american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 37
for poetry even if for him the ultimate “facts of the world” were harsh,
unkind, and sinister. He seemingly rejoiced in them up to his assassination
in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, murdered
before he was able to write poetry during a war that would dramatically
transform Spain into a fascist state. He was martyred, then, before he
was forced either to make poetry out of the context of war, or, in the
words of Wallace Stevens, to evade the “pressure of reality” on
the imagination by ignoring the environment around him. Stevens
styles the question this way: retreat inward or take on the world’s
horrors? His lectures on poetry and politics suggest the early
modernist’s estimation of the poet’s zero–sum game. According to
Stevens, when the “pressure of reality” is great, such as it was throughout
Europe before and during WWI and II, the poet must turn either
to “resistance” or “evasion” (cited in Des Pres Praises 18). 2
In this view, then, the role of the referential world of social and
political events, conditions, and observable realities is paramount in
the writing process, even if the poet chooses to evade that world. The
context in which a poet finds himself or herself living, writing, and
observing both precedes the production of poetry and exists concurrently
with poetic creation. Imagination, under such a formulation, is
a reactionary force that responds to events, and this responsorial
impulse is a critical aspect of political poetry of embodied agency.
However, the force of events in the world on the writing process does
not prevent poets’ political imaginations from being preemptive, transformative
forces of discovery. Poetic agency, in other words, is first a
response to living conditions, but it can also transform perceptions of
those conditions.
Much of the twentieth-century’s best (and worst) political poetry
has been influenced by experiences of war or by perceptions of war
from the home front. War, though, is neither the primary arbiter of
nor the sole realm for political poetry; it must be considered just one
ground of, one impetus for it. In this book, though I am careful not
to elide poems’ contexts, my primary interest is poets’ rhetorical
strategies for making context present as a political tool. However,
many critics have customarily focused on war as a way of understanding
and categorizing political poetry, and for sound reasons. A war can
provide a relatively contained framework for approaching poetry,
especially if the war has pervasive and far-reaching cultural, political,
economic, and humanitarian impacts. For these reasons, I begin this
chapter on embodied agency with an illustration of how two poets have
foregrounded their experiences of war. War, for all its complexities
and paradoxes, can be a simple, boundaried context for explaining