american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

eceived less attention from theorists due to a widely held assumption
that it depends on mimesis and the idea that language always conveys
the unmediated presence of the speaker, essentialized referents, and a
passive representation of the natural world (xiv). Nevertheless, for
political poems, concrete referentiality and the tangible world outside
the poem dilate attention on the “occasion” of poems, whether the
occasion is terrorist attacks in the United States or the abuses of a
Nicaraguan dictator. Do events create the need for poems or do poets
recreate events, or a combination of the two? The answer must be an
affirmative to both poles. For example, Carolyn Forché’s poems of
El Salvador seem to substantiate the first whereas those of Charles
Simic’s WWII Yugoslavia seem to affirm the later. In hip-hop, The
Perceptionists’s “Memorial Day” (Black Dialogue 2005), which
berates President Bush for going to war in Iraq, demands an explanation
for the “missing” weapons of mass destruction. In this case, the
event itself spurred the creative response.
Political Poetry and Indirection
INTRODUCTION 9
There has been much debate about the public functions of poetry, a
debate that converges with another important theoretical concern in
the discussion of political poetry—the interstices between direction
and indirection, or the supposed binary opposition between direct
public speech and lyric poetry. 7 The latter usually works through
figurative language, indirection, and obliquity, often displaying clarity
and referentiality only intermittently. In a strike against poetry written
specifically to move others to a certain action or set of actions, Hirsch
claims that “voice in written poetry is always metaphorical, never
literal” (How to 103), whereas Barbara Herrnstein-Smith brings up
another problem for some political poetry when she writes that lyric
poetry must affect its audience even as it must pretend that it has no
audience to affect (141). Jenny Goodman, on the other hand,
disrupts any private/public divide when she foregrounds her essay on
Joy Harjo with a reference to the false dividing line between poetic
and public discourses. Poetry, she claims, links to Aristotle’s understanding
of “language as a process in which a speaker uses language in
an attempt to move people toward action in public settings,” even if
for Aristotle art is cathartic and a way to prevent regular citizens from
engaging in public action (37).
Goodman also refers to Kenneth Burke’s definition of rhetoric and
its inclusion of literary forms. According to Burke, poetry as rhetoric
is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce