american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONCLUSION 197
For example, I write “J-Live raps” or “Mr. Lif claims.” I have come to
believe that this difference is not merely one of convention or personal
preference. Even though rappers rhetorically stage a variety of voices
and personas in their songs, their voices are more direct than the voices
in printed poems. The sound of the human voice in all its inflections,
intonations, rhythms, and emotions makes hip-hop more immediate
and personal. When Rich wrote about how “the art of the griot,
performed in alliance with music and dance” can be used “to evoke
and catalyze a community or communities against passivity and victimization,”
I think she had in mind this immediacy and urgency. This use
of voice, appropriately, is “at the heart of the renascence of poetry as an
oral art” (What Is Found 86).
Hip-hop voices, too, show us that we live in a country at “perpetual
war,” in which poetry and institutional powers are at odds. Many rappers
suggest that there is no reprieve in urban ghettoes from the conditions
of war. Mobb Deep’s “Survival of the Fittest” (1995) expresses
this notion best—“there’s a war going on outside no man is safe
from”—and KRS-One, in the epigraph in the introduction to this
book, raps that poetry must “conquer it [war] and its law.” If the
United States as global hegemonic power is in a state of perpetual warfare,
then questions about authority and usefulness will always hound
poetry. Poets will always face varying pressures—to tackle geopolitical
realities, to evade them, to feign indifference, to defend poetry, to
lament poetry’s place in the world, to create images of justice, possibility,
and community. As such, the various articles and books that appear
every so often about “the writer in wartime” or some deviation thereof
are slightly off the mark. If poets take for their imaginative realm the
entire world, then there is never a time when the debates about “the
writer in wartime” do not apply, especially because the United States is
at least minimally implicated in most conflicts. If there’s not a war on
directly involving the United States, there is one brewing, or one in a
country from which many have immigrated to the United States. Or,
there is one on that cultivates the disgust, sympathy, or fear of U.S.
citizens, some of whom are poets. As Galway Kinnell writes in “When
the Towers Fell,” the searchlight that look for bodies “always goes on /
somewhere, now in New York and Kabul,” soon Baghdad, Darfur,
Uzbekistan, London. And, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said in his
famous Riverside Church speech of April 4, 1967: “A nation that
continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” (King). This
“spiritual death” is exactly what poets and poetry fights against and
exactly why poetry remains at odds with a society at “perpetual war.”