american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 3
always will be primarily countercultural. Similarly, hip-hop music
began as a countercultural art, but has since lapsed (or progressed,
depending on your perspective) into a cornerstone of popular
culture. The most politically and socially adept hip-hop is still
countercultural—both within the culture itself and within the larger
American culture—and is often recorded on independent record labels
and performed at smaller, independent clubs and concert spaces. These
artists are able to comment on both the dominant American culture
and the hypermaterialistic commercial hip-hop that often implicitly supports
it. In chapter 4 I explore some of these artists’ work and the implications
of hip-hop’s movement into the mainstream. Precisely because
the printed poetry and the hip-hop I discuss are countercultural, they
are able to comment on the larger culture in unique and penetrating
ways. At the same time, poets themselves still have a large amount of
cultural currency and prestige even if their work often does not.
Independent hip-hop and printed poetry, therefore, survive and remain
countercultural while maintaining prestige and credibility.
These two epigraphs, finally, are apt departure points for a rhetorical
mapping of the strategies and figures of voice contemporary poets
use to write political poems. Today’s poets and critics capture three
primary centuries-long concerns about political poetry, two of which
I discuss thoroughly in this introduction: (1) the efficacy of poetry as
public discourse; (2) the functions of poets and poetry in society; and
(3) the potential for political poetry to remain important across
cultural and historical borders.
There is no satisfactory method for determining the efficacy of
poetry. Denise Levertov, one of the United States’ most controversial
and outspoken political poets during the Vietnam War, claimed,
somewhat tenuously, that poetry can “indirectly” affect the course of
events by “awakening pity, terror, compassion and the conscience of a
leader” and by “strengthening the morale of persons working for
a common cause” (174). How should “indirectly” be expanded or
understood? Does poetry retain elements of mystery and subtlety that
prevent such certainty? I argue here that cause-and-effect criteria are
too limiting a means for understanding poetry’s powers. Establishing
a poem as a primary motivator of an agent’s (or group of agents’)
actions would be a remarkable achievement, one that would likely
require extrapolation and reductivism. Though I do not elide the
question of audience in the discussions that follow, especially in
the hip-hop chapter, determining an art form’s verifiable efficacy is
largely speculative. More importantly, such a focus would distract
from the main purpose of my book—to study poetic strategies,