american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

94 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
wracked by war, famine, greed, genocide, intolerance, and terrorism.
This moment is almost necessarily carried across the earth by those
things that inhabit the skies, not by those who live in “dark holes in
windows and in houses,” but by those things that pass in and out of
our lines of sight with ease and speed. Despite the almost totally disembodied
visionary moment of the poem and the lack of palpable
human presence, especially that of an identifiable speaker, the poem
ends with an “exquisitely judged note of balance, between the
depressing truth of degenerate human nature and the hopeful,
encompassing truth of a greater compassion” (Burnett 205). In the
final line, Walcott explains why the peace lasts only “one moment”:
because “for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.” His strategy,
then, at the end, re-dramatizes the comprehensive, global context. He
keeps his voice and vision hovering above the earth, rather than on
the earth in a specific city or country.
Walcott’s poem represents how political poems might, at first, have
no recognizable political content. The poems discussed in the first half
of chapter 2 demonstrate, then, why it is misleading to determine and
classify political poetry strictly on the basis of content, subject matter,
or identity position. Imaginative visions can in themselves be political.
Michael Palmer’s “Sun” (Sun 1988), though, points to potential problems
with poems that may be unrecognizable as political. Reading
Palmer’s poetry is challenging even for experienced readers; he has said
that it is “a lifelong proposition” for him to “understand” his own
work. In explaining this enigmatic comment, he cites Robert
Browning’s comment on one of his own poems: “When I wrote it only
God and I knew what it meant; now only God knows” (cited in
Bartlett 129).
Palmer’s poetry threatens what he calls the “Anglo-American
empirical tradition” in which a poem is “a place in which you tell a
little story, the conclusion of which is at the bottom of the page just
where it is supposed to be.” Like the Language poets, with whom
Palmer shares an “attempt to bring into question surfaces of language
[and] normative syntax,” he works against dominant strains of
American poetry, especially poems of experiential agency (those
poems with first-person speakers, clear narratives, and embodied
experience). Further, he dislikes poems that “posit” a self, inadvertently
creating “a poetry of personality”; instead, the “self ” must be
“transformed through language” in order to hold onto the “mysteries
of reference” (Bartlett 126, 129, 130–131, 127). Despite his
desire to move away from narrative and represented experience,
Palmer remains interested in politics. As Eric Murphy Selinger points