american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 21
for “alternative” aesthetics, such as Native American, Latina/o, spoken
word and voice-driven aesthetics, and the African American aesthetics
of hip-hop and the Black Arts Movement, which draw from African
American and west African traditions of signifying and playing the
dozens, foregrounds rhetorical strategy instead of any “inherent”
poetic value. This approach also allows me to bracket the somewhat
specious universal question of whether a poem must be “good”
(whose good, it begs) to be a strong political poem. The traditional
Western aesthetic is inadequate for evaluating political poetry; unlike
Levertov, von Hallberg, and Alicia Ostriker, who imply (some more
strongly than others) that political poetry must be judged by the same
standards by which we judge all poetry, I contend that if we follow
their directive, some of the most powerful political poetry being written
in this country would be ignored. 12 Hip-hop artists, I argue, probably
have much more political potential at their disposal than poets who
work in printed form. Unlike poets, many of the rappers I discuss have
larger, more enthusiastic, loyal audiences, participatory live shows, and
more cultural capital as the bards of contemporary culture.
Agency: A Framework for Reading
Political Poetry
My framework for reading poems and understanding their strategies is
derived from theories of agency that work to negotiate the individual
agent’s ability to act according to her purposes in relation to the
determining material, political, and social forces that constrain action.
Theories of agency can tease out the nuanced sensibilities of individual
and collective agency—of paramount importance in political
action—in contemporary American poetry. I understand poems as
actions, as engagements with agents in various social fields. In an
interview with American Poetry Review, Yusef Komunyakaa claims
that “poetry is an action” that “reconnects us to the act of dreaming
ourselves into existence” (Hass et al. “How Poetry” 21–27).
Komunyakaa refers, deliberately or otherwise, to Burke’s notion of literature
as “symbolic action” where action in the “real” world is practically
difficult (for example, in stopping a war or a widespread
invidious way of thinking) but conceivable in language. 13 Poetry as
action can be both creative and referential action; in Komunyakaa’s
words, poems can call potential future actions into existence.
Therefore, they make conceivable in language what is difficult to
achieve in the “real” world; they show us not what is, but what could
be or might have been, through images of justice, peace, community,