american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 17
for personal as much as political reasons. Any essential alliance of
techniques with specific political values is faulty because many poets
uninterested in politics made the same shift. Free verse, then, was radical
for Whitman, the French Symbolists, and even for the Beats, but
beginning with the 1960s free verse became conventional. It is now
the dominant, hegemonic form for printed poetry. Therefore, it is
important to note that the politics of free forms is unstable and does
not align precisely with oppositional values.
Hip-hop lyrics, which embody a range of implicit and explicit political
values, are mostly in strict form with rhyming couplets, straight
rhyme, assonance, and as one book puts it, “the verse’s syntax and
meter often tortured for rhythmic gain” (Costello and Wallace 24).
Hip-hop, then, is more formal than most contemporary poetry, and it
is often much more explicitly political. However, Robert Hass writes
that since free verse is now “neutral” there is “an enormous impulse”
for poets “to establish tone rather than to make form.” He claims that
a free verse poem does not have an imposed “specific character” so
poets often “make a character in it” by working hard to establish a
distinctive tone (Twentieth 71). His claim rings true for many poems
I discuss in this book, regardless of their specific strategy. Tone, I argue,
is important for political poems because it gives them distinctive figures
of voice. Like a politician or rapper, a poem needs a distinctive voice in
order for it to be memorable for its audience. Hass concludes that “on
the level of form the difference between the strategies of free and metrical
verse is not very great” (Twentieth 122). Metrical poems, he
notes, immediately announce their patterns but free verse patterns
emerge as they develop. Many free verse poems in fact have a pattern—
of beats per line, of line lengths—discernible in a full reading.
Studies of political poetry should delve further than an alignment
of certain forms with certain sociopolitical commitments. Gibbons
notes that Ezra Pound and Ernesto Cardenal were diametrically
opposed politically, the latter leftist utilizing the poetic innovations of
the fascist, but they shared both technique and the “assumptions that
the structure of a society and of institutions, if changed, could
improve the spiritual and material conditions of man, and that poetry
may participate in the attempt to change what exists” (280). So, while
it is unwise to align form with politics, it seems important to understand
how both Pound and Cardenal understood poetry’s potential
energies and its meliorist functions. Even if there is no strict alignment
of ideological values with forms, Blasing calls to account the possibility
of political resonance in the choice of forms. She believes that metrical
verse has more political potential because it flaunts artifice and