american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 85
(Engelmann 46). And Simic, who grew up in Belgrade during WWII,
does not “assault” readers with his “personal history” (Sack 134) by
heroicizing his childhood experiences of war. His experiences likely
inform his poetic sensibility, but indirectly rather than in concrete
details; Lisa Sack points out that Simic is “a master of indirection”
who “selects and juxtaposes a few striking images” (134) to create
mysterious, anguished atmospheres. In the poems discussed here
these atmospheres are sustained through indirection, surreal images,
and a detached, parodic voice rarely used in poems of embodied
agency, where the tone is grave, urgent.
The first line of “Paradise Motel” depicts a world where no one is
spared torment. Two simple declarative phrases separated by a semicolon
join utterly violent, demented, and irreconcilable spheres:
“Millions were dead; everybody was innocent” (75). In a world without
accountability marked by hyperbolic absolutes, the speaker is a
distant, unreal, cloistered figure. He says calmly: “I stayed in my
room.” This juxtaposition suggests that “paradise” is a suspended purgatory,
an illusion of disinterested, bourgeois individualism and that
denouncing responsibility for the world is cowardly. These three terse,
clipped phrases are hallmarks of Simic’s minimalism, elision, and
refusal to supply a geopolitical context. The poet provides no details
that render the scene local, knowable, and thereby less frightening.
Helen Vendler claims that a Simic poem often creates “an unbearable
tension [that] darkens the air” and turns readers into “prisoner(s)
within its uncompromising and irremediable world” (“Totemic Sifting”
119–21). And so it is in the first line and a half of “Paradise Motel.”
Another figure—the de facto foil to the speaker—enters the poem
in the latter half of line two. Even though the poem is without specific
context, “The president / Spoke of war as of a magic love potion” (my
emphasis). As Vendler points out, Simic tends to use “menacing” definite
articles (“Totemic Sifting” 119), and this one here cedes all parodic
and ironic authority to this president. If the speaker is without
identity, without use (in a mirror his face appears to him as “a twicecanceled
postage stamp”), the president evokes the merged identity of
every president who has spoken of war as a transformative solution.
The president’s “magic love potion” is seemingly able only to make the
“refugees crowding the roads” “vanish / With a touch of the hand.”
The most unnerving aspect of this disappearance is the speaker’s
parodic voice—not only do the refugees vanish, but it happens
“naturally.” Does this voice manifest the depraved wish-fulfillment of
countless presidents who see refugees as thorns in their sides? Even more
menacing than this implication is one that “History” is a carnivorous