american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

4 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
specifically the figures of voice employed in political poems.
Regardless, the difficult question remains and will likely remain in
perpetuity: are poems capable of creating change? While discussing
poems per se, I concentrate on the strategies poets use to engage political
and socioeconomic issues, conditions, and problems. If we can
map and understand poets’ rhetorical strategies for making political
poems, we can perhaps begin to understand the potential for poetry as
a form of political speech, as a form of speech that can influence
people to act in certain ways in the public and political spheres.
Poets, Political Poetry, and
the American Public
What, then, are the functions and the roles of poetry in the broadly
defined contemporary U.S. culture? In “Responsibilities of the Poet,”
Robert Pinsky explores the dialectic between the poet and her culture;
he claims that poets must continually revise the definitions of the
“poetic” that the culture reifies, sustains, and encourages. The poet’s
job, he claims, is to make social judgments prior to the actual writing
of a poem, and more crucially, to re-envision the poetic and thereby
transform values by, in Pinsky’s words, “looking away” from the ways
that the culture represents the poetic (“Responsibilities” 12, 19).
Poetry, then—and I consider both printed poetry and hip-hop music
“poetry”—is thoroughly countercultural and resistant to the structures
of both the dominant discourse and the sociocultural norms it
supports. Poet, translator, and critic Kenneth Rexroth made a comparable
claim in 1936 when he said that the poet, “by the very nature of
his art, has been an enemy of society, that is, of the privileged and the
powerful” (“The Function” 1).
In a similar vein, in Praises & Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the
20th Century, Terrence Des Pres grapples with the “impact of political
havoc” on poetry in the twentieth century. He claims that poetry,
often the territory of hope and praise, now “finds more exercise in
cursing” and “dispraises.” Though he points out that the “patron
saints of poetry in dark times”—Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak,
Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Nazim Hikmet among others—
come to North Americans through translations from places ravaged
by political upheaval, he also suggests that the poet’s role has fundamentally
changed, largely due to what he calls the “miracles of
modern communications,” including the work of television’s “instant
replay of events” and horrific images captured by photojournalists. He
asserts that “a wretchedness of global extent has come into view; the