american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

118 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
I keep in mind (and the reader should as well) that the subject of
chapter 4—hip-hop music—also actuates a type of migratory agency
in its conscious borrowing and mixing (and consequent reshaping) of
a variety of languages, discourses, and musical traditions. Though
both Modernism and hip-hop migrate between cultural codes, neither
of them embody the speaking voice of the migrant. The main figure
of voice in poems of migratory agency emphasizes the agency of the
linguistic and cultural migrant, who moves between Spanish and
English and between the worlds and cultural sensibilities from which
these two languages emerge (and merge). These poems foreground
the poetic agency of the border-crosser and the voices that are
possible only in a bilingual poet.
First, I want to work through my initial two imperatives for chapter 3.
Despite two decades of discussing multiculturalism with regard to
pedagogy, the canon, and American literature, most critical work in
American poetry studies is organized by or dedicated to a specific ethnicity,
gender, topic, or to what I consider an elite survey of American
poetry and culture. Book-length studies of American poetry generally
focus on, for example, African American, Asian American, Native
American, Latina/o, Chicana/o, or female writers, or on a topic such
as environmental, war, feminist, postmodern, prophetic, Language, or
resistance poetry. These thematic works generally exclude Latina/o
writers, writers from alternative traditions, spoken word and hip-hop
artists, and American poets who write in more than one language.
“Comprehensive” American poetry surveys usually consider only
canonical (primarily white male) writers with a (white) woman or an
African American included for comparative (or P.C.) purposes. More
encompassing volumes, such as books of essays edited by Charles
Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff, are better, but they do little with
bilingual poetry or hip-hop.
Latina/o poets are generally left out of even “comprehensive”
critical studies of American poetry. Yet they are not simply marginalized
because even marginalization implies an existence at the edges of
a critic’s scope. For instance, in the seminal American Poetry and
Culture 1945–1980 (1985), Robert von Hallberg focuses on Robert
Creeley, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Robert Lowell, Edward Dorn,
Mona Van Duyn, and Robert Pinsky, all of whom have “shown
marked curiosity about the dominant American culture” (8). 1 To
be fair, von Hallberg is interested in poets who “have looked more
searchingly and fairly at the national culture”; he claims that the
enduring popular perception “that American poets have made themselves
cultural outlaws” (244) is inaccurate. Though I agree in part