american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 13
Though defining the political is important for my book, defining
the broader subject of poetry is equally so. “American” poetry is itself
a loaded term. I am against, in Bernstein’s words, an American
literature understood as a positive, expressive “totalization” (2). What
we usually consider American literature ignores a large percentage of
the literature created in América, below the Rio Grande in Central
and South America and in the Caribbean, as well as in Canada. The
limited use of this term also privileges English as the language, literary
and otherwise, of the Americas, whereas Spanish is spoken by the
majority of América’s citizens. As early as 1889, Walt Whitman saw a
difference between “American literature” and “United States
literature.” As Ed Folsom wrote on the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman “heard something in
the term ‘America’ ” that most U.S. citizens “do not hear today, in
part because the term has been so fully appropriated by the US as a
synonym for itself, ‘at somebody else’s expense’ as Whitman would
remind us” (110). Many citizens of Latin America often think of
themselves as “Americans” in the broadest sense of the term, whereas
in the United States we often think of the term only in reference to
ourselves. In this book, then, I use the term “American” for
convenience’s sake, but I do so understanding that it is compromised,
limiting, and inferior to the Spanish estadounidense, for which
English-speaking North Americans have no equivalent.
Bernstein’s notion that disparate poetic practices comprise a shifting
poetic space is also important here, especially because I discuss both
printed poetry and performed hip-hop lyrics. He writes that “disparate
practices” occupy “a poetic space that is grounded not in an identical
social position but in the English language itself as the material with
which we make our regroupings and refoundings” (8). I draw from
this notion in establishing some theoretical guidelines for this book,
about which I speak in detail later in this introduction. First, by focusing
on how poems work as texts rather than on what their objects of
study are (for example, themes and subjects) or what the identities of
their writers are (for example, African American or female), I implicitly
argue that language is the thing that makes the debate. In other words,
we “make” our groupings and foundings in language, and we understand
identity positions in and through language. Why not study the
language, voices, and rhetoric of poems as a first-order concern rather
than approach American political poetry through the lens of identity,
subject matter, or theme? Is it not limiting to approach the work of
Yusef Komunyakaa simply as an African American poet or a Vietnam
War poet or Mark Doty solely as a gay poet? Though both of