american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

194 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
xenophobia, repression, dangerous working conditions, and heartache
for illegals. Soto’s voice is humorous and political, even if it gains part
of its edge from a position of privilege—legal U.S. citizen versus illegal
Mexican immigrants. Humor, then, can be a viable, if occasionally
risky, figure of voice in U.S. poetry, especially when it is used to comment
on difficult political issues such as immigration.
Part Two
I conclude here by returning to the overarching debates that frame this
project in the preface and introduction. In 1949, when Muriel
Rukeyser wrote that “anyone dealing with poetry and the love of
poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even
more with the indifference” (6), she was engaging a long tradition of
poets who have felt compelled to view poetry through the lens of its
detractors. In eighth-century China, for instance, Tu Fu “brood[ed]
on the uselessness of letters,” lamenting that “Poetry and
letters / Persist in silence and solitude.” What good is poetry, he asked,
when his country is “Overrun with war” and citizens view poets with
“contempt”? (cited in Rexroth One Hundred 6, 29, 8, 15). Rukeyser’s
suggestion that the “economy of the nation” and the “empire of
business” within it “both include in their basic premise the concept of
perpetual warfare” (61) still rings true—if the United States exists in a
state of “perpetual warfare,” poetry will always face contempt and
indifference.
Tu Fu articulated better than most the strained relationship
between poetry and a society at perpetual war. His poems were valued
in the T’ang Dynasty for their Yi, or Confucian moral instruction, as
well as for their rigorously rule-bound verse. During the second half
of his life Tu Fu became increasingly concerned with the ravages of
war, and for good reason. In AD 742, the Chinese census numbered
nearly fifty million; in AD 764—just twenty-two years later—there
were approximately seventeen million citizens. The capital city of
Chang-an, where Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, Jews, and
Manicheans held counsel together, was destroyed in a bloody rebellion.
Tu Fu—a descendent of thirteen generations of Confucian
literati and an exile from Chang-an—and his poetry show an obsession
with poetry’s place in war. 5 The twenty-first century, then, is
more similar to Tu Fu’s than not. Though the wide-scale devastation
now happens in places other than the United States, those who make
war and those who make poetry are still at odds. 6