This essay attempts to explore the links between politics, poetry, and collective, embodied readings and discussion in the classroom. When my Year 12 class were asked 'What is Poetry?', their answers suggested something in the Romantic tradition -- of poetry as expressive, individual and emotional. My experience studying poetry with my Year 9 class suggests something altogether different -- that studying poetry allows students to have an "embodied" and "collective" reading. In the sense that politics concerns the control of bodies, poetry allows the class to read in an embodied sense, thus "politically," in a way that assessment criteria and the demands of high-stakes testing, with their focus on "individual" understanding, do not. Thus, I argue for the study of poetry as essential in terms of recognising students' political agency -- not primarily as exam-takers but as citizens of a country and an Earth they will, to put it grandly, inherit.