american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

124 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
and pressures bilingual poets face from a literary culture that often
determines a poem’s acceptability on the basis of its relationship to an
illusory English-only tradition. In his account of the incident, Sáenz
writes that Brodsky told him to “keep foreign languages out of [his]
poems, since [he] was working in an ‘English tradition.’ ” According
to Sáenz, shortly thereafter Brodsky “recite[d] a poem with a Latin
phrase in it.” Sáenz concludes that Latin, Greek, and French have
“an esteemed place in American letters”—and we see evidence of this
in Eliot’s and Pound’s work—and that Brodsky’s real problem was
with Spanish. “Clearly,” Sáenz writes, “some languages are more
foreign than others” (524).
Brodsky’s apparent disdain for Spanish as well as his upholding of
an “English tradition” ignore some fundamental realities. There is no
unbroken U.S. “English tradition” handed down from poet to poet.
There are many English traditions in the United States. A critic
could ostensibly trace various strands of poetic tradition: Whitman–
Williams–Olson–Ginsberg–Creeley–Baraka; Dickinson–Pound–
Snyder–Charles Wright; Stevens–Ashbery–Merwin–Strand–Graham;
Longfellow–Frost–Roethke–Kumin; McKay–Hughes–Brooks–Clifton–
Dove; Bishop–Lowell–Plath–Berryman–Olds; and Tillie Olsen– Edwin
Rolfe–Rukeyser–Levertov–Rich–Forché. Even these are incomplete,
contentious, and tenuous. Do you trace “tradition” on the basis of aesthetics,
style, theme, subject matter, commitment, or some combination
thereof? How do you account for influences on U.S. poets from
England, Ireland, France, Spain, Russia, Perú, Cuba, Chile, and Mexico?
There are also many Spanish (and indigenous language) traditions
in America and, more specifically, in the land now called the United
States. To give just one, José E. Limón thoroughly discusses the corrido,
which is an oral folk poetry that has been prominent both in
Mexico and in the United States, in his aforementioned book. He
shows its influence on Chicano Movement poetry in the 1960s and
1970s. Bilingual poetry, moreover, can no longer be ignored by the
dominant literary culture as tens of millions of Americans are bilingual,
and there are well over 40 million Latinas/os in the United States
(many of whom speak two languages). Spanish language poems are
also a key component of political poetry in the United States; critics of
American poetry should no longer ignore them. Finally, the discourses
of “authenticity,” as many cultural and postcolonial theorists have
shown, often serve “traditions” that seek to maintain linguistic and
power inequalities.
The conscious mixing of traditions and languages can create
exciting and discordant juxtapositions. The presence of Spanish in an