american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 5
spectacle of man-created suffering is known, observed with such
constancy that a new shape of knowing invades the mind” (xiv–xv;
original emphasis). From the vantage point of 2006 and the almost
immediate access to images of horror that an Internet connection can
provide, Des Pres’s assessment of the onslaught of media images in
1988 seems tame by comparison.
Five years earlier, in 1983, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Witness of
Poetry that poets’ roles have changed, largely because of an exponential
expansion of their “knowledge of reality”; once limited to perhaps
a single village, now subject to the catastrophes of the globe, poets, he
suggests, bear an increased burden, especially when the U.S. role in
conflicts around the world is palpable and often negative. Is it not
surprising, Milosz asks, that poets are “morally indignant”? He continues
with a final commentary on the trajectory of twentieth-century
poetry toward dark visions: poets, he says, have a difficult time imagining
a future devoid of economic crises and wars (116). Similarly, in
the late 1980s, Chuck D, lead rapper of one of hip-hop’s most
acclaimed groups, Public Enemy, explained many rappers’ dark visions
as “the Black CNN” (Saddik 110–112), because they described with
gritty realism actual urban living conditions that mainstream news
consistently ignored, or when they did report on them, essentialized.
Des Pres, moreover, describes the imperative for a “diction” that can
challenge and outlast these dire events and support through “the
stamina of language” the trials of the twentieth, and now, by extrapolation,
the twenty-first century (xv). What, then, is this “diction” that
Des Pres invokes? An analysis of the strategies for inscribing the
political in poems moves toward understanding any such diction, or,
I would argue, dictions.
In The Uses of Poetry, Denys Thompson provides a sweeping
description of the poet’s role in society, one that boldly suggests the
poet’s superiority and a preexisting societal consensus: “In the past
the poet has often been the spokesman of his society, saying what it
wanted said but could not voice for itself ” (202). Similarly, and often
dangerously, many hip-hop artists are often styled as the spokespeople
for their communities, sometimes to negative effect, whereas poets
are often considered “outsiders.” Although slightly misguided,
Thompson’s broad definition is helpful as an initial departure point.
Social theorist Anthony Giddens rejects the functionalist conception
that social systems have “needs” or “reasons” of their own, as
Thompson suggests, when he implies that society “wants” to “say”
something (109–115). Perhaps Thompson simply chooses some
unfortunate words—“society” instead of “people”—and if he avoided