american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

120 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
to be comprehensive and illuminating, book-length works often bog
down in description and background. Four of the seminal, selfdescribed
comprehensive texts—Bruce-Novoa’s Chicano Poetry:
A Response to Chaos (1982); Cordelia Candelaria’s Chicano Poetry: A
Critical Introduction (1986); José E. Limón’s Mexican Ballads,
Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social
Poetry (1992); and Teresa McKenna’s Migrant Song: Politics and
Process in Contemporary Chicano Literature (1997)—have significantly
overlapping summaries and descriptive information. When
Candelaria briefly outlines a historical context for Chicana/o poetry
vis-à-vis the dominant Anglo-American tradition, it is an expeditious,
indistinct backdrop to her “exhaustive analysis” (xii). Even Candelaria
acknowledges that her self-proclaimed comprehensive study will “fall
short” of her goals and reader expectations (xi–xii).
Although books on Latina/o poetry and on other minority poetries
are indispensable to scholarly work and essential for illuminating
the poetry, they also tend to marginalize further the poetry in
American letters. Candelaria’s 1986 important claim about Chicana/o
literature in relation to the American tradition is still largely unheeded
in the academy and by critics: “That Chicano literature is fundamentally
‘American’ is clearly established, for its origins and influences are
all part of the very basis of the macro context that constitutes the U.S.
American literary tradition. In this sense, therefore, it, like other ethnic
minority literatures of the United States, lies within the mainstream
of American literature.” This mainstream, she points out, is
“pluralistic, iconoclastic, democratic, and multi-ethnic,” rather than
“solely Anglo-American” (15; original emphasis). The rhetorical
strategies of migratory agency exist within the mainstream of
American letters; whereas the poetic agency of the migrant is largely
the province of bilingual Latina/o poems, these migrants too are part
of the multiethnic, pluralistic American mainstream. They embody
the dynamism, multiethnic, and multilingual nature of America and
its literature; these poems are thus the most charismatic repositories of
the shifting space that meets at the junction of two signifiers—
“America” and “poetry”—both of which are fluid terms currently
undergoing relatively dramatic changes in meaning.
As I alluded to in this book’s introduction, the term “America” has
a range of different historical significations. The prevailing English
speaker’s (and consequently, hegemonic) understanding of “America”
is fundamentally different from its denotation and connotation in
Spanish. As Debra A. Castillo notes, in English the word “typically
refers to a country” and in Spanish to a continent (5). I want to retain