american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONCLUSION 193
to evidentiary justification. Dove stages a voice of historical imagination
and collective oppression. The voice is both hers and not hers. But the
phrase this did not happen never enters my mind. The poem is
convincing precisely because its speaker becomes not the poet’s voice
but the slave’s. 3
If poems such as Dove’s span the agencies discussed here, others’
voices do not fit into any of my categories. I want to reflect momentarily
on just one—humor—and its possibilities in contemporary
culture. One could make the claim that humor is one of the best political
tools in twenty-first century U.S. society. Chappelle’s Show and
South Park are incisive political art, and Jon Stewart’s “fake news”
show The Daily Show has not only brilliantly subversive political
commentary, it is also the most insightful news program on cable or
network television. Parody and satire are tools in trade for comedians
and for poets. Some contemporary American poems have striking
humorous voices: Gregory Corso’s “Marriage,” Sylvia Plath’s
“Daddy,” Martín Espada’s “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson,” Victor
Hernández Cruz’s “It’s Miller Time,” Gina Valdez’s “English con
Salsa” (discussed in chapter 3), Campbell McGrath’s “Capitalist
Poem #5,” among countless others, including many by Alexie. 4 Since
the Beats, the combination of subversive politics and humor has been
a cornerstone of poetry as countercultural art.
Gary Soto’s “Mexicans Begin Jogging” is an accomplished example
of a contemporary poem that uses humor in a political, but subtle, way.
In the poem, the speaker-poet narrates a worker’s experience of fleeing
a factory on a border patrol raid. Thinking he is an illegal immigrant,
the boss yells at him, “ ‘Over the fence, Soto’ ” (cited in Suárez Red,
White, and Blues 173). The speaker-poet protests that he is an
American, but the boss insists and “press[es] / A dollar into [his]
palm.” So, he follows the running illegals “through the back door”
saying to himself “I was on his [the boss’s] time.” The second stanza
begins with the speaker-poet running with the others. The dominant
image of this run is fascinating, absurd, and darkly comic; Soto styles it
as a surreal road race—a marathon or charity race—that the Mexican
factory workers join accidentally. They run “past the amazed crowds
that lined / The street and blurred like photographs, in rain” and past
“sociologists” who “clock” the speaker-poet as he goes past on a “jog
into the next century / On the power of a great, silly grin.” Because
Soto’s name appears in the poem, and because this technique is poetry
faux pas, it likely points to an actual experience that was funny for just
one participant—the poet. Thus, the image’s comic absurdity for the
speaker-poet opens the poem up to undertones of fear, ethnocentricity,