american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

8 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Workers Union used Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” as a rallying cry
during strikes in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century
(326). 6 In his analysis of a Cardenal poem in which the speaker names
Nicaragua’s dictator, Gibbons claims that a substitution of a different
tyrannical political or historical figure known by an audience as a violent
dictator will not change the poem’s meaning, “only its focus”
(282–283), just as the focus of Shelley’s poem changed in the decades
after its writing. The recent revival of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as postcolonial texts can be understood
through a similar lens.
Although there have been many arguments that the role and
cultural esteem of poets in the United States since the 1960s has
changed greatly (mostly for the worse, critics and observers claim), in
the aftermath of 9/11 and the events that have followed such as the
incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, the role of poets has rekindled
some of the public spirit of 1960s poets. The evidence is circumstantial
but prodigious: Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell,” which
first appeared in The New Yorker a year after the attacks; Amiri
Baraka’s confrontational “Somebody Blew Up America,” which
incited a flurry of anti-Semitic accusations; performance poet Saul
Williams’s project against the war in Afghanistan called Not in My
Name; Sam Hamill’s project Poets against the War; the cancelled
poetry-month celebration to be hosted by Laura Bush at the White
House; and the speaking appearances of poets at rallies across
the country, such as Robert Hass in Berkeley in September 2001.
These examples indicate a greater public role for poets when dramatic
events impinge on everyday living. Why do we turn to poets such as
Hass, a former U.S. Poet Laureate (1993–1995) better known—if
somewhat inaccurately—for poems of introspection than political
poems, when we are faced with uncertainty? Poets, we still seem to
believe, can access truth by stripping back superficial appearances for
deeper meanings and by giving revelatory insight into public issues in
ways that politicians and journalists cannot.
Gibbons indirectly points out one of the potential consequences of
poets being charged with commenting on political and social issues.
He discusses Cardenal’s self-imposed requirement that his staunchly
political poetry refer to a tangible world outside the poem. Such an
approach skirts the possibility of pulling poetic creation into the
domain of referentiality and away from the imagination. Leonard M.
Scigaj points out a similar problematic in his monograph on American
“ecopoetry” (poems by A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin,
and Gary Snyder) when he conjectures that environmental poetry has