american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

36 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
people living in history. Walter Benjamin believed that personal
experience is the content and “source” of traditional storytelling
because it can be “passed on from mouth to mouth” (83). Poems of
embodied agency figuratively enact the exchange—and thereby the
transformation—of experience with readers. My understanding of
experience is also influenced by Latin American testimonio scholars. 1
Although he claims that any attempt to define testimonio is “at best
provisional, at worst repressive” because it is “by nature a protean and
demotic form,” John Beverley defines testimonio as a “novel or novellalength
narrative” that is “told in the first person by a narrator who is
also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts” (24).
Most testimonios, moreover, are narratives of struggles against oppression
that chronicle a fight on behalf of a group of people.
I return to this primarily Latin American form in chapter 3, but for
now I want to make clear that the poems of chapter 1 are not
testimonios. The testimonio, for the poems in this chapter, helps outline
the importance of narrative, a first-person speaker, experience,
and collective struggle. Beverley notes that testimonio “is not so
much concerned with the life of a ‘problematic hero,’ ” but “with a
problematic social situation that the narrator lives with or alongside
others” (27). His point suggests a movement away from the speakerpoet’s
experience as an end unto itself and toward the collective context
for that experience. Many poems I write about in this chapter
suggest that the speaker-poet’s experiences are part of a larger collective
experience. Experience, then, is not merely personal; it is a
metonym for a larger group of other people’s experiences. However,
as Giorgio Agamben notes in his work on experience in the twentieth
century, “nobody would be inclined to accept the validity of an
authority whose sole claim to legitimation was experience” (14).
Thus, poems of embodied agency are poems that gain authority from
what Goodman calls “poetic evidence” (45), which is really a way of
saying that poems have authority as poems first, testaments to experience
second. They do not have experience as a “sole claim to
legitimation”; if they did, they would function better as memoirs.
Experience is crucial to poems of embodied agency, but imagination
is also a key component of this poetry’s understanding of events in the
world. Spanish poet Federico García Lorca knew all too well the bitter
twists and turns of the world. Nevertheless, he once wrote that “visible
reality, the facts of the world and of the human body, are much
more full of subtle nuances, and are much more poetic than what
imagination discovers” (28). Lorca, it appears, believed that the visible
world and the world of human experience are the greatest wellsprings