american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

192 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
vibrant, part of the culture, nevertheless I believe that this part is
critical to the culture’s place as a dynamic political art, capable not
only of poetic agency, but political agency in the public sphere. I hope
that those readers familiar with hip-hop will find the chapter illuminating,
innovative, and an impetus for further inquiry. For those readers
familiar with hip-hop only through its dominant cultural images,
I hope that chapter 4 offers an alternative perspective into the culture,
and an entrance point into those aspects of it that elude mainstream
publicity.
Now that I have summed up the four chapters, I want to consider
a poem that has multiple poetic agencies. Then, following my reading
of this poem, I discuss a poem that uses humor as its primary form of
agency, before making some general conclusions about politics and
poetry in the United States. In “The House Slave” former Poet
Laureate (1993–1995) Rita Dove creates a figure of voice that imagines
the first-person speaking “I” of a slave. The speaker narrates the
poem contemporaneously as if she were present on a nineteenthcentury
plantation. She speaks in present-tense, active first-person
verbs in order to describe the horrors of witnessing her family’s
mistreatment: “I watch them driven,” “I cannot fall asleep again,”
“I lie on my cot,” and “I weep” (29). The reader knows that Dove
was not a slave herself, but the poem works because we are willing to
go along with her experience of being an African American woman.
Yet what is more important is the poet’s and reader’s temporal
distance from slavery. Just as the house slave in the poem is insulated
from the greatest suffering—she is inside and not subject to the horrors
of the fields—and witnesses it from the window, the poet is both
insulated by over one hundred years but still witnesses it through the
window of the poem, the history that informs it, and the racism that
still pervades American society. After all, do not hundreds of thousands
of African American women keep house, so to speak, in large
corporations and universities—“houses” run by rich white men? The
poem enacts the isolation of the house slave, the isolation of the poet,
and the suffering they both witness.
“The House Slave” has two overlapping types of poetic agency. It
is a poem of experiential agency, but with a difference. There is the
first-person speaking “I” witnessing and narrating. There is
the reimagining of collective experience. There is the force of her status
as an African American woman. But there is also a palpable discursive
tension with equivocal agency. The scene she describes certainly
happened, but it never happened to the poet or to anyone she has
known. This poem thus illustrates how and why poems are not subject