american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CHAPTER 3
Migratory Agency
Introduction
As in the previous chapters, the goal of chapter 3 is to elucidate one of
the primary rhetorical strategies of American political poetry.
However, unlike the previous chapters on embodied and equivocal
agencies, this one on migratory agency makes more significant departures
from current poetry criticism and theory. These departures are
byproducts of three imperatives: to be inclusive, to embrace multilingualism,
and to articulate my belief that poems of migratory agency
bring to life a key variation on one of the most important rhetorical
strategies of poetry, broadly defined, in the twentieth century. With a
few brief illustrative exceptions, the poems analyzed in chapter 3 are
by Latina/o poets. However, it is not my intention to write a chapter
about Latina/o poetry; nor is my primary goal to argue that these
poets deserve inclusion in the much-disputed canon. Because most
Latina/o poetry is studied from within the framework of a specif ic
tradition or type of poetry and rarely as part of a larger framework,
I hope that one of the byproducts of chapter 3 is a movement of these
poems and their languages into the multiethnic mainstream of
contemporary American poetry.
In this chapter, then, I discuss the dominant figures of voice and
rhetorical strategies in migratory agency, and how these poems depart
from and are similar to other prominent literary and cultural movements
in the twentieth century. My understanding of migratory
agency thus begins relatively broadly and then narrows into what
I perceive is its primary domain in contemporary American poetry. In
this introduction, I look backward to Modernists Ezra Pound and
T.S. Eliot, who strived to create a sophisticated, multilingual poetry
that migrates between languages, cultures, and historical traditions;
I also turn back briefly to a Neruda poem that illustrates indirectly
some key principles of migratory agency. Throughout the chapter,