american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 91
what Hannah Arendt discusses in her work on public policy formation.
She claims that any agent is capable of forming her opinions in
consideration of others’ interests; as such, a policymaker must negotiate
the differences between her interests and “the interests of the
group.” She implies that the failure to account for others’ interests is
partly due to a “lack of imagination” (Between Past 241–242). When
extended from policy formation to the formation of opinions in the
social world, this notion suggests the possibility that racism,
misogyny, xenophobia, and any difference constituted as conflict
(rather than merely as difference) is partly due to a lack of imagination.
The violence of the colonial encounter, then, is a failure of a powerful
group of people to imagine themselves as another group of people.
Imagination bridges cultural and political gaps, in much the same way
that Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson says that Harjo’s poetics “create a rich
sense of historical and spatial interconnection across tribal and cultural
lines” (107).
Harjo’s poem can be understood via the implied context of
colonial encounters the world over (especially in the Americas), and
her prophetic, optimistic voice is an apt transition to Derek Walcott’s
“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” (The Fortunate Traveller 1981),
where the context is more global. It is the most strategically and
politically comprehensive of all the poems in this chapter, and its
voice the least recognizable as human. Although Walcott was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, two iconic critics,
Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, have been skeptical of his poetic
voice and rhetorical strategies. Their comments are appropriate starting
points for reading “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” as a
premier example of the strategy of equivocal agency. Bloom claims
“bafflement” over whether Walcott has “developed a voice
altogether his own, the mark of a major poet,” or has adopted a
“composite voice of post-Yeatsian poetry in English” (1). Vendler
expressed a similar sentiment about the originality of Walcott’s voice
shortly after the publication of The Fortunate Traveller. His voice,
she wrote, “was for a long time a derivative one;” his “place,” she
continued, is not a poem, “but rather an essay in pentameters”
(“Poet of Two Worlds” 25–26), presumably about colonialism. “The
Season of Phantasmal Peace” renders these criticisms, which are born
from a simplified notion of individual genius isolated from the sociocultural
and historical contexts in which a poet works, void. The
poem, after all, does not utilize a recognizable first-person speaking
voice, nor does that voice hold forth as an essayist but as a visionary
creating potential beauty from tatters.