american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

xii PREFACE
hip-hop music and culture, African American culture, and Latina/o
culture. Further, I hope what follows will be capable of reaching a
broader audience—those who enjoy reading poetry and those who
grew up with hip-hop music, those who follow global politics, and
those who are interested in art’s engagement with sociopolitical
conditions. As such, in this book I attempt to negotiate the constraints
of scholarly literary criticism with a more accessible style.
Although I employ various extant theoretical terms and devise quite
a few theoretical terms of my own, I trust that these terms will challenge
and engage rather than confuse readers. Also, my theoretical and stylistic
approach to the material is similar to hip-hop artists’ approaches—
eclectic and pragmatic. I do not hesitate to borrow from a variety of
academic disciplines and scholarly approaches. Like hip-hop sampling,
I sample a variety of approaches to poetry scholarship and cultural
studies. When Helen Vendler writes that poets who use more than one
language or register employ a “macaronic aesthetic” (“Poet of Two
Worlds” 31), she derides them for their unsustainable voices. However,
I believe that these voices are dynamic and creative even if they appropriate
and revise previous voices and traditions. I hope that this book’s
“macaronic” critical approach is the best one to elucidate the complex
landscape of contemporary poetry in the United States in both printed
poems and hip-hop songs and performances.