american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

88 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
real from what is fabrication, especially in a country in which one of
our most revered presidents was a Hollywood actor.
The speaker’s question also shows a keen understanding of
Shakespeare’s most pliable conceit: the Theatrum Mundi (Theater of
the World) trope, in which “All the world’s a stage / And all the men
and women merely players” (As You Like It). Shakespeare put this
notion to great use and so does Simic; in “Cameo Appearance” the
world of suffering is a stage viewed from afar. Tragically, however, in
the final stanza the speaker points out that disaster is not within the
purview of this trope. In this burning city “one take / Is all they had
time for.” What is really absurd, according to “Cameo Appearance,”
is that after the planes leave the burning city, the cameras leave as well.
The refugees stand “dazed in the burning city, / But of course,
they didn’t film that.” When the sensational events are over and the
requisite images captured, those wielding cameras leave and the
suffering continues unabated, unnoticed.
Simic’s rhetorical strategy in these two poems is inclusive. He elides
context and specificity for a rounder, ironic indictment of the
ravages of and justifications for contemporary warfare. If either of
these poems had a definite geopolitical context—if the president
of “Paradise Motel” were Pinochet, Mugabe, or Milosevic—they
would forfeit a large amount of their power to unsettle and disturb. As
such, these poems rely on the reader’s experiences and on her ability
to imagine a context, rather than on the speaker-poet’s experiences. In
her seminal work on closure in poetry, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith
asserts that a poem “cannot be regarded as totally independent” of
the “reader’s extrinsic experiences,” which include experiences
of “language itself.” She continues, “It is upon our past linguistic
experiences that poetry depends for its most characteristic effects”
(97; original emphasis). Therefore, a reader brings her experiences to
a reading, thus making the lack of specific leaders in Simic’s poems
encompassing ways to reference readers’ experiences. Further, a
reader’s experience of language allows the poets in this chapter to
approach subjects elliptically because they assume that readers have
imaginations with which to leap and bound alongside the poems.
In other words, Simic’s poems show the benefits of equivocal agency
vis-à-vis embodied agency—poems in chapter 2 can be more flexible
and less strident.
In “A Postcolonial Tale” (The Woman Who Fell from the Sky 1994),
Joy Harjo imagines imagination as a primary tool for social change. In
her customary form—the prose poem—Harjo’s first-person plural
speaker delivers platitudes about creation and imagination. Unlike