american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

10 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
actions in other agents.” This definition is appropriate in a study of
political poetry “even though the kinds of assent evoked have no overt,
practical outcome” (41, 50). Mutlu Konuk Blasing further erodes a
strict divide between private poetry and public speech when she argues
that poetic rhetoric is at once figuration and persuasion, which allows
the critic to negotiate poetry’s uneasy relationship between indirection
and direct political message. She appears to agree with Gibbons, who
says that political rhetoric values persuasion, whereas poetry values
perception and insight. Blasing writes, “poetry’s public function is to
grant a perspective on how all meanings are rhetorical and therefore
political” (21–22). Both suggest that poetry’s role is to strip away
surface veneer in order to create new perspectives, meanings that are
present but must be unveiled through poetry—“the sight of what is
visible” and “the understanding of what is hidden” (Gibbons 294).
Political poetry, then, appears to have as its charge the role of revelation.
Yet if lyric poetry is always indirect, must it also obscure what it
reveals? I implicitly explore this question in chapter 2 when I discuss
poems that are often indirect and equivocal.
Ways of Talking about
Political Poetry
In addition to understanding the roles of poetry in society and the
public responsibilities of poets, a book about political poetry should
interrogate the array of signifiers, terminology, and confusion for
what counts as “political” poetry. Some readers may wonder, as did
the interlocutors I mentioned in the preface, how exactly to identify a
political poem. What should be considered political poetry? What
shapes do political poems take? What kinds of political work do they
attempt? What kinds of voices? What kinds of speakers? I begin with a
simple but expansive definition, a “broader view” of politics, put forth
by Michael Parenti:
Politics is more than just something politicians do. It is the process of
struggle over conflicting interests carried into the public arena. It also
involves muting and suppressing conflicting interests. Politics involves
not only the competition among groups within the system but the
struggle to change the system itself, not only the desire to achieve
predefined ends but the struggle to redefine ends and pose alternatives
to the existing politico-economic structure. (3)
Drawing from Parenti’s view of politics, my definition of political
poems is inclusive and far-ranging. For me, the line between what is