american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

38 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
some key features of embodied agency and how lived experience and
poetic creation can work together.
Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (1981) and Yusef
Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau (1988) are two seminal volumes that
deal intimately with poets’ first-person experiences of war: Forché as
an Amnesty International aid worker in El Salvador, Komunyakaa as a
soldier in Vietnam. Despite some critical differences, especially in their
poetic gestation processes—Komunyakaa did not publish poetry
dealing explicitly with his Vietnam experiences until thirteen years
after the war officially ended, whereas Forché spent 1978 to 1980 in
El Salvador and then published the book in 1981—the poems of the
two volumes establish the speaking voice of first-person lived experience
in similar ways. Two poems illustrate a principal manner in which
individual experiences anchor a poem’s meaning, context, language,
and strategies for making political poetry. They both depict these
experiences as illuminating as well as confounding.
Forché’s “The Colonel” and Komunyakaa’s “We Never Know”
are dramatically different poems formally, the first a prose poem, the
second a brief imagist poem. Though both poems turn on dramatic,
visceral images, the self-conscious first-person speaker is the key component
of both poems, as it is for many poems discussed in this
chapter. Both poems, moreover, echo the observations of Samuel
Beckett’s Molloy, a character whose internal monologue is inseparable
from his interaction with the world and with other people. Molloy
says, “I speak in the present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present
tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present” (34).
Based upon past experience, Forché’s and Komunyakaa’s poems relate
the details of experience in past tense verbs, but personal experience
and the experience of writing about it are both foregrounded via
the present tense, “the mythological present” of the poem’s production.
This technique foregrounds the retelling and poeticizing of
experience, as if highlighting any slippage or fissure the poet sees
between the original event and the event of the poem’s making.
“The Colonel,” which relates the speaker’s experience of eating
dinner at a Salvadoran general’s house, begins with a blunt assertion
of first-person experience and a demand for the reader to see the
poem as “true”: “What you have heard is true. I was in his house.”
The lines that follow include a selective, detailed description of the
evening’s events and the house in which they occurred. The lines that
anchor the self-conscious strategy move auspiciously from the poem’s
most shocking images and its past tense verbs to the present tense:
“He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like / dried