american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

12 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
that departs fully from any notion of a poem as a facilitator of action
(“Leaping” 134). Poems, then, can be part of (or symbolic of) a
culture’s consciousness shift. Similarly, Robert Duncan draws from
William Blake’s ideas about poetry and politics as he contends that
great political poetry is “visionary” in its presentation of events as
“part of larger and more universal paradigms.” He positions poetry
as an imaginative endeavor that must not “become a mouthpiece for
a righteous cause” or offer cures for political issues (cited in Perloff
“Poetry in Time” 209). Duncan would likely discount Cardenal’s
“tactical” poems, as the term has been used by Thomas McGrath, as
poems, since they stand in certain opposition to both of his
imperatives. Duncan’s position reveals more about his preference for
what McGrath calls “strategic” poems, which are poems that work to
expand consciousness, rather than tactical poems, which often speak
for a cause and diagnose political problems (McGrath 28–29).
A further conundrum in the discourse surrounding contemporary
political poetry is the multitude of signifiers for the political poem.
Mary K. DeShazer’s study of women’s “resistance” poetry,
Forché’s anthology of “witness” poetry, Hirsch’s discussion of
“transpersonal” poetry, McGrath’s “tactical” (context-specific poems)
and “strategic” political poems, and John Gery’s study of contemporary
poetry’s embeddedness in the nuclear age as a “discourse of survival,”
amongst others, provide thorny departure points for any study of
political poetry. When these signifiers are viewed in conjunction with
the prevailing disregard for polemical poetry, political poetry occupies
an overdetermined but murkily defined place in the criticism. Rather
than open up a platform of debate, these signifiers for politically and
socially engaged poetry often reduce it to one of two spaces—active
opposition or consciousness raising, a problematic that dovetails with
the illusory either/or proposition of McGrath’s dualistic “strategic”
and “tactical” political poetry. Bly’s insistence that the political poem
“comes out of the deepest privacy” (“Leaping” 132), which collapses
what is often seen as a divide between the personal poem and the
political poem, is much different from Adrienne Rich’s proclamation
that “the personal is political.” 8 Again, these assumptions limit the
range of political poetry to either an autonomous realm of assertion or
one of contestation. In the chapters that follow, I discuss poems that
could be understood as assertive, contestatory, and various
combinations thereof. I hope that my discussions will help move us
away from this dichotomy toward an understanding of political poetry
as a collection of multiple rhetorical strategies, with unique, but overlapping
figures of voice.