and struggles.” Here is a point worth arguing—is poetry something dead, is poetry Lady Lazarus? Is there really a golden age of a perfectly just, perfectly literate Poetic Republic? I do not think so.

In fact, I find the idea of Poetry-in-need-of-defibrillation to be very damaging to artists and activists. The obsession—and the death of poetry is one—obscures a real question for literati to consider. If we stop longing for a world saturated with—ruled by—poetry, we can focus instead on questions like: Why is there a dearth of socially engaged poetry? Consider why publicly interested poetry falters in the U.S. whereas in the wider world (Eastern Europe or Afghanistan, for example) it thrives; it inspires popular respect and fear in the autocrats.

Even on these new premises, I fear there is a chance to repeat the same mistake, to reason from a false assumption: How can we be sure that there is a dearth of American poetry focused on social questions, poetry that takes risky and controversial stands, poetry that eschews modernist complexity and ambiguity in exchange for simple and direct appeals?

Here it would be best to put a human face on the problem. Consider a poet—let’s consider Bill Knott. Knott died this March; before his death I had neither heard of him nor read a word he wrote. Perhaps this is true of many of us here at Harvard. Despite Knott’s 25 years of teaching at Emerson College and the many books published during his 74 years including self-published chapbooks and a volume printed by FSG, “The Unsubscriber,” I had no clue who he was or how important he was in the 1970s. Thomas Lux said in Ploughshares Magazine, “His best work re-affirms that poetry can be something that does more than lie on a page.”

Knott’s claim to fame came in 1966 when he hoaxed the established poetry world with a fake suicide letter to the journal “Epoch.” But his poems were new and radical; Knott’s poems were short, accessible, and highly critical of the Vietnam War. He spoke of his struggles: Knott was an orphan, a former mental patient, spent two years in the army.