american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

18 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
thus commands greater distance from cultural discourses—the more
nonutilitarian and special poetry sounds, the more it fulfills its political
function (19). I agree with Blasing to an extent, but she does not go
far enough in considering the potential of various informal languages,
working-class languages, and the languages used on numerous city
streets where rhythm and rhyme are highly regarded for their differences
from standard discourses; she also appears to overstress the
power of elevated literary language. For instance, hip-hop both confirms
and subverts her claim; rule bound, it has extremely rigid forms
and does not sound at all like “normal” speech, but it is usually not
“high” diction. Hip-hop language is nonstandard English, and it
exploits a variety of appropriated linguistic and cultural discourses.
However, Blasing’s point is significant: Robert Lowell’s strongest
political poems were generally written in form—albeit innovative and
experimental form—such as sonnets, even as free verse was beginning
to carry the day, whereas poems such as Rita Dove’s “Parsley” rework
traditional forms. 10 Though I discuss mostly free verse poems in this
study, many of the poems I consider experiment with form and hold
on to it in interesting, innovative ways.
Varieties of and Strategies
for Political Poetry
What, then, are the advantages of a comprehensive study of contemporary
American political poetry, including its most popular form—
hip-hop music—through an argument about the major rhetorical
strategies poets use to engage the political? Precisely because poetry
and politics are at odds in so many ways, a broad understanding of
poets’ strategies, especially their figures of voice, may reveal clues
about how politics can be made poetic, how something so unappealing
to so many (politics, broadly understood) can be made striking,
memorable, and actionable.
In Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways
of Nothingness, John Gery approaches the relationship of poetry to the
nuclear age so as to allow for strategy’s prominence. Gery classifies the
techniques and stylistic devices poets have used to envision the nuclear
age, and he explains this method as the best alternative among others,
including approaches that outline a history of American poetry
after 1945 and that identify poems written explicitly in reaction
to events and subject matter. Gery’s four chapters explore
poems that, respectively, speak “against, through, around, and from
within potential nuclear annihilation” (13; original emphasis). Each