american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 39
peach halves. There is no other way to say this ” (16; my emphasis).
Here, the speaker-poet recounts her experience in the past tense verbs
typically used to describe past events; however, the speaker then enters
the poem in the present to highlight the event of retelling. As a result,
the poet is doubly present—as the person in the poem and as the
person writing the poem. As Joann Gardner writes, the “journalistic
matter-of-factness of Forché’s style acknowledges the primacy of
event over verbalization” (412). Similarly, Sharon Doubiago points
out that it is not the speaker who is confused or hesitant, but “the
poet with the burden of her U.S. aesthetics” and the poetics “of
the isolated, private self ” that struggles to turn experience into poetry
(35–36). Experience, then, in “The Colonel,” is primary, and the
verbalization of that event is secondary. The speaker’s agency, therefore,
is a product both of her experience and of the way she recounts
that experience. She makes explicit that the telling of experience—
Benjamin’s “storytelling”—is a conscious, stylized rhetorical strategy
that is purposefully transparent and confessional.
In “We Never Know,” Komunyakaa makes a similar move. He has
said that poems are most effective when they are “formed from a
composite of meaningful images” and that he remembers the war
mostly as “internalized” imagery (Baer 6–7). Like “The Colonel,” his
poem moves through a series of images that retell an experience with
past tense verbs—a Viet Cong soldier “danced” in the “tall grass” after
being shot, gun barrels “glowed white-hot,” and a “blue halo of flies”
“claimed” the body. The middle of the short poem heralds the change
in voice. After finding a photograph in the dead soldier’s fingers,
the speaker says, “There’s no other way / to say this : I fell in love” (26;
my emphasis). Other than the contraction Komunyakaa uses exactly the
same line as Forché does and with similar results. The speaker seeks not
to report events, but a way to accentuate his current struggle to verbalize
the experience appropriately. Also, whereas the speakers’ experiences
are the primary forces of these poems, their statements of presence
inside the poems as well as inside the experiences anchor both. 3
I view these two poets, who overall at these points in their careers
had dissimilar aesthetics, as utilizing an intentional strategy to politicize
experience, thereby giving it agency, while also complicating its place in
poetry. Their two poems clarify some significant points about political
poems with embodied agency. Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual
indirectly illuminates the role of first-person agency and experience; he
connects perceptions to actions, so that a perception is an action in its
“latent state.” Drawing from Henri Bergson, he claims that “perceptions
are possible actions” (91), just as poems as perceptions, I argue,