american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

mandate or “solution” to make all black people white, and therefore
desirable. 19 Moreover, in Moss’s final “solution,” the imperative to
“call them visions” subtly denounces poetic tradition, especially its
romantic, visionary strains, of which Stevens could be considered a
descendant. It further suggests that “vision” has wrongly been
considered the province of whites, but not blacks. The message could
be construed as: if you are a black artist, make sure your vision is a
white one. If so, “everyone will want” to read it. Otherwise, your
tongue will become a “little noose.”
In his review of Moss’s Small Congregations: New and Selected
Poems (1995), Rafael Campo hints at a series of questions that affect
politically engaged poetry. For Campo, Moss’s poems often “fail to
sound beautiful,” which betrays “her distrust of poetry.” He continues
with the claim that “at times, her methods are not equal to her
message.” He conjectures that her poems are sometimes not beautiful
“because it hurts the eye so much to read them, to see the awful truths
they reveal.” However, he also claims that his is not a “convincing
excuse” because poets such as Marilyn Hacker, June Jordan, Thom
Gunn, and Adrienne Rich have written beautiful poems about difficult
sociopolitical subjects (“Sturdy Boxcars” 348). A comparison, for
example, of Rich’s rhetorical strategies with Moss’s is a byproduct of
this book; the more pressing questions, though, are not ones of
comparison. Why do poems, especially political ones, have to be
“beautiful”? Certainly many hip-hop songs are not “beautiful,” but
still powerful. Are pain and oppression unacceptable subjects for
poetry? Or do these subjects have to be made beautiful as well? What
problems result from making beautiful the horrific? 20 Campo’s comments
get at the heart of the complications and problems with much
political poetry. For a poem of equivocal agency, traditional concepts
of beauty ought not apply. “A Reconsideration of the Blackbird,”
moreover, is beautiful primarily in its haunting qualities, ones that
make the reader quail and think, rather than appreciate gracefulness
and charm. Finally, poems of equivocal agency, such as Moss’s, do not
betray a “distrust” of poetry; rather, they portray an abiding trust in
the ways that poems can be imaginative interventions in the often
frightening world.
Summary and Conclusions
EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 113
The political poems of equivocal agency discussed in chapter 2 are not
so much about specific political messages or positions or about the
experiences that help create and are created by these positions or