american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 7
is always a danger when a critic embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of
political poetry. Removing poems from their political context can shift
or recontextualize their political import; however, it should not prevent
the critic from charting the political strategies of poems.
Moreover, as Günter Grass has suggested, much good writing depends
on a hearing at some point forward in time (cited in Des Pres Praises &
Dispraises 225), which is especially important for printed poems that
may slowly appreciate in value. Even though much political poetry
becomes dated—I think especially of many protest poems from the
1960s—the transferability of poetry to a point forward in time can
reinvigorate political poems and stretch their meanings across contexts.
3 Hip-hop, on the other hand, may be most vibrant in the cultural
and historical moment of its transmission, especially if it is in a live performance,
which I explore at length in chapter 4. Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s hermeneutics highlight the instability of all texts because
meaning changes from one historical context to the next. He points
out that all interpretations of a text consist of a dialogue between past
and present; consequently, all understanding is productive and adds to
the meaning of a specific poem. 4
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Centers in New York City, Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” originally
written from Manhattan to mark the date of Germany’s invasion
of Poland, had a renaissance due to its eerie reverberations with the
aftermath of terror sixty-two years later. In a recent essay, Stephen
Burt explores the public’s increased interest in poetry after the attacks,
and the way that the poem was presented following 9/11 as “an idealtypical
example of the kind of poetic object academic readers now
seek,” one that “described shared, urgent, clearly public concerns for
a large body of people” (535). Thus, whereas some poems, such as
Don L. Lee’s “From a Black Perspective” (1969) about George
Wallace, which utilizes African American traditions of signifying and
playing the dozens, become depoliticized over thirty years later when
Wallace is largely forgotten, others, such as “September 1, 1939,”
become more than just great poems or pertinent cultural/historical
documents—they re-become poignant political poems. 5
In an essay on Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and political
poetry, Reginald Gibbons discusses the penetrating specificity of
Cardenal’s poetry, but subsequently allows for what I understand as a
transhistorical and transtemporal movement of the poem. Depending
on the context, a poem may be politically important when it is published,
but it may also become important politically. For instance, historian
Howard Zinn points out that the International Ladies Garment