american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 11
“political” and what is “social” blurs. Political poems, moreover, may
not narrowly comment on a certain issue, but may comment on “the
system itself.” For instance, a poem does not have to be about a specific
political issue such as affirmative action; instead, it may comment
on the broader conditions that make a specific political policy such as
affirmative action a necessary corrective. Further, political poems may
not have a “predefined end” but may instead “redefine ends” and
“pose alternatives” to the existing economic, political, and social
structures that currently govern our lives. They are also struggles
carried into the public arena, actions themselves put into print, onto
record, or into performance.
Political poems, though, do not have to be explicitly oppositional.
Gibbons’s examination of the tension in Cardenal’s work between
poems that speak “against” and those that speak “for” helps illuminate
the ways that poems can be political without being narrowly
oppositional. Those that speak against speak against injustice, suffering,
materialism, oppression, and so on, whereas those that speak for
speak for compassion, justice, and so on (279). But it seems likely that
most poems, even those that are primarily personal and introspective,
speak for, against, and sometimes in the same poem, for and against
something or somethings. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” for
instance, generally not considered a political poem, in the popular
(but specious) reading speaks for an independent spirit of daring even
as it speaks against conformity and timidity. So, if the speaker’s stance
is important, it may be secondarily so; a political poem is one that
speaks to political issues (if only indirectly), one that consciously
engages political and socioeconomic conditions, its energy directed,
at least partially, beyond the poem itself.
Contemporary American poetry understood as political by poets,
critics, and theorists tends toward consciously issue-engaged, lyricnarrative
poetry of personal experience; that is, the poem’s political content
must be transparent to be designated “political”—some clear issue
such as the outrages of war, racism, or oppression must be readily apparent.
Further, many poets and critics narrowly define political poetry as
poetry that “takes its stand on the side of liberty” (Levertov 166) or
that “speaks for the party of humanity” (Forché “Against” 46),
thereby bracketing the functional political work of poetry that does
not challenge dominant political structures or social conventions, but
implicitly or explicitly supports them. Robert Bly insists that political
poems “do not order us to take specific acts,” a notion that seems to
contradict many of his most forceful Vietnam-era antiwar poems;
rather, he asserts that they move only to deepen awareness, a notion