Rich, Forche, and Poetry's Political Action

This week we're reading Adrienne Rich's work from the '70s to the present, Carolyn Forche's first book A Country Between Us, and an essay by Anite Helle titled "Elegy as History: Three Women Poets 'By the Century's Deathbed,'" (South Atlantic Review Spring 1996). Given that frame, the proximate focus of our posts this week is open; perhaps though people will comment on the function of "vision" in Rich's and Forche's politically charged work. Is there something about seeing, about the visual image, that is somehow more appropriate to this kind of political poetry than other more traditional aspects of verse, such as the senses evoked by meter and rhyme? Why is this political poetry un-metered and image based (and is it really?)?