american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 25
Laureate (2001–2003) Billy Collins, who is often criticized for
writing light verse, traces the limits of what he calls “memory-driven”
poetry (281). He suggests that a poem based on past events must
convey an awareness of its own unfolding in time in the present tense
and an awareness of its own language if it is to be successful as more
than a narrative of events (283). Memory, he insists, should serve as a
springboard or a departure point for a poem rather than an end unto
itself. He continues by claiming that “it is impossible to view the past”
without implicating the remembering agent in the present remembering;
for Collins, “the observer is an ingredient in the observed” (285).
Poems of experiential agency often foreground both personal experience
and the perception, retelling, and aestheticizing of personal
experience, thereby preemptively acknowledging and tackling concerns
like Collins’s and avoiding what Jed Rasula, in borrowing from
Jonathan Raban and Northrop Frye, calls “low mimetic realism” (318).
Political poems of experiential agency usually employ self-reflexive
narrators who consider the implications of poeticizing experience.
Chapter 1 therefore also explores the complexities of embodying
experience and testimony in poetry, as this abiding self-consciousness
is a major part of the figures of voice utilized in experiential agency,
and to a lesser extent, in authoritative agency.
Some critics go so far as to claim that a first-person narrator who
proclaims and stages the self as speaker is indispensable for
political poetry. Alicia Ostriker, in her 2001 essay “Beyond
Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness,” claims that any
poetics that denies a self is useless; furthermore, she writes that poetry
of witness needs a consciousness that suffers and chooses in order to
stage an ethical and political model for readers. Indeed, she points out
a major difference in socially and politically engaged postmodern
poetry compared to high modernism—the poet must be present and
located in the poem (35). Chapter 1 tracks how the poet inscribes the
speaker-poet (the one with the experiences) into poems and
the effects it has on the political nature of them. In doing so, I try
to tease out the ways that experience works politically in poetry and
how its representation can make poetry political.
In the first half of the chapter on experiential agency I mostly consider
first-person, lyric-narrative, free verse poems. Personal experience
provides the power, justification, and a great deal of integrity to
poems by Levine, Forché, Michael S. Harper, Komunyakaa, Gary
Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Lowell, and countless other poets
I do not discuss in this book. For example, Komunyakaa’s Vietnam
War poems have an added integrity derived not from aesthetic