Walter,
I do like the Haider article. As an ardent lefty myself, and someone who constantly tries to be an advocate in my school, I find some some of the recent Twitter explosions (say, surrounding
Anders Carlson-Wee's not great poem in The Nation) interesting and challenging.
I find some stuff to enjoy in all three--though, in the case of Smith
almost entirely when I hear him read his own poems and almost never on the page. (In the case of Sharif, is this the poem you're talking about
:
[Persian Letters]).
I think for a long time poetry ceased having "popular" poets. There wasn't a way in for people who had one major talent but not another. When you think of almost every major era--even Modernism--there was a popular poetry that was actually, you know,
popular. Sometimes popularity coincided with talent. Byron is an easy example. Very frequently it didn't. But those popular poets allowed an entryway into the good poets--it kept poetry both ephemeral and important. That strikes me as something the industry has lacked pretty much since the novel took over. Our culture (and I'm generalizing) with it's lac of attention span, should ultimately have a similar reading market to the eras where could read: shorter pieces that engage and draw people in. I think the popularity of poets--even if it's based solely on racial/sexual/gender identity at first--is what, at first, draws people in, it helps poetry in general.