american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 95
out, Palmer is “interested in the way politics might inhabit poetry as
something more than subject matter, particularly when by ‘politics’ we
mean something like ‘atrocity’ ” (7; my emphasis). All of this suggests
that if politics are to enter Palmer’s work, it will be in an equivocal,
shifting, and indirect manner, all of which are characteristic of equivocal
agency. Palmer’s poetry, though, stretches the limits of this type
of poetic agency, thereby testing its effectiveness.
Palmer’s comments about how narrative works in his poetry—it
“shimmers at the edge of the page” in “scraps” (Bartlett 132)—can be
applied to his poetry’s political voice. It too is elusive, appearing only
in “scraps.” Even so, “Sun” is one of his most obviously political
poems, but it is not immediately obvious how it is political because
Palmer wants to frustrate any simple correlation between poetry and
politics. More so, he wants to avoid romanticizing any artistic or political
representation of atrocity. As pointed out in chapter 1, there is an
inherent risk in foregrounding one’s witness to and experience of
extremity. Palmer has derided “poets’ shuttle down to Nicaragua
and so on to get material,” which he says is “a betrayal of what is to
be meant by the political.” One of the many problems with these
“shuttles,” he says, is that poets “appropriate” what they have
witnessed as subject matter to proclaim “in stale poetic language”
something that implies “ ‘Look how much human feeling and fellow
feeling I have.’ ” For Palmer, such poetry is “self-congratulatory”
(“Dear” 12, 26), a criticism that echoes those cataloged at the end of
chapter 1. Selinger suggests that Palmer’s Sun can then be understood
as a “counterpoint” to Forché’s The Country Between Us, which he
says “soothes” readers with its “familiar grammar, forms of reference,
and moral compass” (7). Putting aside the specious claim that
Forché’s Salvador poems are comforting (which belies any engaged
reading of them), it is clear that “Sun” is neither soothing nor familiar,
and that its rhetorical strategy, poetic agency, and figures of voice
diverge dramatically from Forché’s “Return.”
“Sun” begins with four statements that foreground the acts of writing
about and representing atrocity. Each begins with a command:
“Write this.” In the first two lines, brief phrases depicting
military/imperial violence follow the command to record: “We have
burned all their villages” and “We have burned all the villages and the
people in them” (233–235). The remainder of the poem frustrates
any attempt to summarize its political voice/perspective. It is dotted
with “scraps” of references to state-sanctioned violence in WWII
Germany and in the Vietnam War: “Darmstadt,” “Plain of Jars,”
“Plain of Reeds,” “Neak Luong,” and “Goebbels.” These allusions,