american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

150 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
languages, but between vernaculars, registers, and colloquialisms.
This multilingualism, he writes, is “a verbal strategy for conveying
such information as sociopolitical identity and economic position”
(Movements 17). The use of the vernacular in Chicana/o poetry, he
continues, is “an attempt to make present a silenced voice” (233).
Candelaria’s and Pérez-Torres’s comments suggest that most poets,
indeed most of society’s agents, even monolingual speakers, have
many ways of speaking. In this movement between registers and languages
there is a powerful agency of representation and re-creation.
Poems of migratory agency, therefore, engage in a special kind of
code switching because they involve not only registers of one language,
but variations on two or more. To return to Balaban’s poem,
it shows that code switching works in monolingual poems as well,
between registers of the same language. In “Agua Fria y Las
Chicharras,” Balaban’s speaker switches between high poetic diction
to a colloquial voice from line to line. The following lines offer a striking
example of this juxtaposition: “In the spill of water, the signature
of god” to “the few friends he counted / were gone and God knows
where.” Poets as dissimilar as John Ashbery, who is masterful at
switching between jargons and registers, and Yusef Komunyakaa,
whose “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country
Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” (Neon
Vernacular 8–10) is a verbal and visual tour-de-force of register
switching, utilize different languages in their poems, even if not different
standard languages. Chicano Ricardo Sánchez’s poems are
some of the best examples not only of code switching between
Spanish and English, but of switching between multiple registers—
beatnik dialect, Caló, regional dialects, and barrio vernacular. 16 It is
clear, then, that for as different as poems of migratory agency may
seem from the mainstream American English “tradition,” they also
share a variety of similarities in voice, rhetorical strategy, and the use
of diction.
Summary and Conclusions
Perhaps nowhere more than for the poems of chapter 3 do Bertolt
Brecht’s famous lines serve as a better conclusion: “In the dark times,
will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the
dark times” (27). The poems discussed in this chapter on the figures
of voice and rhetorical strategies of migratory agency are dark, often
depressing, visions of contemporary America. Though Valdez’s
“English con Salsa” is hopeful and celebratory, even it is tinged with