american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONCLUSION 191
from what Muriel Rukeyser called poetry of “documentary fact”
(cited in What Is Found 21) in commenting on historical events, but
they also often foreground voices of experience with regard to historical
conditions and trends rather than to specific events. These poems
are sometimes criticized as mere documentary or polemic, especially
when written by women or minorities, but they reimagine experience
in ways that transform as they document. Poems of authoritative
agency embody experience, but they extrapolate from that experience
the authority to speak for entire communities in the traditions of
Whitman and the griot. They are uncompromising, and their grave,
urgent voices tackle directly pressing injustices. They do not, as poet
David Mura writes, “surrender vast realms of experience” to the
“objectivity” of disciplines such as journalism, economics, and political
science as “the sole voice[s] which speak on events and topics of
relevance to us all” (cited in What Is Found 121).
In chapter 2 I discussed two types of equivocal agency, comprehensive
and particular. These strategies are often more difficult to describe
than those of chapter 1. By nature, these poems are often indirect,
mysterious, haunting, enchanting, duplicitous, or some combination
thereof. They generally depart from simple linear narratives and from
identifiable first-person speakers. They often have parodic, distant,
satirical voices. For example, Simic uses first-person speakers, but they
are ghostly, more present in their absence than in any physical body.
His speakers and characters “vanish / With a touch of the hand”
(“Cameo Appearance”). Poems of equivocal agency are primarily
political through the imagination, which is itself the uncompromising
force that refuses capitulation to repressive sociopolitical paradigms or
the limitations of a poetry of experience.
In chapter 3 I discussed poems of migratory agency, which are not
simply “hybrid.” They do not foreground multiple languages in service
of a hybrid, modern (or postmodern) art. Their figures of voice
migrate between languages, cultures, worldviews, and geographies,
and in doing so begin to challenge how we speak of America. The skin
of these poems holds a multiplicity of living, breathing communities
moving between languages and cultures. These poems—whether
mostly in English or in Spanish—actively create a multicultural, multilingual
poetry of the Americas and of the United States. They are,
moreover, at the forefront of a burgeoning Latina/o century in U.S.
literature and culture.
In chapter 4 I argued that hip-hop has a unique form of poetic
agency activated by its progressive voices, live performances, and
community-based values. The chapter captures only a small, but