american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

106 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
emotionally resonant and familial but also more abstract. So while the
lion grows “out of buried aunties” and “Mothers hardening like
pounded stumps,” it also grows “out of the bones’ need to sharpen
and the muscles’ to stretch.” The use of “aunties” is particularly
resonant as it suggest centuries of African American domestic servitude
and oppression. The latter two lines are images of being taxed to
physical extremity and the corresponding need to respond to that
extremity with focused physical strength.
At the same time though, the symbols of poverty are still present.
“Industrial barns,” “bus ride,” and “gutted cars” mix with disconcerting,
abstract images such as “the sweet kinks of the fist” and “the
thorax of caves.” The result is a ghostly lion, rising both out of
mysterious, visionary images resonant with emotional turmoil and the
very real materials of the inner-city. In a review of They Feed They Lion,
Alan Helms claims that the title poem “ignores the ‘edges’ of syntax,
logical relation, propositional sense.” For Helms, moreover, much of
the poem’s imagery does not “make ‘sense,’ ” but “that’s one of the
points of the poem” (153). Though much of the poem may not make
sense from a purely realistic, representational viewpoint, the collection
of images make “sense” on a gut emotional, adrenaline-fueled level.
Furthermore, from a mainstream media standpoint, riots do not make
“sense” either—in their view, riots are self-destructive and pathological.
Levine’s poem powerfully suggests that riots come “out of” the
everyday, mundane realities of bus rides, burlap sacks, and black beans
and “out of ” some abstract, dynamic repository of rage—“From they
sack and they belly opened.” Therein lies the brilliance of “They Feed
They Lion.” There is no way to get at the raw emotion Levine is interested
in without mixing the inexplicable genesis of pure anger with
the raw materials that both embody and create that anger. In this way,
the rage is similar to the anger in some hip-hop music with its emphasis
on metaphor, hyperbole, and the raw materials of poverty.
Along with its sense of communal rage, the most instrumental aspect
of “They Feed They Lion” is its portrayal of collective agency. The lion
is the communal agent—it embodies all of the power and anger of
Detroit’s African American community, and all of the community’s
energies coalesce in the single figure of the lion. “They Lion” is thus the
agent that enables this community to move “from ‘Bow Down’ ” to
“ ‘Rise Up.’ ” Even though the speaker—outsider and (symbolic)
oppressor—“has imaginatively embraced ‘They,’ and done it in defiant
black English grammatical constructions” (Marchant 305), he is still an
outsider. He is the symbolic character that the lion acts against. This
outside speaker is consumed as “they feed” on him. As Marchant points