american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

14 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
these identity positions may reveal something about their interests,
concerns, and language, they also limit the critic’s frame and bias their
readings. They also prevent potentially revealing juxtapositions
between diverse writers who share, if not identity positions and
thematic concerns, then similar poetics.
Second, though I also agree with Bernstein that disparate practices
and rhetorical strategies are grounded in the materials of language, I do
not agree that these practices begin and end with English. It is also
important to consider the influences and materiality of Spanish for not
only the Latina/o poets who utilize both English and Spanish, some of
whom I discuss in chapter 3, but also for many wholly English-language
poems that may be influenced by Spanish-speaking cultures. For instance,
many twentieth-century U.S. poets have been greatly influenced by
Neruda, Vallejo, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, and other Latin
American writers (many of whom themselves were greatly influenced by
Whitman), and yet others have been influenced by the techniques and
sensibilities of magic realism. I argue that the scope of political poetry
in the United States must be broadened to include poetic strategies
that foreground language choice and language interchange. Social
positions and geographic locations, then, can be viewed within the
materiality of languages and their criss-crossings. “America” and
“American poetry,” like the boundaries between English and Spanish,
and like the shape-shifting signifier and its signified “political poetry,”
are contested spaces. Many readers may also contest that hip-hop is
“poetry,” a claim that I hope is refuted in chapter 4.
Political Poetry and
Interiority
A primary obstacle for political poetry is the widely held notion that
poetry is foremost a private expression. This belief can be attributed to
a variety of factors: a hangover from the Romantic era (although
Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology suggests otherwise); 9 the
false assumption that poets are antisocial outcasts, partially inherited
from the reception for the Beats in the 1950s; the aesthetic prominence
of the lyric in contemporary poetry, which is often viewed as a
form appropriate primarily for introspection; the legacy inherited
from high modernism that poetry should be both difficult and a monument
to the individual; and the defensible notion that “poetry is
often seen as a ‘natural’ medium for the recounting and examining of
personal experience” (Roberts and Allison 1). Jenny Goodman writes
that “mainstream thinking” views poetry as “culturally apart” and