american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

110 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
the Blackbird” (Pyramid of Bone 1989) Thylias Moss re-imagines the
pernicious effects of racism by “reconsidering” the object of one of
the most famous twentieth-century American poems, Wallace
Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (Harmonium
1923). 17 Like Simic’s especially, Moss’s modus operandi falls squarely
within the rhetorical strategy of equivocal agency. And unlike most of
Stevens’s, Moss’s poetry engages pressing social issues, such as racism,
violence, and misogyny. Jahan Ramazani writes that Moss’s “approach
to this weighty material is oblique, riddling, and gnomic.” As
Ramazani points out, her poems are “digressive, elliptical, allusive”
pieces that “ramble associatively,” but “tend to return to their central
themes” (999). In “A Reconsideration of the Blackbird,” the
elements Ramazani describes are all in play; the poem is so fragmented
and elliptical that the political import is mostly felt rather than rationalized,
as is often true of poems of equivocal agency.
Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is well-known
for its multiple perspectives, cubist influences, and its celebration of
movement. In Stevens’s poem the blackbird “whirled in the autumn
winds, / It was a small part of the pantomime.” Whereas Moss’s
reconsiderations are often prosaic and flat, Stevens’s are often haikulike
and cubist-influenced: “I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In
which there are three blackbirds” (The Collected Poems 92–94). In
Moss’s poem, though, there is little motion or faith in language to
remake the world for the better. Stevens’s poem enacts in part the
modernist impetus to create a world out of the individual’s imagination
and consciousness, and he was primarily concerned with a world
that is in constant motion. However, for Stevens and for some of his
readers, the negative counterbalance to this continual movement is
instability and uncertainty, two notions that Moss explores in her
“reconsideration.”
Stevens’s propensity for linguistic play is the primary element that
Moss takes on in her poem. But unlike Stevens’s poem, which is
methodical and ordered, Moss’s is explosive, snarled, and difficult to
sort out. It is immediately obvious from the visual texture of
“A Reconsideration of the Blackbird” that it is even more fragmented
than Stevens’s thirteen well-marked sections; Moss’s poem proliferates
with italicized terms and phrases, questions answered elliptically if
at all, and three pairs of “Problem” and “Solution” lines. 18 On this
surface, the poem’s main linguistic play and conceit emerge—that a
crow is a blackbird and a blackbird is a symbol for a black person.
Accordingly, the first line is a declarative statement with just such an
implication: “Let’s call him Jim Crow” (10–11; original emphasis here