american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

28 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
evoked via multiple voices, discontinuous sequencing, and staged
voices (often composite, ironic, or parodic). Other poems, such as
Derek Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” augur an imaginary
strangeness, an alternative visionary moment nearly devoid of
human presence more in the vein of Blake’s and Duncan’s preferences
for “visionary” poetry. This kind of poetry separates the speaker in
some capacity from the limitations of personal experience and the
conventions that implicitly govern poems of memory, witness, and
interiority. Jane Frazier’s essay on Merwin’s “disembodied narrators”
points to how the poems in this chapter “lack a particular self so that
they may make their quests without the burdens of the ego”; as such,
the speakers’ actions “remain part of a journey or process” rather than
discrete end points (341). In much the same way, many of the speakers
in the poems of this chapter are “disembodied narrators” who
often move through their lines like ghosts.
In chapter 3 I discuss a way of being political that foregrounds
language itself and the linguistic and cultural differences between
English and Spanish and its speakers. Bilingual poems that switch
between languages and cultural codes demonstrate the agency of the
linguistic and transnational migrant; their code switching enacts a
figurative migration across national borders, contesting American
identity and the primacy of English in U.S. literature. The primary
source of agency in these poems is the multilingual and multicultural
voice and the ways that it crosses a variety of borders between nations
and between English- and Spanish-speaking cultures. Poems of
migratory agency thus have bilingual textures that challenge English’s
position as the approved language for poetic, social, and political
expression in the United States. In these poems language comprises a
contestatory public sphere redolent with political ramifications.
Though the primary site of production for these poems is North
America, their visions tend toward Latin America, the marginalized
spaces of “American” culture, and the Spanish language. As Stephen
Tapscott notes, the status of poetry in Latin America is vastly different
than in the United States and the poet’s standing in many Latin
American countries is more public and revered. He writes that Latin
American countries often “nominate their writers to be diplomats,
international attachés, or makers and administrators of public
policy,” which “surprises” North Americans, whose poets are often
marginalized (1). Gibbons points out the same dynamic in Cardenal’s
commitment to revolutionary solidarity with the people of Nicaragua
as it is a social responsibility he has inherited from the “Latin
American tradition” (286), and Nicaraguan novelist and poet Claribel