american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

PREFACE xi
printed poetry and what printed poetry can tell us about the world’s
most popular, dynamic, and often confounding art form.
Years of attending hip-hop shows at night while reading, writing,
and studying printed poetry during the day have compelled me to
consider the shifting roles of both poets in society and of hip-hop as a
powerful form of political poetry. I have also been grappling with the
apparent desire of many critics, readers, and poets to make lyric
poetry—since the Romantic period associated with introspection and
isolation, and since the Modernists with an unapproachable
difficulty—political. Poetry, these observers hope, should be capable
of making a difference in the world. Further, although romantic and
modern poetry, for example, are rightly and seriously studied, I discovered
that I was drawn more to contemporary poetry’s inextricability
from current political and social contexts, partially, I believe,
because of what Robert von Hallberg pointed out in 1987, a dictum
that applies nearly twenty years later: the need of humanities scholars
to make the study of poetry “obviously important” (Politics and
Poetic Value 2). Printed poetry can be “obviously important” in the
classroom, for instance, when it reverberates beyond the narrow confines
of the classroom in confronting issues of social justice, war, and
foreign policy—outside, between, and within the walls of the individual
heart and mind. In my view, it is unnecessary to style hip-hop as
“obviously important”; Patrick Neate’s recent, Where You’re At:
Notes from the Frontlines of a Hip-Hop Planet, for instance, shows that
hip-hop music and culture are a fascinating combination of local and
global forces, what he calls “glocal,” and they have sociopolitical
implications in places as dissimilar as Tokyo, Cape Town, New York,
and Rio de Janeiro.
Throughout my years of graduate study, I wrestled, often inconclusively,
with the same question from friends, family, and colleagues.
After being asked about my research interests and responding with
“American poetry, especially political poetry,” I often received blank
stares, as if to say, I know what poetry is and I know what politics are,
but what is political poetry and who writes it? Who ever thought that
poetry was political? This book, then, is my extended answer. As
Michael Bérubé discusses in Public Access: Literary Theory and
American Cultural Politics, there is a great need for a more accessible
language and a better articulation of political positions in humanities
scholarship so that it has greater potential to reach a broader audience
(171). As such, I hope this book contributes to academic discussions
of contemporary printed poetry, cultural studies, literature and
politics, applied theoretical studies of agency, and discourses about