american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

16 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
and its audiences. Hip-hop can literally bring its listeners to new
knowledge and ideas and to ignored historical figures. Of course,
some hip-hop can potentially have a negative impact on impressionable
youth too. In junior high and in high school everything I learned
about African American history, the Civil Rights Movement, and radical
movements of the 1960s came from listening to hip-hop. Because
I was not learning about them in history classes, these glimpses of a
broader American history were, I see now, crucial in forming my views
about the world and my interests as a poet, scholar, and teacher.
Listening to artists such as Boogie Down Productions, Just-Ice,
X Clan, Public Enemy, Brand Nubian, Paris, Pete Rock and
C.L. Smooth, and Poor Righteous Teachers—some when I was as
young as twelve years old—had an immeasurable impact on my sense
of justice and my desire to learn about cultural and political figures
rarely mentioned in school. MC Slug of the rap group Atmosphere
sums up these influences, both positive and negative: “as a child hiphop
made me read books / and hip-hop made me want to be a
crook / and hip-hop gave me the way and something to say” (“Party
for the Fight to Write” Lucy Ford 1998). In contrast, I did not begin
reading poetry seriously until college when hip-hop had already
staked its claim on my consciousness, a situation I believe is true for
many twenty-somethings and college students over the last decade.
Political Poetry and
Poetic Form
Interiority may be a potential impediment to poets speaking to
sociopolitical conditions; however, poetic form is often wrongly
considered a yoke that must be rejected in order to write politically
engaged verse. While the common perception styles an easy correlation
between form and political motivation—metrical voice is conservative,
free verse is politically progressive—this understanding is inaccurate.
Both Shetley and Blasing point out that poetic form and political values
do not always align neatly. Blasing writes that “techniques serve
political rather than revelatory functions . . . without any inherent
authority” (10). A specific poetic strategy can be contestatory or politically
hegemonic. “Making it new” is many decades past, and free
verse is the norm and, some would argue, politically neutralized. In
the 1960s poets such as Kinnell, Bly, Rich, Merwin, James Wright,
Philip Levine, and Donald Hall began writing free verse partly in
response to the political climate and partly in rejection of New
Criticism, formalism, and their training in them, but they often did so