Spoken word refers to poetic performance that relies on or emphasizes the aspects of its construction that must be heard, rather than read, to be fully experienced and appreciated. Factors like intonation, volume, and audience participation are aesthetic elements that might be of some consequence on the page, but they are central to the construction and performance of spoken word. Any discussion about hip hop’s aesthetic qualities and sociopolitical weight requires substantive engagement with Black spoken word and performance poetry. What follows is an exploration of the political resonances that emerge from interactions – both historical and into the present day – between hip-hop music and Black spoken word performance.

Noting the lack of poetry reviews in newspapers and the rise of the novel as the preeminent literary genre in the United States, Gioia, writing in The Atlantic, worries that an insulated subculture has taken custody of poetry: “Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.” Contra Gioia, the success of US poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1997 “Favorite Poem Project,” to which, as the project website reports, “18,000 Americans wrote in to share their favorite poems – Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, representing a range of occupations, kinds of education, and backgrounds” – suggests a strong undercurrent of enthusiastic poetry readers.

Florence Howe’s 1993 revised and expanded poetry anthology No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets continues the work of the first edition, with poet Muriel Rukeyser’s The Poem as Mask providing the “vision” for the collection, as Howe notes the “fragments and the invisibility that control women’s lives [to], at last, come to wholeness and vision” (F. Howe xxix). Howe’s new edition responded to “new differences [that] now divide women’s poetic consciousness” and considered that “to be a woman poet is to encompass,” after Adrienne Rich, “the difficult world” (xxix, xxxi). The volume illustrates the collection’s purpose with Rukeyser’s starting poem where she identifies a mask worn by women that once concealed the individual, the self “unable to speak, in exile from myself” (xxvii). The Poem as Mask – focusing on the mythology of Orpheus – calls for “No more masks! No more mythologies!” to put an end to the masking through myths imposed on women writers and to signal a move toward new mythologies that emerge from the women’s self, an identity once split that finds its oneness.

Throughout the twentieth century, American poets engaged in a spirited debate about their art’s relation to propaganda. Some rejected outright the notion that poetry should advocate for a political cause. To instrumentalize poetry, in this view, would be to degrade its very nature. William Carlos Williams, in a statement intended for the first issue of Blast: A Magazine of Proletarian Fiction in 1933, contended that “a dilemma has been broached when the artist has been conscripted and forced to subordinate his training and skill to party necessity for a purpose” (On Art and Artists 75). Still, others argued that poets should have freedom to promote a cause. Langston Hughes made this case in the Chicago Defender in 1945: “Art in its essence is a path to truth. Propaganda is a path toward more to eat. That the two may be inextricably mixed is not to be denied. That they may often be one and the same is certainly true” (quoted in Rampersad 121). This disagreement can be read as part of a much longer history of poets debating the role of politics in their art and whether poetry should ever be used as propaganda.

When W. H. Auden – thirtysomething poet, English expatriate, and new New Yorker – wrote the words “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he was mere miles from a 305-foot-tall counterexample. Poetry didn’t build the Statue of Liberty, and didn’t notably influence the statue’s French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, or the Americans who funded and built its pedestal. But “The New Colossus” (1883), a sonnet by the Jewish American poet and humanitarian Emma Lazarus, did raise $1,500 at auction for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund – not much, but for fourteen lines, not bad. In an inestimably greater contribution, “The New Colossus” prospectively transformed the statue into a monument to immigration, a “Mother of Exiles” from whose “beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”

Most poetry pays poorly, and so most of the institutions that have developed to facilitate its production and distribution in the United States have served as patrons, insulating poets from the need to earn money directly from the publication of their poems. In the first third of the twentieth century this patronage was largely private, as wealthy individuals such as John Quinn and Scofield Thayer subsidized modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for both prestige and, ultimately, profit in the form of limited and signed editions that would in turn enable the emergence of a collector’s market. Inherited wealth also formed the basis of modernist publishing, as the “new breed” of American publishers such as Horace Liveright and James Laughlin used family funds to finance their ventures, again frequently producing limited editions that would ultimately accrue value in the collector’s market even as they functioned as prestigious loss leaders in the mainstream literary marketplace.

In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war – “The world must be made safe for democracy” – enshrined liberal-democratic nation-building as central to the US military mission, conceivably extended to every nation on earth (Tooze 9). Such sentiments might be credited with inspiring the most voluminous outpouring of prowar poetry in American literary history. Yet under the idealistic veneer Wilson’s aim was no less than US hegemony in a world capitalist system, in which “political liberty” would promote an open global marketplace that the United States could dominate (Dayton 15). This contradiction between Wilsonian ideal and reality catalyzed, in turn, a body of trenchant antiwar poetry. Broadly speaking, this minority report has become the pattern for most American poetry of war and peace written ever since, which has sought to debunk the recurring fantasy that, in American hands, war might become an instrument of peace and liberation. Yet this largely antiwar trajectory has remained largely at the cultural margins, only under exceptional circumstances speaking for the political mainstream.

If poetry is the imperfect approximation of ungovernable forces and feelings, a revolt from within and against the distribution of the sensible, there will have always been something poetic about revolutionary possibility in the United States. And yet American poetry has often understood social revolution as an alien phenomenon, a foreign concept in the most literal sense of that term. When Walt Whitman pressed for “quenchless, indispensable fire” with his “Songs of Insurrection,” he only did so with thoughts cast far away from home and to Paris in the year of its Commune. “Then courage!” we read in his 1871 cluster. “European revolter! revoltress!” (632).

One of the most immediate ways to query the political stakes of poetry is to consider the context in which one encounters a poem. Take for instance Abel Meeropol’s antilynching poem “Strange Fruit.” In the 1937 issue of the Marxist labor magazine New Masses the work is an article of working-class allyship and protest, whereas the more popular musical rendition, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, underscores the elegiac quality of the work, emphasizing a connection between jazz and Black folk traditions of social mourning. In certain instances, poems use extraliterary markers to indicate the circumstantial conditions out of which they arise; these are commonly referred to as framing devices. In his succinct comment on “The Literary Frame,” John Frow defines the frame as the material and immaterial border that “surrounds a text and defines its specific [literary] status and the kinds of use to which it can be put” (26). The frame includes the material boundaries of the books’ two covers, the blank space encircling the text and even the silence that marks the start and conclusion of a public reading. But it also includes the immaterial boundaries that communicate the generic and historical particularity of a given work, thus generating what Hans Robert Jauss has called our horizons of expectation. These horizons are cued by such seemingly extra-literary elements as the poem’s date of composition (occasionally stamped at the bottom of the page), the author’s name, the work’s title, the publishing house, as well as the dedicatory material. Taken together these inscriptive settings carry major implications for how we derive meaning. Yet we often overlook them in our rush to privilege content. When accepted uncritically, the frame fulfills its principle duty, to present the separation of literature from everyday life as uncontested and natural. Like any border concept – silence, for instance – when we pay attention to the frame, the ideological biases constructing the border come into view. Each framing occasion provides the receiver with the opportunity to consider the occluded relationships of production and exchange that underpin the creation and reception of a poem. Attending to the frame acknowledges the poem as an ongoing series of events, with each iteration carrying the potential to reroute its meaning. It is for this reason that practitioners of socially attuned innovative poetries have made it a perennial habit to call attention to the frame in order to relax its authority.

Claudia Rankine’s fifth book, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a volume of poetry and also a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category, represents her evolving use of form from lyric toward multiple genres and media. Her first book, Nothing in Nature Is Private (1992), utilizes the individual, lyric poem; thereafter, The End of the Alphabet (1998) expands into lyric sequences. PLOT (2001) employs multiple genres, including fragment, lyric, dialogue, prose, and boxes of text. The first of her “American Lyric” pairing, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), is also the first volume to include a wide variety of visual images, employing parataxis as a mode to activate meaning in the “gaps” between individual elements. While her previous books explore individual identities within the context of the social, with Citizen, Rankine sought to more explicitly take poetry into public conversations, shaping discussion of racial inequality. Indeed, Citizen has held a spot on the public stage since its release.

Because most African American poetry imagines social pasts, presents, and futures, most of this verse can be described as political poetry. What Cary Nelson says of political poets in general applies to many African American poets in particular: “historical contingency,” the mutability of society, “is the very marrow of their work” (5). From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, African American political poetry was often engaged with the southern Jim Crow regime that rose after the end of Reconstruction and with this regime’s northern counterpart, some features of which survive today in ostensibly race-neutral law and institutional practice. With the rise of Jim Crow came new Black institutions, among them literary magazines (e.g., The Colored American Magazine, The Voice of the Negro, The Horizon, and The Crisis) and literary societies (e.g., the Bethel Literary and Historical Association and the Boston Literary and Historical Association), and many of the new Black cultural institutions opened spaces where Black intellectuals could resist Jim Crow.

As the environmental crisis has worsened in recent decades, hundreds of American poets have addressed it in their writing, bringing attentiveness, precision, and tenderness toward existence to bear against the failure of the imagination that has led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe. This essay cannot begin to do justice to the plenitude and variety of contemporary, politically engaged ecopoetry; instead, I will focus on three major poets writing in this vein: Camille Dungy, Brenda Hillman, and Craig Santos Perez. They and their work are quite different from each other. Yet all three are environmental activists for whom poetry is not separate from political engagement and awareness of the ways in which colonialism, postcolonialism, and industrialism have exploited both humans and nature.

The chapter deals with the ICJ and human rights. It argues that, while the Court is not and will never be a specialised human rights court, it has a significant role in the protection and development of human rights. The author explains some structural obstacles and impediments to the engagement of the Court with human rights, and then offers some instances of substantial incorporation of human rights into the fabric of general international law through interpretation and legal concepts encompassing international community interests. The chapter suggests that structural disengagement in the sense of norms allowing only States to litigate before the Court does not impede substantial incorporation which may depend on other factors, including the changing attitudes of the ICJ judges and lawyers before the Court.

This chapter examines the institutional context of the Court. It focuses first on the Court’s function as a court, i.e. as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. It then considers the Court’s relations with States, as an international court. Finally, he considers the Court’s institutional grounding as an organ of the United Nations, and examines its relationship with the United Nations. Professor Ginsburg argues that there is a gap between the Court’s formal institutional structures and its actual operation in practice, and emphasises in particular the way in which the Court has taken a central role in the development of international law.

This chapter considers the ICJ and territorial disputes, an area where the Court has had significant scope to consider the applicable law in multiple cases. The authors identify three areas in which the Court has made a significant contribution to the law on territorial disputes: first, the reconceptualisation of the rules of international law governing the acquisition of territorial sovereignty; second, the clarification of the territorial implications of the fundamental principles of international law; and finally, the elaboration of a clear and coherent method for the legal settlement of territorial disputes, the core of which rests on respect for the principle of legality.