american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

122 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
didactic intentions and in their juxtaposition of languages. They were
trying to show that Americans are not provincial and unlearned.
Theirs was an attempt to display the agency of the intellectual
migrant, who is not only comfortable, but superior, in nimbly moving
between languages and historical and poetic traditions.
In Pound’s case, for example, The Cantos were his attempt at a
modern epic encompassing world history, literatures, languages, arts,
myths, and economics. He wanted to write a poem with allusions that
only classically educated readers would understand; these readers
would then work to create an uber-civilization “ruled by rightthinking
men of action” (Ramazani Head Notes 367). Eliot’s and
Pound’s use of multiple languages, therefore, was a political strategy
for demonstrating authority, learnedness, and superior education.
Moreover, they were not directly challenging the primacy or authority
of English or its place in the dominant culture, as do the poems
discussed in chapter 3. Additionally, their multilingual poems are the
product of elite, classical educations, not the life experiences of a
migrant moving between languages, which suggests that experience is
key to migratory agency in addition to embodied agency, the latter a
point supported by Rafael Pérez-Torres when he claims that many
Latina/o poems “attempt to represent accurately the culture and
economics of specific communities” (Movements 17). Finally, then,
these Modernists and hip-hop artists generally borrow from other languages
and cultural codes, whereas the figures of voice in migratory
agency are organic, indigenous to the languages and cultures they
inhabit. In all three cases, however, the voices remain poetic—staged
and rhetorical.
Because poems of migratory agency code switch between English
and Spanish, I want to review briefly some theoretical parameters outlined
in literary and sociolinguistic studies on code switching in poetry
and in U.S. bilingual communities. Anthropologist Keith H. Basso
argues that code switching—in his study between Western Apache and
English—“may be strategically employed as an instrument of metacommunication”
and as an “indirect form of social commentary”
(8–9). Jeraldine R. Kraver writes that code switching in Latina poetry is
a “means of resisting the forces of monoculturalism and monolingualism
that threaten bicultural and bilingual writers”; she shows that it also
“upset(s)” “the binary oppositions—especially English/Spanish—upon
which Anglo society depends” (193, 196). Further, she rightly claims
that “introducing” Spanish in a text “disrupts [the] authoritarian discourse”
of English (196–197). Poems of migratory agency, which have
various amounts of English and Spanish, do all of the above: they