american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

NOTES 207
an epigraph indicate that whatever their differences, Palmer and
Forché share theoretical influences.
11. These examples are from Richard Wilbur’s “Grace” (1947) and
Adrienne Rich’s “The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room” (1951).
See von Hallberg’s American Poetry (129–130).
12. In the essay at the conclusion of Selected Poems, Bly writes that he used
this line in The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (1970), but I argue that it
applies especially well to “Counting Small-Boned Bodies.”
13. In their introduction to W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry (1987),
Folsom and Nelson point out that the word “enigma” became a
prominent “part of the vocabulary” in writings about Merwin’s
poetry beginning in the mid-1960s (9).
14. Much the opposite may actually be true. See John Perkins’s Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
2004), a memoir about the American “corporatocracy” that keeps
developing nations under its economic and political control through,
among other things, massive World Bank loans, IMF structural adjustment
programs, and incentives to liberalize their economies.
15. Poems such as “Saturday Sweeping” (They Feed They’Lion) and “On
the Birth of Good & Evil during the Long Winter of ’28” and “For
the Poets of Chile” (The Names of the Lost 1976) are more indicative
of Levine’s narrative voice and use of experience than is “They Feed.”
16. These lines appear in Requiem for a Nun (1951; New York: Vintage,
1975).
17. Robert Kroetsch’s “Sketches of a Lemon” (1981) is one of the best
poems to sound off on Stevens’s poem. Unlike Moss’s poem,
Kroetsch’s is playful, irreverent, and unconcerned with sociopolitical
issues. See Kroetsch, “Sketches of a Lemon” in The Contemporary
Canadian Poem Anthology, Vol. 3, ed. George Bowering (Toronto:
Coach House, 1983), 162–176.
18. This “Problem” and “Solution” section is reminiscent of Merwin’s
“Some Last Questions” (The Lice 1967), except that Moss’s eerie
solutions are often more literal (even if absurd) than Merwin’s surreal,
disconnected images.
19. In Chapter 42 of Melville’s Moby Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale,”
Ishmael describes how disconcerting Moby Dick’s whiteness is for
sailors. He goes into a lengthy treatise about how whiteness “typifies
the majesty of Justice” (192) as well as the way it “exaggerates” the
“terror of objects otherwise terrible” (197). See Moby Dick; or The
Whale, ed. and intro. Tony Tanner (New York: Oxford UP, 1988).
20. Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s Migrations: Humanity in
Transition (New York: Aperture P, 2000) has been acclaimed as well
as scorned for its photographs of refugees and displaced people (from
war, environmental disaster, and migration to cities) in the hypercities
of Asia, the Americas, and Africa. They suggest that it is possible to
make beautiful the horrific despite questions of appropriation and