american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 63
themselves from certain implications—the juxtaposition of “the ones
you fear most of all” with “you” forces readers to reconsider their
actions as indistinct from the villainous.
If “For the Record” is provocative and righteous, Amiri Baraka’s
“Somebody Blew Up America” has added doses of aggressiveness,
defiance, and many would argue, offensive language. Most readers are
likely aware of the controversy surrounding the poem, so it is unnecessary
to review in depth Baraka’s career as a “persistent chronical of
controversies, most of them having been provoked by Baraka’s own
deliberately incendiary polemics” (Smith “Amiri Baraka” 235). The
poem, written in response to 9/11, was first delivered to the public on
September 20, 2002, at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo,
New Jersey, where it created a maelstrom of complaints, most
of which focused on the poem’s commentary on Israel. At the time of
the reading, Baraka was Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and
Governor Jim McGreevey, two years prior to his own controversy,
asked Baraka to resign. Baraka refused. It would be disingenuous to
ignore the poem’s criticism of Israel or its lament for the genocide of
European Jews during the Holocaust; therefore, I focus on its rhetorical
strategy and authoritative agency. Though such an approach could
be seen as ignoring, overriding, or even exacerbating the anti-
Semitism, it is important to look at a poem that ignited such controversy
due to its rhetoric in a study of the rhetorical strategies of
political poetry. Inflammatory rhetoric, after all, is a crucial element of
many political poems of authoritative agency and many in the Black
Arts Movement, although it is folly to ascribe to what James
Smethurst calls a “great-man theory in which Baraka’s work becomes
a metonymy for all Black Arts literature” (261). This poem, moreover,
is meant to incite, to be an uncompromising, authoritative utterance.
Overtly confrontational poems such as “Somebody Blew Up
America” are unusual in contemporary American poetry. Politically
engaged hip-hop and spoken-word artists have taken up the mantle
assumed in the 1960s by G.I. poets opposing the Vietnam War, and
by Black Arts Movement and Chicano Movement poets opposing the
institutionalized racism of the United States. Not only is the poem’s
strategy anomalous in printed poetry, its length (233 lines) departs
significantly from many contemporary political poems, unless it is considered
as a spoken-word performance piece or a hip-hop song, which
are usually longer than written poems. Further, in the United States,
unlike in many countries in Latin America, where poetry is a “fugitive
means of expression” and offers the practical advantage of being easier
to copy, distribute, memorize, and chant or perform publicly than