american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

2 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
nothing happen” because it is isolated from the domains of political
power and from the executives who make decisions about the future
of nations. Nevertheless, Auden claims, poetry “survives” as a “way of
happening,” an action in its own right that persists and retains a power
and mystery with which the powerful “would never want to tamper.”
For KRS-One (Kris Parker), the rapper for the influential Bronx-based
Boogie Down Productions and one of the culture’s most respected
innovators and political voices, hip-hop artists must use positive, powerful
language to “attack” the forces of “war.” This poetic language,
KRS-One believes, is capable of helping to “conquer” the “law” of
war that upholds inequality in a world rife with racism, violence,
poverty, and oppression. This optimism and abiding belief in language
as a force of resistance to injustice differs from Auden’s suggestion
that a poem is ultimately an ineffective social act.
I begin with these two epigraphs because they illustrate centurieslong
questions about the usefulness of political poetry and the survival
of poetry in the face of substantial doubts about its viability. Moreover,
they illustrate the ways that poets alternate between swaggering braggadocio
and despondency about their poetry’s making something
“happen” politically or socially. The divide between naïve optimism and
pessimism, though, should not be understood as one between hip-hop
songs and printed poems. Numerous hip-hop artists bemoan their
inability to affect change in their communities, whereas other poets,
such as those of the Black Arts Movement, challenge and deftly proclaim
the power of language. Poems such as Quincy Troupe’s
“Boomerang: A Blatantly Political Poem,” which claims that
“absolutely nothing / will have been undone” (665–666) by the
poems of resistance during the civil rights movement, and José
Montoya’s “The Movement Has Gone for its Ph.D. over at the
University, or the Gang Wars are Back” (95–96) suggest that progressive
change is compromised by the institutionalization in which poets
are complicit. But rarely, if ever, is any printed poem as unabashedly
swaggering as a rap song. Even if tongue-in-cheek, one of hip-hop’s
primary tropes asserts the power of language as a weapon for change
and as a metonym of the artist’s linguistic dexterity. For instance,
Edan’s “Promised Land” (Beauty and the Beat 2005) proclaims both
the power of hip-hop and the impact of his verse: “my power settled the
clash between races / and put good people on the magazine faces.”
Most importantly, though, these epigraphs point to an overarching
warrant for writing about the political strategies of printed poetry and
hip-hop music instead of some other expressive form such as folk
music, film, fiction, or blogging. Auden implies that poetry is and