american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

98 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
comprehensive strategies have vast, global contexts, those with
particular strategies have specific, focused (but expansive imaginative)
contexts. However, their similarities are more instructive than their
differences, so the divide here is a fine one used to suggest that the overarching
context within a political poem can have dramatic effects on our
readings of them. The poems discussed hereafter in chapter 2 have
explicit contexts, several of which are dependent upon additional
knowledge about the contexts for their production and publication.
For instance, Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” does not refer specifically
to the 1967 Detroit riots, but Levine has repeatedly said that he
wrote it in response to them. Similarly, Bly’s “Counting Small-Boned
Bodies” does not expressly refer to Vietnam, but given his public pronouncements
about the war, daily Pentagon body counts, and the section
title of The Light Around the Body (1967) in which the poem
appears, the context is obvious. Poems of particular equivocal agency,
finally, usually speak to public issues that do not need direct reference
in the poem. The issues are either urgent or the historical moment
makes the context demonstrable.
The first three poems considered here all emerged from one of the
most tumultuous decades in American history. The Vietnam War, the
Civil Rights Movement, high-profile assassinations, and widespread
antiwar protests and urban riots marked the 1960s as a decade of outrage
and dissension. Poets entered the center of the maelstrom, so
much so that American culture was “lyricized” during the Vietnam era
as citizens began to view poetry “as an inherently anti-establishment
vehicle for their political expressions” (Bibby 7). In his study of
Vietnam resistance poetry, Michael Bibby argues that American poetry
from 1965 to 1975 should be periodized as “Vietnam-era Poetry” and
that any categorization of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s poetry as
“Postwar Poetry” obscures the true nature of our national and literary
history (23–24). Robert von Hallberg also argues that 1965 heralded
a critical shift in the nation’s poetic sensibilities. After 1965, he
laments, poets stopped using concessions, qualifications, adversatives,
and “reasonable language” such as “even,” “is needful,” “nevertheless,”
“not that,” “none as Yet” “let us only” 11 that was appropriate in
the 1950s (American Poetry 129–130), a decade that some argue was
characterized by a cultural consensus, at least among the middle and
upper classes.
Bly, W.S. Merwin, and Levine all entered these public conversations,
and all three wrote remarkable poems of equivocal agency. Bly
was one of the most politically active writers of his generation. In
1966, he and David Ray founded American Writers against the