Now that you’ve read “Poetry and Politics” from the Poetry Society of America Conference (2000) and the selected excerpts from Erica Hunt’s A Local History, please respond with 2-3 paragraphs analyzing the poetics of a selected Hunt poem that resonates with you, and responds to some of the points discussed at the conference. Be sure to use literary terminology from both topic and composition courses, and explain the significance of your connection to this work. Analysis should speak to both form and content, as well identify some of the theories Hunt critiques in her work. Use quotations from the text to support your analysis.

Erica Hunt’s poetry seems to be a fusion of critical theory, political activity, and literary criticism. In Erica Hunter’s “Local History” featured excerpt, her poem “Surplus Future Imperfect” also reflects her critique of political activities. Her work involved the problems and issues of African Americans, however, her work is motivated less by nonracial aesthetics but out of politics. In the poem “Surplus Future Imperfect”, Hunt describes the scene about the future. However, the future is only the surface of this poetry, and the deep meaning of poetry show Hunt’s criticism of politics. In the poetry, almost all of her sentences began with “No”. This is to show rhythm and highlight the rhythm of poetry. “No place to make a phone call”. Erica Hunt used rhetorical strategies to make the imperfect circumstance future to the readers. In our opinion, making a phone call is very easy and it can be done anywhere, but in the future is not. As we have seen, there is no place in the future for us to “make a phone call”. “Future” in the description of the poet, looks very bad. “No more of the same. No difference”. Hunt also uses avant-garde forms and methods to describe politics inside and outside the black community. “As is true with many poets, I’m drawn to language variously, for its music, for language’s plasticity, capacity to limn sinuous thought, for its inextricable connection to experience, all of which have the power to still the world while reading the World/book,”(Poetry and Politics). Her poems have ethnic marks, and she uses the plasticity of the language to write about political racial discrimination in her poems. Not only the content of the poem, but the title of the poem “Future Imperfect” also has deep meaning. “Future Imperfect” can be thought of as a verb form that combines past tense and non-holonomic which mean continuous or repetitive events or states. So it can show that our future will continue or repeat in a bad or terrible state.

This poem is significance connection with me. As Hunt said, “But the language used to mediate social reality, social rhetorics fascinate me, for here race, class, sex and gender, and power are coded in ways seldom acknowledged, transmitted noiselessly and invisibly, disguised as irrevocable speech, impenetrable text, absolute statements, catalog copy and other forms of triumph”(Poetry and Politics). The rhetoric of language is fascinating. In life, many political events are not openly discussed or disseminated, such as racial discrimination and gender inequality. Many times, people do not recognize the existence of these political issues. The rhetoric of language allows us to play freely and allows us to write all the ideas and political issues we want to express in poetry or text in a rhetorical way.

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