american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

20 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
for a tangible sacrifice in depth—of a specific poet or hip-hop artist,
specific “school” of poetry, or a defined period of literary history—for
breadth.
My framework for reading contemporary political poetry is
twofold. My first consideration is the distinctive rhetorical strategies
and figures of voice that characterize political poems. Categorizing
strategies of political poetry makes rhetorical strategy primary. The
categories depart from previous formulations of political poetry in
that they foreground the uses of language in poems—figures of voice,
kinds of narrative trajectory, types of “evidence,” tones of authority,
and the types of images and rhetorical figures. I set out to see how
poems act politically. These categories, moreover, are not selfcontained;
there is significant overlap and slippage between strategies.
In the conclusion I discuss a poem that actualizes multiple strategies.
My categories are not nearly as rigid as Northrop Frye’s four narrative
categories into which any work of literature can fit. One poem may
embody multiple strategies; however, I choose the one that governs
the poem, that shapes its action, power, impact, and this reader’s
response to it. Further, there are significant changes in strategy from
poem to poem or from volume to volume in a poet’s career. For
instance, Forché abandoned her lyric-narrative, free verse poetry of
The Country between Us for the staging of multiple voices in The
Angel of History, 11 and rappers often change their voice, style, and
persona from song to song. Most importantly, the categories are not
poet-generated; instead, I formulated them in order to clarify and
illuminate the political work of contemporary American poetry. But to
be clear, the poetry is generative of the strategies—I did not read
poetry and listen to hip-hop for years with this framework in mind;
rather, the framework comes from years of trying to understand the
political work of printed poetry and hip-hop.
While the categories are an emergent quality of the poetry itself, this
book certainly reveals my preferences. Gibbons claims that the
“evaluation of political poetry” must always lead to the phrase
“political evaluation of poetry” (297). My evaluative methods and
choices are political in that I do not evaluate politically conservative
poems, and I occasionally value representative breadth above aesthetic
brilliance. Explicitly conservative poems (in terms of viewpoint, rather
than in terms of style) are, in any case, difficult to find. Poets generally
seem a progressive lot these days, even if not stylistically. Further,
though I do not evaluate what I consider “bad” poems, I do not feel
indebted to traditional Western, Anglo-European aesthetic paradigms.
Giving space and consideration to poems that refute Western aesthetics