american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CHAPTER 1
Embodied Agency
Introduction
In his book about globalization, capitalism, and the failure of
developing countries to integrate the extralegal poor into their
economic and legal structures, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto
explains a legal theory that responds to the ways that people organize
their lives outside of the law. He writes, “It is ‘experience’ that gives
life to the law demonstrating . . . that the law must be compatible
with how people actually arrange their lives. The way law stays alive is
by keeping in touch with social contracts pieced together among real
people on the ground” (108). I begin this chapter with de Soto
because of his words’ striking parallels with the modus operandi of the
poems of embodied agency. One need only substitute “poetry” for
“the law” to make de Soto’s claim about on-the-ground experience a
perfect gateway into the poetry of this chapter. The poems I discuss
demand that we see that experience “gives life” to poetry. Poetry,
moreover, “must be compatible with how people actually arrange
their lives.” Most dramatically, poetry “stays alive” by “keeping in
touch” with the dynamic, confusing, and sometimes horrifying ways
that “real people on the ground” experience the world. Poetry, for the
poets of this chapter, is not only about imagination and creativity, nor
is it a calculated retreat from the empirical world. It is an engagement
with lived experiences, their own and that of other people and the
communities to which they belong (and to which they imagine they
belong). Poetry is political, these poems insist, when it “keeps in
touch” with experience; poetry, like “the law” for de Soto, works best
when it is organic, when it responds to the ways that people live their
lives in the world, to their needs, and to their experiences.
I want to return briefly to the working definition of experience
I advanced in this book’s introduction. As I stated there, the poems in
chapter 1 portray the lived experiences of quasi-historical actors, of