american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

INTRODUCTION 27
insistence on the “power to know the other’s pain and the injustices
that produced it” (155).
Much the same can be said (often minus the shame) for confrontational
poems, which few poets working in print still write. That mantle
has been taken over by many hip-hop artists. Amiri Baraka, Sonia
Sanchez, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Nikki Giovanni have all written
great confrontational poems that challenge their readers to act and
to redefine their consciousnesses. Authoritative poetry, whether of
Rich’s variety or like that which came out of the Black Arts Movement
and the Chicano Movement, does not necessarily rely on empirical
experience, events, happenings, or referents, which is not to imply
that the poetry of experiential agency relies exclusively on a staunch
model of factual history. As Goodman says in her discussion of a Harjo
poem, “poetic evidence” is the only type of validation necessary for
political poetry (45). Finally, authoritative agency often circumvents
the usual channels of compromise and negotiation in social and
political space, a strategy that has provoked the sensibilities of many
critics, one of whom I write about briefly in this section of chapter 1. At
the end of the chapter, I discuss at length a poem that successfully
joins the strategies of both experiential and authoritative agency.
Poems of equivocal agency, which I analyze in chapter 2, challenge
poems of experience while maintaining a strategic political engagement,
showing that political poetry need not rely exclusively on
referentiality or experience. Whereas the problems of memory are
complicated by the poems in chapter 1, those in chapter 2 rely on a
different model of agency. Often influenced by surrealism, magic realism,
and Native American traditions, the poems I examine here problematize
notions of direct experience, while foregrounding
equivocation, paradox, strangeness, irony, and parodic voices. This
indirection can lead to a ghostly sense of absence in many poems.
These poems, moreover, often articulate utopian or dystopian
visions that depart from identifiable contexts, speakers, and human
presence, thereby asserting the primary agency of the imagination.
These poems suggest that persuasion and the representation of realistic
lived experience are unnecessary for political poetry, while their
eerie, parodic, and prophetic voices are able to make more global
claims than poems of experience can.
Poems such as Simic’s “Cameo Appearance,” as well as poems from
Merwin’s The Lice and Forché’s The Angel of History, as well as others
by Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Charles Wright, and Marcos McPeek
Villatoro rely not on first-person speakers poeticizing personal experience,
but on transpersonal experiences of loss and oppression, often