american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 19
chapter title doubles as a new signifier for a poetic technique and
strategy: “Nuclear Protest Poetry,” “The Apocalyptic Lyric,”
“Psychohistorical Poetry in the Nuclear Age,” and “The Poetry of
Destinerrance” are departure points for Gery’s exploration of poems.
This organization allows the author “to underscore how poets have
imagined the nuclear world more than what they explicitly say about
it” (12; my emphasis). I use Gery’s method as a departure point and
focus here on how poets make their poems political. Such an approach
inevitably leads away from a primary emphasis on content or on an
event-based perspective and to an emphasis on the imaginative strategies
and voices poets use to be political. Bernstein writes that “poetry
can be a process of thinking rather than a report of things already
settled, an investigation of figuration rather than a picture of something
already figured out” (5), a claim that converges with both my
approach and with Gery’s exploration of how poets imagine nuclear
threats instead of what they say about them.
My primary aim in this book is to elucidate the primary techniques
of contemporary American political poetry by doing extensive readings
of specific representative poems. For each strategy, I choose five to six
poems that I believe best represent the characteristics of the particular
rhetorical strategy. I consider strategies for engagement the primary
departure point for my study of American political poems, with their
sites of engagement and issues of engagement secondary variables for
understanding the work they attempt. Gibbons’s proposition that
political poetry is “inextricable” from specific poems at “particular historical
moments” leads to his suggestion that it is apt only to discuss
examples of political poems (207) rather than to explicate political
poetry with broad critical strokes. The examples I choose to write
about range from the Vietnam-era to the present; I occasionally select
poems that appear in anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of
Modern and Contemporary Poetry, whereas others I choose are lesserknown
poems that exhibit a range of qualities important to my study. In
choosing both Norton “worthy” poems by “canonical” poets, those
that have been published only in magazines and journals, and those that
have been anthologized in books such as Postmodern American Poetry:
A Norton Anthology, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political
Imagination from Curbstone Press, and other lesser-known anthologies,
I hope to engage a broad cross-section of American poetic practices,
engagements, and strategies. Most of the hip-hop artists I discuss
are independent artists, iconic figures in the culture, or politically
resonant ones. My choices generally align with my aesthetic
preferences and knowledge base, and my approach in this book allows