american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

104 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
was born and raised. Levine thus has both an outsider’s and an
insider’s perspective on the 1967 riots, much as Kinnell’s poem has on
9/11. This dichotomy could be a primary reason that he chose to use
a different figure of voice for “They Feed They Lion” than he used for
most of his other poems of the period. The political poem of equivocal
agency is an anomaly for Levine; his poems are mostly in the experiential,
first-person narrative vein. They often feature readily
identifiable first-person speakers meditating on their experiences of
nature, love, poverty, work, and foreign cultures, or third-person
speakers meditating on the experience, for example, of a Republican
in the Spanish Civil War or an auto worker in Detroit. 15 David
St. John claims that Levine’s “primary impulse” is narrative, especially
one of the “struggle of individuals ignored and unheard by their
societies.” He points out that Levine’s work “gives voice to these
‘voiceless’ men and women whom he feels have been recognized and
honored rarely in our literature” (277). Thus, “They Feed They
Lion” has a theme similar to Levine’s best poems, but its techniques—
lack of narrative, unidentifiable first-person speaker, and the use of
AAVE—diverge from his other poems.
“They Feed They Lion” has much to distinguish it from the majority
of Levine’s work, but also from most contemporary political poems.
These differences begin with the title, which immediately brings up
several issues that trouble both the poem and this reader. First, the repetition
of “They” foreshadows the poem’s incantatory use of syntactical
parallelism and repetition. Next, the second “They” shows Levine’s
heavy usage of AAVE—substituting the personal pronoun for the possessive
pronoun, dropping the initial article as in “Earth is eating
trees,” and departing from the standard subject–verb agreement as in
“They Lion grow.” Third, the prominent repetition of the thirdperson
plural “They” indicates that the poem will be about community
and collective agency, what Edward Hirsch has called a “hymn to
communal rage, to acting in unison” (“Naming” 348).
The title also indicates that Levine boldly stages a rhetorical voice
foreign to him. In doing so, he risks appropriating the voice of an
oppressed other in order to stage his own guilt. Levine’s comments
about the poem nearly twenty-five years later bear out in part such a
notion. He says that he saw himself “as a witness to a great
American crime” of racism; however, he suggests that the poem seeks
to deal with his own place in the struggles against racism. On his
visit to Detroit sometime after the riots, he was struck in “realizing
that in Eldridge Cleaver’s term” he was “part of the problem, not part
of the solution” because he is white, middle class, and middle-aged.