american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 123
challenge the dominant discourse, they reflect the multicultural
experiences of poets and their communities, and they interrupt the
Anglo-American literary tradition.
In poems of migratory agency, the speaker-poet—to use the words
of sociolinguists Eva Mendieta-Lombardo and Zaida A. Cintron—is
“the creative actor who uses CS [code switching] as a linguistic/literary
device to accomplish an end, for instance, to engage the reader/audience
in a culturally significant or culturally intimate way” (567). Code
switching not only reflects the speaker’s experiences and serves as a
means to establishing and recognizing group identity, it is also a
strategic, creative device for activating a specific type of poetic agency.
The primary and most powerful agency these poets have in the wider
culture is their ability to move fluidly between languages and their
variant systems of signification. However, the use of multiple languages
and cultural codes is just one tool at the disposal of bilingual
poets. They employ numerous rhetorical strategies that often dovetail
with experiential and authoritative agencies. Furthermore, many
Latina/o poems are exclusively in English or Spanish, but they are still
informed by the rhythms, nuances, and cultural currents of both languages.
Four critically acclaimed Latina/o poets—Alberto Ríos,
Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, and Martín Espada—write almost exclusively
in English, but their poems embody the voices and strategies
used by other bilingual poets. Also, some bilingual poets—notably
Lorna Dee Cervantes and Victor Hernández Cruz—no longer write
bilingual poems; Cervantes now writes in English and Cruz writes
poems in Spanish and English but not in combination. Cervantes, for
example, “decided early in her career that she could not write bilingually,
that it was a ‘false’ and ‘clumsy’ voice” (Kraver 197). Though
I disagree with Cervantes and believe some of her strongest poems are
bilingual, readers must decide this question themselves. (Her claim
also dovetails in an interesting way with Vendler’s presumptive desire
for a purity of language discussed shortly.) Ultimately, though, it is
unnecessary that a poem be transparently bilingual in order to display
the sensibilities, voices, and strategies of the migrant speaker, as
I explain later.
Cervantes’s and Vendler’s concerns are also reflected in the wider
literary culture, where there is a palpable resistance to Spanish among
many poets, readers, and critics. In a recent essay, Marcos McPeek
Villatoro retells the story of Joseph Brodsky’s confrontation with
Latino writer Benjamin Sáenz. Brodsky, according to the story,
“admonished” Sáenz for turning in a bilingual poem in Brodsky’s
workshop (176). For Villatoro, this anecdote suggests the difficulties