american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 101
This move is possible only with a calm, detached voice that does
not “exude rage” but an irrational rationality depraved in its
demeanor as well as in its desire. Bly’s use of the “Smart-Blake-
Whitman” line, even for all its monotony, is perfect for such a venture.
As Bly says, this line is given to “declaration rather than inquiry” and
to “rhetoric rather than exchange of feelings” (Selected Poems 197). In
“Counting Small-Boned Bodies” the speaker declares his desire, but
evinces no feelings that buttress it. This empty rhetorical voice echoes
the horrifying, detached language of daily kill counts during the late
1960s. In this poem, then, equivocal agency’s dystopian voice is a
counterpoint to the utopian one present in Walcott’s poem.
Whereas “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” is perhaps the finest of
Bly’s Vietnam-era political poems—not least because it is concise,
restrained, clever, and because its voice is a parodic absurdity, unlike
some of his longer meditations on the effects of Vietnam on
the American psyche—“The Asians Dying” is the most noticeably
political poem in Merwin’s brilliant The Lice (1967). In poems devoid
of punctuation and marked by disconnected, surreal images, ambiguous
syntax, elusive meditative phrasing, and an abiding sense of
absence and death, Merwin considers the aspects of experience and
consciousness that defy narrative expression. The political poems in
the volume move more by haunting strangeness than by specific ideological
platform. Each poem can be seen paradoxically as both a selfcontained
unit as there are no smaller syntactical units within the
poem—no sentences and few unequivocal phrases—and as an experience
that cannot be expressed effectively in language. These poems
portray the world as better understood as a mysterious place than as a
rational, logical one governed by scientific and human laws.
“The Asians Dying” is thus a model example of particular equivocal
agency. There is no readily identifiable, realistic speaker. There is no
punctuation to help the reader sort out the haunting, surreal images or
to sequence them logically. The only quasi-human agents in the poem
are odd abstractions from decay and absence, without breath, color, or
immanence. The four primary movers in the poem, the ones that act or
are acted upon, are symbolic images: “The ash the great walker”; “the
possessors”; “the ghosts of the villages”; and “the open eyes of
the dead” (118–119). However, the reader knows that the poem refers
to the atrocities of the Vietnam War because the title demands this
interpretation. However, Merwin’s aesthetics are not given to overt
political statements or representations of the “real” world. Instead of
speaking of empire, soldiers, or the Pentagon, he creates visionary
personifications that make U.S. actions in Vietnam more omnipresent