"Political" poetry and other art

Many U.S. critics whose work I've read, professors I've had, and people I've known tend to see much "political" art as less valuable than "non-political" art. The idea is that "political" art places the politics first before the art form, which is *bad.* Because then the art itself isn't as good, goes the idea, and "pure" art is better, and political art, especially poetry and fiction (because they are somehow supposed to be simultaneously intimately personal yet universal, a feat for some reason accomplished primarily by white men) is clumsy, stilted. Poetry in particular is supposed to seek higher truth and ignore such worldly concerns. But thinking back to the feminist movement, isn't the personal political? Why not? Isn't *everything* political? If a political piece of art is "bad," why do many insist on seeing the problem as residing mainly with the fact that it's political and not that it's bad? There is plenty of non-political art that is bad, but we don't fault it for not being political.

Once again, I think it's people's refusal to see that, yes, even the work of dominant classes is political. The topic of a poem is always political, even something as personal as the death of a family member. Yet it is seen as ok and good to write about the death of a family from "natural causes," but political to write about the death of someone from non-natural causes. Just as many female poets and/or poets of color in the U.S. have been given the label of "special interest/(too) personal," or "(too) political," many Latin American poets have been stuck with the "political" label and I have read multiple commentaries about how the problem with Latin American poetry is how political it is. ... Yet when Pablo Picassso paints a scene of Guernica, that is ok. That is "good" art. Dylan Thomas' poem to his dying father ("Do not go gently...") is both personal yet universal, and certainly not political. Nevermind that not all poetic traditions have even focused on aesthetics "above" message.

Anyway, I have read a fair bit of Latin American poetry that was political but also beautiful. With all the colonization, imperialism, and foreign involvement in Latin American affairs, many more things are overtly political. For example, living in Chile during their September 11, when military leader Augusto Pinochet led a U.S.-backed coup against the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, was terribly political. In a country with a population of roughly 10-11 million, several thousand people were directly killed or "disappeared" by Pinochet's government, tens of thousands were tortured or interned in camps, and several hundred thousand fled the country. Even if you consider only these people, that's a lot of affected people. Start considering their friends and family, and that's a significant percentage of the total population. Also consider that *all* Chileans were affected by the change in government, the new policies put in place, and everything else. Yet writing about these changes is purely "political" and not universal or even personal?? I don't think political poetry or other art should have an additional burden to climb in order to be considered "good art."

Rant done. Check out one of my other blogs, which I have been neglecting even more than this one, for a bunch of poetry and quotes that I like from novels. I have a fair bit of poetry in Spanish--with English translations, of course--and I'm about to post some great stuff by Mario Benedetti of Chile! It's a livejournal located at funsizedwit.livejournal.com