american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

24 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
on the speaker-poets’ lived experiences demonstrable through the
human body and memory; as Massumi might argue, human agency is
bodily. Poems that foreground individual and collective experience
insist that the first-person perceptions, testimonies, and memories of
historical actors provide the most powerful political agency for poetry.
Like my understanding of how poems can be “political,” my understanding
of what experience is is broad. Simply put, these poems generally
use the lived experiences of real historical actors. As Walter
Benjamin believed, personal experience is the content and “source” of
storytelling. It can be “passed on from mouth to mouth.” For
Benjamin, the horrors of the twentieth century did much to endanger
our “ability to exchange experiences” with each other through stories
(83). Poems of experiential agency are thus acts of exchanging
(and transforming) experience with readers.
My understanding of experience, moreover, is influenced greatly by
the Latin American testimonio and its scholars. I say more about the
testimonio in chapter 1, but here I want to make two points about
experience. George Yúdice argues that testimonial writing “promotes
expression of personal experience” that is through and through a
“collective experience of struggle against oppression” (54; original
emphasis). Many poems I analyze suggest that the speaker-poet’s
experiences are part of a larger community’s experience of the world.
Experience, then, is not only personal; it can be shared, exchanged,
and lived together. However, as Santiago Colás writes, in testimonio
the speaking “agent is not identical to the other members of the community,
precisely because he or she has chosen to speak” (166), in this
case because he or she is a poet. As such, the speaker-poet is always
somewhat apart from that represented community. Second, John
Beverley shows that the testimonio is able to produce a peculiar
sensation in readers that fiction cannot. He writes, “it produces if not
the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real ” (34; original
emphasis). Poems that are centered by and in experience, unlike
testimonios, do not seek to produce “the real”—whatever exactly that
may mean—but they can impact the reader with something akin to
“experiencing the real.”
As I wrote earlier, “poetry is often seen as a ‘natural’ medium for
the recounting and examining of personal experience” (Roberts and
Allison 1), but a poetry of experience is best when it is complicated
rather than “natural,” if “natural” signifies simply and transparently
representative of lived experience. Using personal experience in
poetry is often seen as problematic and as a potential limit to creativity
and innovation. In a recent article in Poetry, former U.S. Poet