american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

190 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Def Poetry Jam, and local sites across the country. 1 A simple explanation
for their exclusion is my knowledge of and passion for printed poetry
and hip-hop rather than spoken word, but another is more convincing.
Spoken-word poetry embodies voices and strategies that draw on the
types of poetic agency detailed in this book. Performance pieces could
conceivably fit into any of the agencies described here. Much slam
poetry, moreover, utilizes the language/vernacular and contestatory
urban agency of hip-hop music; hip-hop also draws on spoken-word
traditions and grew out of them—Last Poets, Black Arts poets,
signifying, and playing the dozens inform the fundamental aesthetics
of hip-hop as well as spoken word.
Some readers may take issue with the poems I have chosen to discuss
here. It is possible to find countless other poems that fit into the
strategies I outline. I view this not as a problem but as a positive generative
quality of my categories. That generation, after all, is part of
the purpose of this project. To reiterate, I also chose to discuss poems
by living, working poets. Thus, I did not include political poems by
deceased poets (with the exception of the Notorious B.I.G.) such as
June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg,
Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, James Wright, Denise Levertov, and
Ricardo Sánchez. Others may see an oversight in my decision to
exclude Language Poetry (while yet other readers may cheer). 2
I believe, as many other critics and readers do, that though Language
Poetry is certainly political in its conscious subversion of poetic tradition(s),
commodified corporate language(s), and MFA workshop
poetry, it fails as a language of politics. Another reason is the lack of
human agency in most Language Poetry, which is one of my primary
concerns in this book. Alicia Ostriker claims that Language Poetry is
politically vacuous, despite its practitioners’ insistences to the contrary,
because it denies that “the morally responsible human subject is
even theoretically possible” (“Beyond Confession” 35), a claim also
advanced in part by Charles Altieri in “Without Consequences is No
Politics.” As I discussed in relation to Michael Palmer’s “Sun,” if the
political content of a poem is obscured or inaccessible, it will likely fail
as a political figure of voice.
In summary, then, this book explores the ways that poets engage
pressing social and political realities and the ways they figure human
agency. In chapter 1 I selected and analyzed poems of embodied
agency, which include experiential and authoritative agencies. They
support Adrienne Rich’s claim that a poem is “not a philosophical or
psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience”
(What Is Found 13). Poems of experiential agency, moreover, draw