american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

6 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
the implication that there are only spokesmen and not spokeswomen,
then the definition may be more helpful.
Poets are often seen as charged with speaking on behalf of their
people, which is quite a lofty task, albeit one that Latin American
poets such as Neruda and Ernesto Cardenal took on willingly in the
twentieth century. 2 As Suzanne Gardinier points out, Neruda’s Canto
general (1950) was an attempt to summon forth power on “his
people’s behalf.” Furthermore, the Canto general, she says, was made
both to be beautiful and “a force of nature, a testimony, a pamphlet,
a letter, a sword” (18). However, especially given the debates
concerning a poet’s right to speak on behalf of others—cogently outlined
by Hélène Cixous in her essay “Conversations,” Hirsch in How
to Read a Poem, and by the various theorists of the Latin American
testimonio (which I discuss thoroughly in chapter 1)—the wisdom and
propriety of writing on behalf of others is now viewed suspiciously,
especially by those living in postcolonial nations. To paraphrase
Eudora Welty’s 1965 essay: “Must the poet crusade?” Hirsch calls into
question the poet’s function as voice of the people because of “compelling
reasons” for poets “to resist any public or ideological pressure
to speak for anyone besides oneself ” (180). Referring primarily to the
dangers of writing political poetry on behalf of others in World
War II–era Poland, he shows the dangers, both to life and liberty, of
writing to promote the needs and rights of others. Is there an inherent
danger, then, in political poetry, or is this factor heavily dependent
on context? Can political poems speak simply on behalf of the poet
rather than on behalf of a community? I believe that even poems that
speak on behalf of one person are nonetheless read by others who may
see them as speaking on behalf of themselves or others. In other
words, once a poem is written and published or performed, it leaves
the boundedness of the author’s world.
Political Poetry’s
Historical-Cultural Contexts
The question of temporality has long been problematic for political
poetry. Is political poetry timeless, or is it time- and context-bound,
mutable, decaying in meaning over temporal, geographical, and historical
borders? If the roles and functions of the poet in American society
are contested and ever-shifting, so too is the import of political poems
when they are removed from historical or cultural context. In “Poetics of
the Americas,” Charles Bernstein indicates that it is important not to
remove poems from the local contexts that give them meaning (3), which