american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

Preface
When I began reading, writing, and studying American poetry
seriously many years ago, I happened upon Adrienne Rich’s poem
“North American Time” and the particularly bold, provocative lines,
“Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history” (33).
Reading these lines and the other poems in Your Native Land, Your
Life (1986) set in motion the process from which this book emerged.
I started considering how poetry can be political, and I began to see
the ways in which poems can engage public debates about political,
historical, social, and economic concerns. As my academic interests
often tend, this initial inquiry led me back to my early teenage years
and the development then of latent political and intellectual interests.
In other words, I saw immediately the connection between the varieties
of poetry I was studying in graduate classes and the poetry of my
youth—hip-hop music. Listening to the hip-hop poets of the late
1980s and early 1990s set the foundation for my later understanding
of how poetry can be and why it should be political. The dual genesis
of this book thus reflects my conception of American poetry as a
dynamic collection of startling different, yet overlapping, methods for
transforming the world in verse.
I feared initially that it would be difficult to articulate points of
convergence for the two controlling imperatives of this book—
printed poetry and hip-hop music as potentially sociopolitically
engaged texts—but I soon realized that these forms are bound
together intimately. My dedication to contemporary American poetry,
hip-hop music, and international political issues reaches a critical juncture
under the broad designator “political poetry.” Despite the opinions
of some scholars, colleagues, and friends that contemporary
poetry is obsolete except in a few isolated conclaves and that hip-hop
music is ephemeral and vacuous, I believe that poetry—both in
printed form and in hip-hop performance—is not only a powerful
cultural form in the United States, but that it is perhaps the best
means for exploring contemporary American culture and the ways
artists make their work political. In this book I analyze the poetics of