american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

92 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
In Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2000), Paula Burnett argues
that Walcott’s poetic “impetus has been to devise an inclusive
solution” (8) to problems stemming from colonialism, racism, and
political conflict. Walcott, she claims, is “an idealist” who “believes in
the openendedness of possibilities” (9). Part of this idealism and proclivity
for inclusion, she points out, “repudiates the tragic view of the
human condition that sees it as unable to transcend the patterns
evinced by the past.” As such, Walcott “recognizes that the dream can
lead the reality into amelioration” (8–9). As Burnett’s claim makes
clear, Walcott’s vision is not piecemeal but holistic; his aesthetic is not
exclusionary but encompassing. For Walcott as for Harjo, the
imagination can do political work; in it inheres the possibility for
positive, transformative change. In the words of Paul Breslin, then,
“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” is an “affirmation of the transcendent”
(320). It supplies the ultimate in “inclusive” solutions and
“open-ended” possibilities.
As is true of the previous poems in chapter 2, the first line of
Walcott’s poem is a relatively abstract and mysterious comprehensive
vision. However, Walcott begins with a “then” statement that suggests
an absent antecedent: “Then all the nations of birds lifted
together” (464–465 my emphasis). In conjunction with “all,”
“Then” immediately gives the poem an epic scale, as if the events
detailed therein are the culmination of (or response to) centuries of
oppressive violence and division. Finally, the lines insinuate, all the
human nations of the world are united in a moment of peace. Line
one also initiates the poem’s main symbol—“nations of birds” symbolizes
nations of people. The use of birds in lieu of people is more
indirect, which is in keeping with the disembodied voice of equivocal
agency; birds, moreover, have the ability to fly, and indeed, when
many birds fly, they fly in flocks. This extended conceit is perhaps the
primary reason that Vendler calls it the “best” poem in The Fortunate
Traveller, as she worries about any poet who is invested in a certain
“subject” that may result in his use of language simply as “ornament
to his message, the rhetoric for his sermon” (“Poet of Two Worlds”
32, 26). This poem is light not heavy-handed, visionary not directive,
beneficent not exculpatory, and its speakerless voice is transparent
rather than histrionic. A sermon, after all, needs a sermonizer, which
is something that this poem lacks.
Walcott’s united birds miraculously lift what normally cannot be
lifted but by the rotation of the earth around the sun: “the huge net
of shadows of this earth.” These shadows, which appear in different
form throughout the poem, are “in multitudinous dialects, twittering