american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

22 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
and progressive change. They also expose what in the larger world is
often concealed in the discourses of “progress” and “freedom,”
the first concept of which I discuss in relation to several poems in
this book.
Agency provides two frameworks for understanding political
poetry. First, the subjects of poems—speakers, characters, the
witnessed—can be seen as agents acting in response to various other
agents, material constraints, and the social fields in which they are
embedded. In reading a Cardenal poem, Gibbons interprets the
poem’s speaker and spoken-of as political agents in their “participation
in Nicaraguan society” (283). In a shift in what Anthony Giddens
would call “two-way power relations” where power is, in part, transformative
capacity, the dictator is voiceless while the speaker, an agent
with little power in society, has the voice of the poem to act symbolically
(Giddens 88, 93). Whereas symbolic action is categorically different
than action in the world, to bracket symbolic action as a consolation
prize or wishful thinking denies the power of symbolic action in
politics. (For a recent example of symbolic action in politics one need
look no further than George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished”
speech aboard an aircraft carrier after the “fall” of Iraq.) In any case,
Giddens’s sense of agency elucidates the complex conditions for
action for speakers in a space where agents, as William James and
James Dewey might have argued, are entangled in relation to material
conditions, social and political networks, preestablished meanings,
and other agents. Like agents, political poems are entangled with
these conditions, networks, meanings, and realities as well. Second,
agency provides a way to generate categories of political poetry
through a formulation of the various types of agency represented in
poets’ strategies, specifically in their voices. For example, the source of
agency in a first-person, lyric-narrative poem of witness or personal
experience is the experience itself.
Before I outline the strategies for making political poetry, I want to
outline how I use theories of agency in my readings. Giddens suggests
that human practices—the habitual acts we engage in on a daily
basis—rather than roles “should be regarded as the points of articulation
between actors and structures” (117), a principle that leads away
from understanding agents in poems as occupying essential or representative
roles (as an African American, as a poor person, as a dictator,
and so on); instead, subjects, speakers, and characters in poems are
better understood by their practices, language, and their actions and
consequences. Focusing on actions and practices allows for greater
nuance and creativity than does mechanistic role or identity
fulfillment. Moreover, an agential reading of political poetry redirects