american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

the extant criticism about the isolated, speaking “I” of lyric poetry
into social and political space: the Pragmatists, Hannah Arendt, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Brian Massumi all see individual identity as activated in
and through action, where action transforms the relations of the field.
Action does not express a preexisting identity; rather, action creates
and forms identity. Arendt also pointed out that individual identity is
possible only in a matrix of social and political relations because identity
emerges out of interrelations rather than out of isolation, a notion
that is key to the theories I lay out about live hip-hop in chapter 4.
The notion of action as creative and productive rather than referential
opens up political poetry to a more expansive paradigm than the
opposition between imagination and reality, wherein a poem represents
either the product of imagination or the witness to actual events.
A framework of agency further assists in elucidating poems as
objects in the mix of social and political space, as contestation points
between actors, structures, and material realities. It helps to illustrate
the ways in which poems display the constraints limiting agents’
actions and the way that social and political forces shape action and
individual and collective agency and identity. Massumi’s work on
movement is meaningful for my understanding of politics and agency
in poetry. He sees positionality—the individual’s roles and positions in
society—as an emergent quality of movement, where the field of emergence
for the agent is “open-endedly social.” With every move, with
every change, there is something new to the world, an added reality so
that the world is self-augmenting. Every experience carries a “fringe of
active indetermination” (232). Just like those (real, imagined, or
recreated) experiences related in a political poem, the sense of active
indetermination centers a poem in public space, where the experience
inside the poem is also in some sense outside it in public, social, political
spaces, and with other readers, listeners. Political poems, I argue,
often track a speaker’s awareness of what Dewey, Massumi, James,
Arendt, and Giddens all tackle: our awareness is always of an “already
ongoing participation” in developing relations as “we become conscious
of a situation in its midst, already actively engaged in it”
(Massumi 231). For live hip-hop this immersion is requisite for the
creation of a vibrant political space and audience–performer interaction.
Types of Agency in
Political Poetry
INTRODUCTION 23
In chapter 1 I discuss two types of poems that utilize personal experience
as a poetic strategy. I group them under the chapter heading embodied
agency because both experiential agency and authoritative agency rely