american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

212 NOTES
7. Victor Hernández Cruz argues that consumer society does not value
poetry because it lacks extrinsic sale-value: “In the United States,
people see poets as just playing word games, unimportant to the real
operation of a materialistic society. In capitalism, there isn’t a place for
poetry. ‘The books don’t sell,’ they would say. This doesn’t change
the function of the wordsmith in society. The poet makes awareness
available to the masses” (Dick 62).
8. See The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2005): 34–47. This issue
celebrates Whitman and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the publication of Leaves of Grass.
9. “Commercial rap is Republican” is a contentious but legitimate claim.
The dominant tropes of commercial hip-hop include: individual
wealth as key to happiness, upward social mobility, and power; you
can achieve your (material) dreams if you work and hustle hard
enough (that is, nothing can stop you from getting rich if you want it
enough); there are clearly delineated traditional gender relations with
men having more power than women; negotiation and compromise
are for the weak; and militant action can solve problems. These are
caricatures, but they hold as generalizations. For example, 50 Cent’s
multi-platinum debut album is titled Get Rich or Die Tryin. On
another note, Slam, starring Saul Williams as a poet/drug dealer
living in the Washington, D.C. housing projects, won the 1998
Sundance Film Festival grand prize. It is an apt introduction to the
energy, creativity, and multiculturalism of spoken-word poetry.
10. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” appears on It Takes a Nation of
Millions to Hold Us Back (New York: Columbia Records, 1988).
“Fight the Power,” Fear of a Black Planet (New York: Columbia
Records, 1989), which originally appeared in Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing, is another of Public Enemy’s powerful anthems.