Why, Poetry?

[Achebe]

Should it be Why, Poetry? or Why Poetry? You are not addressing the personification of poetry directly anywhere in the poem.

An elegance of words best left to salons, where 
forgotten jargon meets white font. Truth there...'black font'?
Is malleable, and life is altogether amenable: ... No colon
To fallacy. What power, then, is in beautiful ... pointless 'then'
Words? Apparently, abandoned to the artful,

Of empty galleries, and tasteless experiences; 
Or in dusty books, made of shredded covers. ... from 'apparently' to here I can't discern a logical statement. The power in beautiful words is "Apparently, abandoned to the artful, of empty galleries or in dusty books". It might work better with: "Apparently, none. They are (remember, words are plural) abandoned to the artful, to empty galleries, etc." Not that words are abandoned to galleries, but you get my drift.

Indeed, it is a lost art, in an encoded society ... replace 'it' with 'poetry' or equivalent, otherwise it's confusing (you were talking about 'words' in the stanza before)
Where technology, knowingly and gleefully, ... 'technology' is generally seen as automatic and a-human, so 'knowingly' looks odd....but it's your POV so ok. 
Annuls. The human soul. Where are stars,  
If not stolen by stars - adorned in expensive cars? ... is this a pun on movie stars? good heavens, if so. if not, then I can't fathom what you're trying to say here.

Tattered, stuttered, uttered syllables scrambling,
For notoriety, with no empirical value; intoning
Chants. Or are they simply rants, in broken
Trance? Too often good art can be mistaken,  ... 'rants' would more logically be 'in trance'. If the trance is broken, then they are simply rants in a normal state of mind...the transparent attempt to rhyme detracts from the line.

For soggy graffiti on dry concrete ... tattooed walls.
Where is poetry, if not neglected, in celled walls ... 'walled cells' might make sense still, but what are 'celled walls'?
Of Spanish doctors, and religious mystics?
Is poetry intellectual mysticism, or, perhaps, too cryptic? ... 'just plain cryptic' is better than 'too cryptic', since it is then not clear what the 'too' is a comparison with...intellectual mysticism? that's pretty cryptic too. Wait, what is intellectual mysticism? is it different than religious mysticism? dodgy phrase.

Words dance, sights glance, pages clanked!
Omitted to the obsolete ruins, of destitute cranks. 'the ruins of cranks' - what, their corpses? Don't understand this one.

Negatives:-
Possible loss of continuity between certain stanzas 
some of the lines don't make sense - reason at the cost of rhyme.

Positives:-
The flaws are nothing that a little editing wouldn't fix.
A good title. A title with potential.

EDIT - I edited this crit as my earlier one was based on an imperfect reading of the text.