While interiority may be a potential impediment to poets speaking to sociopolitical issues, poetic form is often wrongly considered a yoke that must be rejected in order to write politically. While the common perception styles an easy correlation between form and political motivation – metrical voice is conservative, free verse is politically progressive – this understanding is highly inaccurate. Both Shetley and Blasing point out that poetic form and political values do not always align neatly. Blasing writes that “techniques serve political rather than revelatory functions…without any inherent authority” (10). A specific poetic strategy can be contestatory or politically hegemonic. Now “making it new” is decades past
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and free verse is the norm and, therefore, some would argue, politically neutralized. In the 1960s mainstream poets such as Kinnell, James Wright, Bly, Philip Levine, Rich, Merwin, and Donald Hall began writing free verse partly in response to the political climate and partly in response to New Criticism, formalism, and their training in them, but they often did so for personal as much as political reasons. Any essential alliance of techniques with specific political values is faulty because many poets uninterested in politics made the same shift. Free verse, then, was radical for Whitman, the French Symbolists, or even for the Beats, but beginning with the 1960s free verse became conventional. It is now the dominant, hegemonic form for printed poetry. Therefore, it is important to note that the politics of free forms is unstable and does not align precisely with oppositional values.
Hip hop lyrics, which embody a range of implicit and explicit political values, are mostly in strict form with rhyming couplets, straight rhyme, assonance, and as one book puts it, “the verse’s syntax and meter often tortured for rhythmic gain” (Costello and Foster Wallace 24). Hip hop, then, has much more form than most contemporary poetry, and it is often much more explicitly political. However, Robert Hass writes that since free verse is now “neutral” there is “an enormous impulse” for poets “to establish tone rather than to make form.” He claims that a free verse poem does not have an imposed “specific character” so poets often “make a character in it” by working hard to establish a distinctive tone (Twentieth 71). His claim rings true for many poems I discuss in this book, regardless of their specific strategy. Tone, I argue, is important for political poems because it gives them distinctive voices. Like a politician or rapper, a poem needs a distinctive voice in order for it to be memorable for its audience. Hass concludes that “on the level of form the difference between the strategies of free and metrical verse is not very great” (Twentieth 122). Metrical poems, he says,
immediately announce their patterns but free verse patterns emerge as they develop. Many free verse poems in fact have a pattern – of beats per line, of line lengths – discernible in a full reading.
Studies of political poetry should delve further than an alignment of certain forms with certain sociopolitical commitments. Reginald Gibbons notes that Ezra Pound and Ernesto Cardenal were diametrically opposed politically, the latter leftist utilizing the poetic innovations of the fascist, but they shared both technique and the “assumptions that the structure of a society and of institutions, if changed, could improve the spiritual and material conditions of man, and that poetry may participate in the attempt to change what exists” (280). So, while it is unwise to align form with politics, it seems important to understand how both Pound and Cardenal understood poetry’s potential energy and its meliorist functions. Even if there is no strict alignment of ideological values with forms, Blasing calls to account the possibility of political resonance in the choice of forms. She believes that metrical verse has more political potential because it flaunts artifice and thus commands greater distance from cultural discourses – the more nonutilitarian and special poetry sounds, the more it fulfills its political function (19). I agree with Blasing to an extent, but she partly ignores the potential of various informal languages, working class languages, and the languages used on numerous city streets where rhythm and rhyme are highly regarded for their differences from standard discourses; she also overstresses the power of elevated literary language. For instance, hip hop both confirms and subverts her claim; rule bound, it has an extremely rigid form and does not sound at all like “normal” speech, but it is usually not “high” diction.” It often is non-standard English and exploits a variety of appropriated cultural discourses. However, Blasing’s point is significant: Robert Lowell’s strongest political poems were
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generally written in form – albeit highly innovative and experimental – such as sonnets, even as free verse was beginning to carry the day, while poems such as Rita Dove’s “Parsley” rework traditional forms.7A comprehensive study of political poetry should consider poems written in free forms and those written in more traditional forms. While I discuss mostly free verse poems, in the conclusion I briefly consider a metrical, end-rhymed poem.