american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

Introduction: Political Poetry
in the United States
The age of the ignorant rapper is done
knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone
the stereotype must be lost
that love and peace and knowledge is soft
do away with that and understand one fact
for love, peace must attack
and attack real strong, stronger than war
to conquer it and its law
—Boogie Down Productions, “Why Is That?”
(KRS-One: A Retrospective 1989)
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
—W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
(1939) (247–249)
Poet and critic Edward Hirsch once wrote that poetry embodies a
“magical potency” (How to 1–5). In this book I explore the ways that
contemporary American poets and hip-hop artists 1 transmit, impart,
and create political potency in their work without losing the magic
and dynamism that is usually the province of poetry but less often of
politics. I begin, then, with two epigraphs, one by a rapper and one by
a poet who made the United States home for most of his adult life.
Both suggest some critical departure points for this study uncovering
the rhetorical strategies for making poetry political. It is often
thought, as Auden implies in his elegy for Yeats, that poetry “makes