american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

26 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
dexterity (of which they have plenty), but from the reader’s
knowledge of Komunyakaa’s history as a soldier in Vietnam. His most
anthologized poem, “Facing It,” in which the speaker visits the
Vietnam War Memorial, is inseparable from the facts of the war and its
nearly 60,000 American dead. The reader knows that the poet is staging
a voice, but one that speaks of the lived experiences that mark it.
Instead, even if, as Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and others have
pointed out, the “I” in the text is different from the person who writes
the text, an added level of poetic agency may be derived from
Komunyakaa’s experience itself. 14 Even so, this poetic strategy has
been criticized by scholars and poets for being romantic, simplistic,
and for glorifying witness or participation in events of extremity.
Rasula, for instance, hints that many of Forché’s and Rich’s poems are
“grounded in methods of emotional manipulation” (319). When a
voice has too much of this kind of integrity there is always a risk of
reader nausea, of being overwhelmed with the accomplishments and
courage of the speaking “I.” Many of my colleagues refuse to read or
teach Whitman because they dislike his constant (and often grandiose)
repetition of the first-person pronoun and of his range of (real or
imagined) experiences. Much Language Poetry works to decenter the
self for this very reason, so that the speaking “I” remains in
the peripheries, rather than being the proverbial center of attention,
even if, I would argue, Whitman’s “I” is much more complex,
versatile, and democratic than these colleagues consider it.
In the second half of chapter 1 I explore the second subset of
embodied agency—authoritative agency. These poems draw on the
Whitmanian tradition in embracing the poet’s assumed cultural
authority and role as a people’s representative. The speaker-poets of
these poems insist on their abilities to know the conditions of others,
and they command the corresponding right to inscribe a type of
enjoining authoritative voice that demands action from readers. Many
of these poems, moreover, protest social injustice in exhortatory tones
and implicitly assert poetry’s didactic functions. Adrienne Rich’s use
of apostrophe to call forth a community of readers to action—which
Mary K. DeShazer has pointed out is common amongst women
“resistance poets” from South Africa to El Salvador to the United
States—symbolizes the rigorous, relentless spirit of these poems.
Many are activist poems at heart. They demand action, and they insist
that readers use their own experiences to create change. Along those
lines, Anne Herzog calls Rich’s poetry a “poetry of shame [that] readies
for revolution,” evoking community, guilt, and shame in order to
bring about change (267); Roger Gilbert also points out her