american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

40 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
represent possible worlds, actions, and communities. In the above
poems, perceptions of experience reinvest past actions with new imaginative
possibility even as the poems themselves become new actions.
Massumi’s suggestion that an action must “produce” an “outward
effect” and “disengage possibilities” (106) is highlighted in these
poems as they catalog both their speakers’ interiority and the “outward
effects” of both their actions and the actions of others. Additionally,
according to Massumi, an agent’s movement is always primary and the
positions in the social world he or she assumes are always secondary to
movement. Any agent’s subject position, he says, “is an emergent quality
of movement” (7–8). This notion allows for the primacy of experience
in poems of embodied agency: poems can be thought of as
“emergent qualities” of the speaker-poet’s experiences. As Massumi
foregrounds the body in motion, so these poems foreground the
speaker-poet in motion through the empirical world.
Although both Forché’s and Komunyakaa’s poems are based upon
their experiences (albeit experiences they re-imagine in verse), the political
poems discussed in this chapter—both of experiential and authoritative
agency—do not necessarily assume that all experiences must be fully verifiable.
In the introduction to her anthology of poetry of witness,
Against Forgetting, Forché writes that poems of witness to events of
extremity must be evaluated differently. She says that they should not be
submitted to any test of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” Such poems, she
reminds us, are de facto “evidence” of what has happened, and they
may be “the sole trace of an occurrence” so that there might not be an
independent account with which to verify whether or not the poem is
“true” (31). In the case of “We Never Know,” where a Vietnamese man
dies at the hands of an American soldier, it matters little if the speakerpoet’s
own experience is verifiable because millions of Vietnamese were
killed by American soldiers. 4 Further, Forché’s formulation also rightly
suggests that imagination, metaphor, indirection, and figurative
language play key roles in poems of embodied agency ; after all, both
Forché and Komunyakaa create figures of voice that emphasize their
experiences. Experience may be the prime mover of a poem, the greeting
that extends outward into the world of complicated socioeconomic
and political conditions, but it is only one tool at the disposal of poets.
Poems, most importantly, are not newspaper articles; they are not by
convention bound to accuracy, truth, or empirical verification.
Experiential Agency
Hélène Cixous has long stumped for the primacy of experience both
in literary texts and in our reading of them. Because experiences of