american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

x PREFACE
late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century poets, including those
who perform on stage and on record, as well as on the printed page.
Their strategies for confronting complex political, social, and global
contexts in an era of globalization, war, human rights abuses, increasing
economic inequality, and a prevailing uncertainty about the future
help illuminate how artists negotiate between creative purposes and
real-world constraints.
I began listening to and thinking and talking about hip-hop music
and culture long before I became a serious poet or critic. I went to my
first hip-hop concert when I was thirteen years old, but did not read
my first full-length volume of poetry until I was an undergraduate.
If, therefore, I sound occasionally like an ardent fan or passionate
defender of hip-hop, my stance is a product of this history. I trust that
my growth from fan to critic-fan does not prevent my analyzing hiphop
music and culture in an illuminating and disciplined, scholarly
way. Printed poetry, on the other hand, does not have “fans” in the
same way that hip-hop does. Hip-hop is both a youth-dominated and
performance-based culture, whereas the most exalted and celebrated
poetic traditions in the United States have been passed along in
printed form and are generally more intellectual and less accessible—
so the story goes—than popular youth culture forms.
This dynamic has led many observers to view hip-hop as an evanescent
art form with little long-term value. In hip-hop culture, after all,
fans often think of music made prior to 1994 as “old school,” whereas
scholars often periodize “contemporary” poetry as any work produced
from the 1960s to the present. Printed poetry, at least what critics and
scholars have determined is the “best,” tends to mature and gain in
cultural value over time. I have come to believe that these opposite
trajectories are a key to understanding contemporary political poetry
and the different political potentials of printed poetry and hip-hop.
Hip-hop artists are capable of accomplishing what active contemporary
poets often strive to create—a public space of collective agency, potential
change, and community. They have a larger stage on which to
interact with their audience, to create alternative images of justice, and
to build potential political movements. Printed poetry, though, appreciates
more slowly. Its impacts are often not as immediate as they are in
hip-hop; thus, it is often difficult for many to see printed poetry as a
political form. I have thus come to think that any extensive study of
contemporary poetry, especially political poetry, is incomplete if it does
not consider the politics, poetics, and rhetorical strategies of hip-hop.
Such a study has never been published; consequently, critics have
missed the opportunity to explore what hip-hop can teach us about