american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

For background on testimonio, see Beverley’s Against Literature
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989); the Gugelberger edited
The Real Thing; and two special issues of Latin American Perspectives
titled Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature (18.3 (Summer
1991): 1–120 and 18.4 (Autumn 1991): 1–120) edited by
Gugelberger and Michael Kearney. The premier example of testimonio
is Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia as told
to Elisabeth Burgos by Guatemalan Indian activist and Nobel Peace
Prize–winner Rigoberta Menchú (Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara,
S.A., 1983).
2. See Jonathan Levin’s The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism,
& American Literary Modernism (New Americanists Series. Ed.
Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), which draws on
Emerson, Dewey, James, and Santayana, for further discussion of
Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the dynamic between resistance
and evasion, especially in relationship to imagination. See pages
87–89. Levin writes, “Imagination responds to material conditions—
natural, social, and cultural—and has no possible existence apart from
them” (88).
3. Was Komunyakaa familiar with Forché’s poem when he wrote “We
Never Know”? Given that Forché’s book is well known, I assume that
Komunyakaa was aware of “The Colonel.” Whether or not he
consciously imitated her line is uncertain. This argument on
Komunyakaa draws on my article “Working in the Space of Disaster:
Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dialogues with America,” Callaloo: A Journal of
African Diaspora Arts & Letters 28.3 (2005): 812–823.
4. Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” (The Things They Carried) deals
with how collective guilt overwhelms even soldiers who did not kill a
Vietnamese soldier personally, only saw one killed.
5. In this book I use the term “stanza” for simplicity and convenience.
Though some critics would insist that a “stanza” is part of a formal,
metered poem, and that a “stanza” in a free verse poem should be
called a “verse paragraph,” I find the semantic difference unnecessary.
If it looks like a stanza, I call it a stanza. For instance, I would call the
first six free verse lines of Merwin’s “For a Coming Extinction”
(The Lice 1967) a “stanza” because it is a self-contained unit of lines
separated from the next “stanza” by a blank line:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
NOTES 203
6. This object position is important in that it reflects the African American
male’s historical position as an object to be used and ultimately rejected
by the dominant culture; it also suggests the African American subject’s
historically compromised agency in American society.