american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

There is great facetiousness in the penultimate line in the speaker’s
declaration that her students will respond to questions of “Do you
speak English?” with “of course. I love English!” This voice and the
exclamation mark suggest that the students’ “love” of English is an
act. The poem’s final line is slow and measured after a poem of quick,
enjambed rhythms and fast lines. The speaker concludes that speaking
English will be undergirded by other more ancient rhythms. She says,
“And you’ll hum / a Mextec chant that touches la tierra and the
heavens.” Because the speaker says this line immediately following
“I love English!” it is a reminder that the immigrant students will
make sense of the world with their native expressive traditions.
English will be the language of the everyday business transaction,
Spanish and other indigenous languages the media of song, poetry, of
“la tierra and the heavens.” In this poem, then, the alternating use of
English and Spanish enacts the sociolinguistic agency of the migrant
even as it foregrounds the glass ceiling that traps and channels them
into careers migrating between restaurants and, in light of potential
crackdowns on illegal immigrants, safe houses.
Migratory Agency and
the ITALICS Question
MIGRATORY AGENCY 139
The previous three poems of migratory agency require competent
bilingual readers. They would frustrate monolingual readers, sending
them to the dictionary/diccionario too many times to have a fluid
reading experience. This disruption is a critical aspect of these poems’
figures of voice; each disruption highlights the rift between languages
and cultures enacted for bilingual and non-English-speaking
Latinas/os on a daily basis. Code switching also interrupts the dominance
of English and challenges its “mastery” of lesser “foreign” languages.
As such, these poems are intended for competent bilingual
readers. If a poet must imagine her audience, the imagined audience
for the previous poems of migratory agency is bilingual.
There are, however, poems of migratory agency that are not fully
bilingual. These primarily English poems highlight or foreground
Spanish words, phrases, and titles without excluding monolingual
English speakers from comprehending them. Novelist and poet Pat
Mora’s comments on her use of Spanish in primarily English works is
instructive: “I’m writing to a great extent for an English-speaking
audience. I am bilingual, though English-dominant. I’m interested in
including Spanish because it’s part of my world, it’s part of my
mind . . . There is subversion in the use of Spanish, very consciously.”