american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

atrocities she writes about. Even so, Forché’s stylistic transition
between The Country Between Us (1981) and The Angel of History
(1994) 9 suggests that Forché understood the shortcomings of the former
volume’s first-person, lyric narratives depicting her experience.
In the endnotes to The Angel of History, Forché writes that the
poems therein are “not about experiences,” but a “gathering of utterances”
that “issue from my own encounter with the events of the
century but do not represent ‘it.’ ” Her earlier style, moreover, has
“given way” to a poetry that is “polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in
ruins, with no possibility of restoration” (81). These endnotes suggest
that Forché was likely affected by criticisms like Palmer’s in the years
after the publication of her El Salvador poems. Further, her explicit
concern with the representation of experience and the use of multiple
voices and fragments points to an abiding problem with her agency as
poet. When she writes that her previous style has “given way” to this
new one, it is easy to notice the lack of linguistic agency in the shift.
She has effectively given up control over events as well as her primary
voice of experience; in doing so, her aesthetic begins to dovetail with
Palmer’s. In his review of The Angel of History, Jon Thompson asks a
question that plagues “Sun,” Forché’s work, 10 and many political
poets and their critics: “at what point does the witnessing of
witnessed—and unwitnessed—human catastrophe pass from poetic
and political necessity to the exploitation of the horror for dramatic
effect?” (7). This question is important to ask, but the level of discomfort
matters more. If a work of art makes us uncomfortable, it
may be due to its exploitation of horror, but it also may simply mean
that images of violence and atrocity should make us uncomfortable
regardless of how they are presented. They should make us question
our roles—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—in the policies and
power structures that enable poverty, war, and violence. They also
force us to question the voices, strategies, and effectiveness of political
poetry. I believe that poems of experiential and equivocal agency
are important, if divergent, types of engaged writing; both kinds of
poetic agency, moreover, can be viewed as romanticizing the poet’s
role, and both can be seen as interrogating that very role, but in starkly
different voices.
Particular Equivocal Agency
EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 97
The differences between comprehensive and particular strategies of
equivocal agency are subtle and will be teased out in the following
examples. The primary difference is context. While poems with