american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

32 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Moving Forward
As I often tell my students, all writing is about choice. The choices
I made in writing this book reveal much about my biases, aesthetic
preferences, and political commitments. In the conclusion of this
book I consider some notable exclusions—Language Poetry, spoken
word, and poetry with other primary forms of agency—I made in
writing about the landscape of contemporary American poetry.
Further, my basic categories of political poetry are not exhaustive nor
are their borders hermetically sealed against the influences of other literary
figures of voice. As such, in the conclusion I give a reading of a
poem that spans strategies—Dove’s “The House Slave”—and of one
that uses humor as its primary form of poetic agency.
The most obvious choice I made was in terms of my theoretical
framework. In this book I put forth a new model for understanding
the varieties of American political poetry from the mid-1960s to the
present. Most critical studies of American poetry are organized by
theme (Vietnam War poetry, for instance), by writer identity (that is,
Chicana/o poetry, African American poetry), or by conceptual category
(that is, poetry of “witness”). These frames are limiting, often
leading us away from the language itself and into ever-narrowing
thematic concerns and/or identity categories. I argue that political
poetry overflows these boundaries and settles more dynamically into a
collection of distinct, but overlapping, rhetorical strategies. These
strategies foreground various kinds of poetic agency that have unique
ways of acting politically. Analyzing the ways that political agency is
actualized in poems’ rhetorical strategies, specifically in their figures of
voice, allows for the contingencies of identity positions and thematic
concerns while emphasizing how poems address social, economic, and
political issues. Most importantly, I believe, it allows us to talk about
poetry in a more expansive manner, and it move us away from arguments
that poetry “makes nothing happen” to conversations about
how poems themselves happen.
I hope, then, that this book illustrates successfully the various poetic
strategies and types of agency contemporary American poets use to
give their poems political life. I believe that hip-hop music and printed
poetry are vibrant and exciting aspects of contemporary American culture.
By placing these various forms of contemporary American poetry
in conversation with each other, this project contends that poetry grapples
ably and in myriad ways with the complexities of geopolitics, social
injustices, and politics writ large. In juxtaposition they can tell us much
about each other’s vulnerabilities and competencies. However, I do