“What was the voice that emerged from Algeria?” asked a twenty-one-year-old Mahmoud Darwish in a 1961 article for the journal Al-Jadid. In the years following the Bandung Conference of 1955, the idea of poetry that captured the ‘voice’ of the people became a key ethos, emblem, and strategy of the ideological project of Third-Worldism. Not only were different fantasies of ‘the voice’ of the people animated as the necessary precondition for the transformation of poetry into a weapon in the struggle for liberation, but the newly perceived importance of paying attention to voices from oppressed elsewheres generated a conception of poetry tasked with discursively linking disparate struggles. Scholars of poetry movements within frameworks of declared political militancy have often noted this tendency and gestured to internationalism as a unifying principle of mid-twentieth century cultural production. Rarely, however, have they sought to unearth any shared generic, stylistic, or tonal characteristics between the contemporaneous poets associated with Third-Worldist cultural formations, such as Darwish. If we wanted to bring some features of the poetics of Third-Worldism to light, where could we look? To what debates should we attend? In this paper, I suggest we begin by turning our attention to the aesthetic concept of genre, and in particular to two poetic genres that Mahmoud Darwish adopted in the early sixties as part of his quest to construct the ‘voice’ of the Palestinian people, and to put that voice in conversation with revolutionary actors elsewhere: the ars poetica poem and the dramatic monologue. These two genres were central to Darwish’s attempts to cultivate a form of poetic realism [al-shiʿr al-waqiʿ'i], which he deemed the only mode of writing the committed poet could adopt if he wished to transform the world and not merely reflect it. My paper will suggest that these 'minor' genres bring to light a more precise ground of comparison than other categories with which Darwish’s sixties poetry has often been associated, such as Soviet-style socialist realism. In fact, I contend that examining the particular poetic genres through which Darwish insisted on the role of art in political struggles, and through which he expressed his identification with far-flung anti-colonial actors, both gives us a sharper sense of how global aesthetic currents like socialist realism were vernacularized, and allows us to trace the Third-Worldist networks of literary exchange in which Darwish was embedded.