american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

30 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
American culture, but also what they perceive as the vacuity, ignorance,
and greed of mainstream hip-hop. Even though KRS-One’s 1989
proclamation in my introduction’s epigraph that “the age of the
ignorant rapper is done” has sadly not come to pass, much hip-hop
retains the promise of a dynamic art with resistant political power.
The impact of hip-hop on generations of young people in the
United States is palpable. Poetry, whether written by Emily
Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, or Lucille Clifton,
may be a beneficiary. Houston A. Baker, Jr., writes that hip-hop has
revised the current generation’s expectations of poetry, which suggests
the need for further work on hip-hop as a dynamic, popular form
of poetry. If printed poetry is to flourish in secondary schools and colleges,
where many students listen to hip-hop everyday, instructors
could exploit students’ knowledge of hip-hop as an entry way to
teaching other types of poetry. Baker’s understanding of poetry as
“disruptive performance” and as a “sounding space of opposition”
also opens up space for hip-hop lyrics to be read as poems. Poetry, for
Baker, is an “alternative space of the conditional,” a notion important
in many formulations of political poetry (94–96), especially in the
ways that poems can create imaginary visions of justice and injustice.
Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, too, claim that hip-hop is
“serious poetry” and that it was the first music to begin creative work
on the “threat of economic inequality to American ideals” (98–100).
Joseph Harrington opens up further space for the study of hip-hop
as poetry when he writes that “poetry” overdetermines poems. He
claims there is no a priori essence to poetry; it is important, he insists,
to look at noninstitutional forms of poetry that “decenter and decentralize
art-writing from the norms and sites of literary authority”
(10–11). Of course, however, much hip-hop is thoroughly
institutional—the commanding roles that corporate conglomerates
MTV (owned by Disney), Viacom, Clear Channel, 16 Sony, and others
play in producing, promoting, commodifying, and controlling much
hip-hop music co-opt large swaths of its cultural landscape. Moreover,
Harrington writes that the cultural uses of poetry in the 1990s shifted
as radically as they did in the Romantic period, an important point for
a study that charts the strategies of political poetry, especially as I consider
the ways hip-hop has emerged as political poetry. He also notes
that critics and poets tend to define poetry with reference to “the
public”—“either as an alternative to or refuge from the public, as a
vehicle or mode for participating in and engaging with the public, or
as a way of negotiating or problematizing the separation of public
and private spheres” (168). Much of the hip-hop that I discuss can