american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
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36 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY<br />
people liv<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> history. Walter Benjam<strong>in</strong> believed that personal<br />
experience is <strong>the</strong> content and “source” of traditional storytell<strong>in</strong>g<br />
because it can be “passed on from mouth to mouth” (83). Poems of<br />
embodied agency figuratively enact <strong>the</strong> exchange—and <strong>the</strong>reby <strong>the</strong><br />
transformation—of experience with readers. My understand<strong>in</strong>g of<br />
experience is also <strong>in</strong>fluenced by Lat<strong>in</strong> American testimonio scholars. 1<br />
Although he claims that any attempt to def<strong>in</strong>e testimonio is “at best<br />
provisional, at worst repressive” because it is “by nature a protean and<br />
demotic form,” John Beverley def<strong>in</strong>es testimonio as a “novel or novellalength<br />
narrative” that is “told <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong> first person by a narrator who is<br />
also <strong>the</strong> real protagonist or witness of <strong>the</strong> events he or she recounts” (24).<br />
Most testimonios, moreover, are narratives of struggles aga<strong>in</strong>st oppression<br />
that chronicle a fight on behalf of a group of people.<br />
I return to this primarily Lat<strong>in</strong> American form <strong>in</strong> chapter 3, but for<br />
now I want to make clear that <strong>the</strong> poems of chapter 1 are not<br />
testimonios. The testimonio, for <strong>the</strong> poems <strong>in</strong> this chapter, helps outl<strong>in</strong>e<br />
<strong>the</strong> importance of narrative, a first-person speaker, experience,<br />
and collective struggle. Beverley notes that testimonio “is not so<br />
much concerned with <strong>the</strong> life of a ‘problematic hero,’ ” but “with a<br />
problematic social situation that <strong>the</strong> narrator lives with or alongside<br />
o<strong>the</strong>rs” (27). His po<strong>in</strong>t suggests a movement away from <strong>the</strong> speakerpoet’s<br />
experience as an end unto itself and toward <strong>the</strong> collective context<br />
for that experience. Many poems I write about <strong>in</strong> this chapter<br />
suggest that <strong>the</strong> speaker-poet’s experiences are part of a larger collective<br />
experience. Experience, <strong>the</strong>n, is not merely personal; it is a<br />
metonym for a larger group of o<strong>the</strong>r people’s experiences. However,<br />
as Giorgio Agamben notes <strong>in</strong> his work on experience <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong> twentieth<br />
<strong>century</strong>, “nobody would be <strong>in</strong>cl<strong>in</strong>ed to accept <strong>the</strong> validity of an<br />
authority whose sole claim to legitimation was experience” (14).<br />
Thus, poems of embodied agency are poems that ga<strong>in</strong> authority from<br />
what Goodman calls “poetic evidence” (45), which is really a way of<br />
say<strong>in</strong>g that poems have authority as poems first, testaments to experience<br />
second. They do not have experience as a “sole claim to<br />
legitimation”; if <strong>the</strong>y did, <strong>the</strong>y would function better as memoirs.<br />
Experience is crucial to poems of embodied agency, but imag<strong>in</strong>ation<br />
is also a key component of this <strong>poetry</strong>’s understand<strong>in</strong>g of events <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong><br />
world. Spanish poet Federico García Lorca knew all too well <strong>the</strong> bitter<br />
twists and turns of <strong>the</strong> world. Never<strong>the</strong>less, he once wrote that “visible<br />
reality, <strong>the</strong> facts of <strong>the</strong> world and of <strong>the</strong> human body, are much<br />
more full of subtle nuances, and are much more poetic than what<br />
imag<strong>in</strong>ation discovers” (28). Lorca, it appears, believed that <strong>the</strong> visible<br />
world and <strong>the</strong> world of human experience are <strong>the</strong> greatest wellspr<strong>in</strong>gs