american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONCLUSION 195
The debate about the usefulness of poetry began in earnest in the
United States in 1991 with the appearance of poet-critic Dana Gioia’s
“Can Poetry Matter?” in The Atlantic. Nothing, however, has been
resolved or calcified in this debate but the debate itself. As mentioned
in the preface, the debate pits—centuries after Tu Fu—those who want
to make poetry “obviously important” and those disparate factions
who want to disparage poetry as useless at best, an obstruction to
might and power at worst. 7 My goal here is not to stake my own claim
in this debate; I mention it simply as a checkpoint on the way to a more
critical question. In lamenting the place of poetry in U.S. culture,
many critics miss most of its places. Tu Fu wrote, in the poem that
laments poetry’s solitude, “Everywhere the workers sing wild songs”
(29). These songs, the poem suggests, thrive and inspire even as we
lament for “poetry.” Poetry, then, is song—Bob Dylan’s, Bright
Eyes’s, and Jill Scott’s; slave spirituals and working-class chants in
stands of soccer stadiums in Quito and Lima; and Rita Dove’s, June
Jordan’s, Anthony Hecht’s, Simon Ortiz’s, Li-Young Lee’s, and Def
Poetry Jam. But it is also the force that inspires, enchants, and mobilizes
poor city youth the world over in the many forms of hip-hop
music, in Tokyo, New York, Cape Town, Mexico City, Vancouver, and
Los Angeles. What is needed in the debate about poetry, and what
I have tried to create in this book, is a wider frame of reference for
poetry and for the criticism that should nurture, challenge, and
promote it.
The terms of the debate, in other words, have not kept up with the
object of the debate. Poetry reinvents itself, much as hip-hop does, as
it goes, and our critical understanding of it lags behind. David Haven
Blake’s recent article “Reading Whitman, Growing up Rock ‘n’ Roll”
claims that if Whitman were alive in the 1960s and 1970s instead of
one hundred years previously, he would have been a rock star or folk
singer-songwriter. 8 Bob Dylan has mentioned in passing that if he
were born in the 1970s or 1980s he would be a rapper rather than a
singer. These two anecdotes suggest that poetry—both performed
and printed—reifies itself in unpredictable ways over time. Critics,
unfortunately, have a difficult time keeping up with the changes and
the ways that poetry lives and reinvents itself in the margins.
Both anecdotes also indicate that poetry is reifying as a musical
rather than literary form. Poets such as Joy Harjo, Miguel Algarín,
Sherman Alexie, and others perform their poetry with bands. Robert
Hass’s comments about the political nature of rhythm point directly
to the power of poetry and music together: “Because rhythm has