american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 121
the essences of both connotations. The poems discussed in chapter 3
were produced in the place that English speakers understand as
America, but they exhibit the values and influences of the broad range
of peoples, cultures, and languages of the Spanish speaker’s continental
understanding of America. This bifurcated understanding of
America points up the bilingual, divided voices of migratory agency,
in which various registers of two languages vector into and out of each
other and into and out of the cultures from which they originate.
Further, as Castillo points out in Redreaming America: Toward a
Bilingual American Culture, the “discourse of plurality” in the
American academy is discordant—not to mention disturbing—“in the
[university] context of monolingualism” (190) in which English
predominates and other languages barely register. Given this
language-power imbalance, bilingual political poems, and more
specifically poems of migratory agency, serve to redress and correct for
academic, critical, and cultural biases.
The use of multiple languages, as I mentioned previously, is not
exclusive to Latina/o poets. In their most famous long poems—The
Waste Land (1922), “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)”
(1920), and The Cantos (published intermittently from 1917 to
1969)—Eliot and Pound used multiple languages. Eliot used
German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit in The Waste Land in order to
create a polyglot texture of voices, perspectives, and speakers as if
mimicking the turning of a global radio dial. He was interested in the
fragmentation and uncertainty of the modern world; the use of multiple
languages was part of his attempt to find some objective way of
seeing this world through a cacophony of voices.
Pound’s engagement with languages, on the other hand, was
longer and more sustained. Imagism, founded and practiced by
Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell, was influenced greatly by Chinese
and Japanese poetry. He translated regularly from Chinese, Japanese,
Italian, and Greek, and his translation of T’ang poet Li Po’s “The
River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915) is one of the best twentiethcentury
English translations of any poem from any language. In his
own poetry, Pound habitually made allusions in five to six languages.
Herein lies a key difference between the strategies of migratory
agency, which I fully delineate shortly, and those of Modernism.
Pound and Eliot wrote English poems textured with lines and
allusions in other languages in part to display the difficulty, authority,
and unique individualism inherent in their rigid, authoritarian, and
patriarchal version of Modernism. Eliot’s and Pound’s often arcane
allusions in multiple languages were implicitly political in their