What, then, are the advantages of a relatively comprehensive study of contemporary American political poetry, including its most popular form – hip hop music – through an argument about the major rhetorical strategies poets use to engage the political? Precisely because poetry and politics seem to be at odds in so many ways, a broad understanding of poets’ strategies may reveal clues about how politics can be made poetic, how something so unappealing to so many (politics, broadly understood) can be made poetic, striking, memorable, and actionable.
In Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness, John Gery approaches the relationship of poetry to the nuclear age so as to allow for strategy’s prominence. He classifies the techniques and stylistic devices poets have used to envision the nuclear age. He explains his method as the best alternative among others, including approaches that outline a history of American poetry after 1945, or identify poems written explicitly in reaction to events or certain paradigms of subject matter. Gery’s four chapters explore poems that, respectively, speak “against,through,around, and from within potential nuclear annihilation” (original emphasis 13). Each chapter title doubles as a new signifier for a poetic technique and strategy – “Nuclear Protest Poetry,” “The Apocalyptic Lyric,” “Psychohistorical Poetry in the Nuclear Age,” and “The Poetry of Destinerrance” are
departure points for Gery’s exploration of poems. This organization allows the author “to underscore how poets have imagined the nuclear world more than what they explicitly say about it” (12). I follow Gery’s method and focus here on how poets make their poems political. Such an approach inevitably leads away from a primary emphasis on content or an event-based perspective and to an emphasis on the imaginative strategies poets use to be political. Bernstein writes that “poetry can be a process of thinking rather than a report of things already settled, an investigation of figuration rather than a picture of something already figured out” (5), a claim that converges with both my approach and with Gery’s exploration of howpoets imagine nuclear threats instead of what they say about them.
My primary aim is to elucidate the primary techniques of contemporary American political poetry by doing extensive readings of specific representative poems. For each strategy, I choose five to six poems that I believe best represent the characteristics of the particular rhetorical strategy. I consider strategies for engagement the primary departure point for my study of American political poems, with their sites of engagement and issues of engagement secondary variables for understanding the work they attempt to do. Gibbons’s proposition that political poetry is “inextricable” from specific poems at “particular historical moments” leads to his suggestion that it is apt only to discuss examples of political poems (207) rather than to explicate political poetry with broad critical strokes. The examples I chose range from the Vietnam era to the present; I occasionally select those that appear in anthologies such as
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, while others I choose are lesser- known poems that exhibit a range of qualities important to my study. In choosing both Norton “worthy” poems by “canonical” poets, those that have been published only in magazines and journals, and those that have been anthologized in books like Postmodern
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American Poetry: A Norton Anthology,Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press, and other lesser known anthologies, I hope to engage a broad cross- section of American poetic practices, engagements, and strategies. Most of the hip hop artists I discuss are independent artists, iconic figures in the culture, or politically resonant ones. My choices generally align with my aesthetic preferences and knowledge base. My approach in this book allows for a tangible sacrifice in depth – of a specific poet or hip hop artist, specific “school” of poetry, or a defined period of literary history – for breadth, even though I give extended readings of relatively few poems.
My framework for reading contemporary political poetry is twofold. My first consideration is the various strategies that make political poems. Categorizing strategies of political poetry makes rhetorical strategy primary. The categories depart from previous formulations of political poetry in that they foreground the rhetorical decisions of poets – types of voice, kinds of narrative trajectory, types of “evidence,” tones of authority, and the types of images and rhetorical figures. I want to see how the poem acts politically. This way of reading of political poetry is more specific than the terms advanced thus far, whether it is “witness,” “strategic,” or another signifier. However, my categories are not self-contained; there is significant overlap and slippage between strategies. In the conclusion I discuss a poem that actualizes multiple strategies. My categories are not nearly so rigid as Northrop Frye’s four narrative categories into which any work of literature can fit. One poem may embody multiple strategies; however, I choose the one that I think governs the poem, that shapes its action, power, impact, and the readers’ response to it. Further, there are significant changes in strategy from poem to poem or from volume to volume in a poet’s career. For instance, Forché abandoned her lyric-narrative, free verse poetry of The Country Between Us for the
staging of multiple voices in The Angel of History.8Hip hop artists, as I discuss in the fourth chapter, often change their voice, style, and persona from song to song. Most importantly, the categories are not artist-generated; instead, I formulated them in order to clarify and illuminate the political work of contemporary American poetry. But, to be clear, the poetry is generative of the strategies or types – I did not read poetry and listen to hip hop for years with this framework in mind; rather, the framework comes from years of trying to understand the political work of printed poetry and hip hop.
While the categories are an emergent quality of the poetry itself, part of this book does reveal my impositions and biases. Gibbons claims that the “evaluation of political poetry” must always lead to the phrase “political evaluation of poetry” (297), and I admit that my evaluative methods and choices are political in that I do not evaluate politically conservative poems and I occasionally value message and panache above aesthetic brilliance. Explicitly conservative poems are difficult to find; in any case poems that favor the status quo, corporate power, tax cuts, national defense spending, and limited government would bore many readers. Poets generally seem a progressive lot these days, even if not stylistically. Further, while I do not evaluate what I consider “bad” poems, I do not feel indebted to traditional Western, White, European-North American aesthetic paradigms. Giving space and consideration to poems that refute traditional aesthetics for “alternative” aesthetics, such as Native American aesthetics, Latino/a aesthetics, spoken word and other voice-driven aesthetics, and the African American aesthetics of hip hop and the Black Arts Movement, foregrounds rhetorical strategy instead of any “inherent” poetic value. This approach also allows me to bracket the somewhat specious universal question of whether a poem must be “good” (whose good, it begs) to be a strong political poem. The traditional western aesthetic
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is inadequate for evaluating political poetry; unlike Levertov, von Hallberg, and Ostriker, who imply (some more strongly than others) that political poetry must be judged by the same standards by which we judge all poetry, I contend that if we follow their directive, some of the most powerful political poetry being written in this country would be ignored.9Hip hop artists, I argue, probably have much more political potential at their disposal than poets who work in printed form. Unlike poets, many of the rappers I discuss have larger, more enthusiastic and loyal audiences, participatory live shows, and more cultural capital – they are the bards of contemporary culture.