american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 149
illuminates differences between Eliot’s and Pound’s Modernist
version of migratory agency, hip hop’s version of it, and Latina/o
poets’ more organic version. However, Cruz’s differentiation
obscures the fact that most poets, and most speakers, borrow from a
variety of discourses and codes. Whereas writers such as Eliot and
Pound may have used multiple languages to create an “elite” poetry,
other Anglo poems emphasize the aural and rhetorical effects of a
Romance language such as Spanish—effects that English
cannot accomplish. This use of Spanish, for instance, can also contextualize
experience. For example, John Balaban’s “Agua Fria y Las
Chicharras” (Words for My Daughter 22–25, which was selected by
W.S. Merwin for the 1990 National Poetry Series) has a Spanish title
and a few Spanish lines. Yet Balaban, who has translated Bulgarian
poets Blaga Dimitrova and Georgi Borisov and Vietnamese poet Ho
Xuan Huong, 15 does not speak or read Spanish. In the poem, Spanish
authenticates experience and creates key sound effects. Because the
poem takes place in three places—the Alhambra; Arroyo Hondo,
New Mexico; and Taos, New Mexico—Spanish words authenticate
and localize the poem and the experiences therein.
The first part of the poem focuses on sound itself, specifically on
how “the voice of the Prophet,” the singing of “water-carriers,” the
“spill of water,” and “locusts calling at the edge of wilderness” combine
to create elemental motion and tactile and aural beauty. To
presage, authenticate, and contextualize these effects, Balaban renders
the title, which translates simply as “Cold Water and the Locusts,”
and the water-carriers’ song in Spanish. Balaban’s use of Spanish does
not indicate “elite” intentions nor “colonial imposition,” as a full
reading makes clear. But it implies, if not a lesser status, than a supplemental,
or ornamental, status for the second language, although
certainly not a relationship of “mastery.”
Though Balaban’s poem actuates a type of migratory agency,
I include it here mainly for a different purpose. Code switching
between English and Spanish, which is key to many poems in chapter 3
and others like them, is not the only kind of switching that characterize
them. Candelaria writes that Chicana/o poetry only appears bilingual
“if one is not looking or listening very hard.” She rightly claims
that much Chicana/o poetry has a “multilingualism” with six distinct
dialects—Standard American English, Standard Spanish, English
slang/vernacular, Spanish dialects/regional vernaculars,
English/Spanish bilingualism, and “an amalgam of pre-American
indigenous languages” (Chicano Poetry 73; original emphasis). Pérez-
Torres also points out that Chicana/o poetry moves not only between