american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

114 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
worldviews. Instead, these poems’ strategies and voices evince greater
concern for imaginative visions that do not fit neatly into succinct
messages or political positions. They do not order us to act; they move
by insinuation, intuition, and in the re-creation of the world rather
than in its representation. The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice
Blanchot’s fragmented meditations on disaster, language, and an
ethics of responsibility, suggests that literature arrests and impedes the
containability of its message, in the process defusing and complicating
whatever messages inhere therein. So it is in many of the poems in this
chapter, many of which are complex and multifaceted. These poems
often display more sweeping, challenging, and surreal visions of the
world we live in, the ones we might live in, and the ones that are likely
only dreams; they depict not what is, but what might be or what might
have been. A few lines from A.R. Ammons’s book-length poem Tape
for the Turn of the Year (1965) sum up the strategy: “in art, we do not
run / to keep up with random / moments, we select / & create / the
moment occurring forever” (37). So, though the moment—events
and experiences in the world—have a place in poetry, in poems of
equivocal agency the poet creates and recreates a type of magical,
transformative world that is “occurring forever” and is not bound to
a limited time and space, even for those poems with particular
contexts.
There are many other poems I could have chosen for this chapter,
including those in the oeuvre of Yusef Komunyakaa, many of which
combine the rhetorical strategies and voices of experiential and
equivocal agency. Poems such as “1984,” “Landscape for the
Disappeared,” “The Music that Hurts,” “Fever,” “Camouflaging the
Chimera,” and “ ‘You and I Are Disappearing,’ ” all of which appear
in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular: New and Selected
Poems (1993), are some of his most haunting and surreal. Jorie
Graham’s “Fission” (1991) is another well-known example that combines
elements of both experiential and equivocal agency. Amiri
Baraka’s frequently anthologized “An Agony. As Now” (1964) is also
a political poem of equivocal agency, one which stands in stark contrast
to his poems of authoritative agency. I refer readers specifically to
two excellent examples I did not choose—Robert Hass’s “Politics of a
Pornographer” (Field Guide 1973) and Charles Wright’s “Against the
American Grain” (Harper’s Magazine August 2004)—for further
ways that contemporary poets, and ones not often considered “political,”
use the voices of equivocal agency. When reading any political
poem of equivocal agency, finally, it is necessary for the reader to be
willing to make broad imaginative leaps. As Bruce Weigl writes of