american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 103
Edward J. Brunner has noted that death for the possessors is
different than death for the Vietnamese. He writes, “The two versions
of death radically distinguish Asians from Americans, a distinction
underscored with irony: the death the Asians experience leaves them
with their eyes open; the death star under which the possessors march
leaves them as blind as ever” (148). Brunner’s point has merit, but the
poem leaves unclear the identities of “the open eyes of the dead”;
though Brunner declares unequivocally that these dead are Vietnamese,
the poem suggests otherwise: “when the moon finds them they
are the color of everything.” “The color of everything” may suggest
brown soil and thus brown Vietnamese skin, but such an interpretation
is essentialist and would ignore the African American, Native
American, and other nonwhite U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam.
Moreover, the term “Asians” is itself imprecise, equivocal. It is thus
important not to consider “The Asians Dying” using Brunner’s
binary in which Vietnamese die enlightened and Americans die
“blind”; the movement of the possessors “everywhere” implies that
Merwin is primarily concerned with an American imperial policy
that ignores the past and relies on “fire (power)” as the “only future”
that will increase its power. 14
The Vietnam poems of Bly, Merwin, Denise Levertov, David
Ignatow, and Robert Duncan are categorically different than the
poems of Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau (1988), Weigl’s volume of
Vietnam War poetry Song of Napalm (1988), and the G.I. resistance
poems Bibby discusses in Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and
Resistance in the Vietnam Era (1996). Komunyakaa’s, Weigl’s, and
G.I. resistance poetry are based on first-person experiences of war.
Bibby points out that the Vietnam era was “a period in which ‘being
there’ [was] paramount” (ix). Bly’s and Merwin’s poems are counterpoints
to this notion and to poems of experiential agency in which
“being there” is of great importance. Rather than depict combat
experience, Bly’s and Merwin’s poems document the effects of an
imperial war on the American psyche. Merwin’s poem also preemptively
circumvents Palmer’s implied criticisms of Forché’s “soothing”
images, grammar, and syntax, while also being more accessible
politically than Palmer’s poem.
Like the two previous poems, Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”
(They Feed They Lion 1972) does not represent and transform firstperson
experience. Levine did not participate in or directly observe
the 1967 Detroit riots, nor is he an African American subject to
racism’s injustices. Even so, Levine has pointed out that the poem
“comes out of the riots” (“Staying Power” 23) in the city where he