I feel that poetry has not taken a place in the mainstream, it's completely on the fringes still. Yes there may be advertisers and mainstream commercial advertisers who may use the form, but the form itself, the art form itself, will always remain on the fringes as any art form will. It may pop up in mainstream media, but I don't feel like the form itself has taken a place in mainstream society.
In terms of poets appearing in mainstream media, I feel that there are definitely notions in the poetry community"selling out". I think with any sub-culture/fringe culture, that's going to be the biggest question. Are you down or are you selling out? Some people think that taking your poetry on TV is the biggest sell-out ever. Participating in Def Poetry is a sellout. We get notes from people because they don't want to be down with that. And that's fine if that's where you stand and that's where you want to take your art. I feel like it's dangerous for poets to feel the need to "well, you know, there's not a poet label, so maybe I'll try to get down with a Hip Hop label, or maybe I'll just become more musical or get down with a rock label". I think that's dangerous because that's not the core essence of your aesthetic or your work. I think it's just a recipe for disaster.
The question is how do we define mainstream success? I think that has yet to be defined in the spoken word community, because there is this idea of just being caught in sharing your work with your community versus selling a million albums, which isn't yet a paradigm of the spoken word community.