american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

16. See Ben Lee’s “ ‘Howl’ and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These
New Beats?” in American Literature 76.2 (June 2004): 367–389, for
a discussion of Allen Ginsberg’s use of anaphora and “who” in Howl.
Ginsberg’s use of “who” to begin lines is a precursor and likely
influence on Baraka’s “who” lines in “Somebody Blew up America.”
Lee writes about Howl: “The form of the poem leads us to wonder
when exactly—and with whom—these actions and attitudes originate.
Through force of repetition, one might say, the relative pronoun
‘who’ becomes interrogative, and the form of Ginsberg’s poem subtly
undermines the notion that generations break away cleanly” (383).
17. It is crucial not to mistake AAVE or other vernaculars as improper or
inferior. They are systematic, dynamic, rule-based variations on SAE
rather than lesser versions of English.
18. See Michael J. Sidnell’s essay “Yeats’s ‘Written Speech’: Writing,
Hearing, and Performance” in Yeats Annual 11 (1995): 3–11, for an
analysis of how Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse” stages spoken voices. Yeats’s
rhetorical staging and Sidnell’s discussion of it influenced my
understanding of the two spoken voices in Forché’s “Return.”
19. Joan Didion’s Salvador (Washington Square P, 1983) is a short,
captivating, impressionistic sketch of El Salvador during this time
period. One passage particularly resonates with Forché’s poem.
Didion writes, “Whenever I hear someone speak now of one or
another solución for El Salvador I think of particular Americans who
have spent time there, each in his or her own way inextricably altered
by the fact of having been in a certain place at a certain time. Some of
these Americans have since moved on and others remain in Salvador,
but like survivors of a common natural disaster, they are equally
marked by the place” (98; original emphasis).
20. César Vallejo’s “Un hombre pasa con un pan . . .” (“A Man Walks by
with a Stick of Bread . . .”) offers an alternative justification. It
suggests that poetry (especially intellectual poetry) is difficult, if not
impossible, to write in the face of human poverty and suffering. See
César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, trans. Clayton
Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979),
176–177.
Chapter 2 Equivocal Agency
NOTES 205
1. As noted in chapter one, this discussion is not to imply that all poems
in chapter two are about war. War simply provides an accessible and
easily illustrated context with which to frame the ways that poems of
equivocal agency depart from poems of experiential agency.
2. For present purposes, I do not make a stark distinction between magic
realism and the fantastic real, as originally advanced by Cuban writer
Alejo Carpentier. For background, consult Alberto Ríos’s website on