american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 41
the same event “leave different marks” and “different memories” on
individuals, she claims that what texts do primarily is transmit perceptions
of experiences to readers (230). She argues that readers should
read texts to gain insight into the experiences of others. She believes
that texts should “establish an ethical relation to reality” since it is
important that texts have both a message and “a relationship to
humanity” (231). Consequently, poets who inscribe their experiences
into poems as a primary strategy for making political poetry are
implicitly establishing an “ethical relation” to their realities, their
memories, (their) history, and to the humanity of their audiences. As
Charles Altieri has claimed, lyric poetry is capable of creating a bond
between the speaking self and readers in that the speaking “I” can
implicitly claim that his/her experience is representative of others’
experiences (Self 22). Altieri’s claim dovetails with the basic assertion
of the testimonio (and with a relatively fundamental tenet of some
hip-hop), but lyric poetry creates that bond partly through figures of
voice that foreground the “different marks” of moving experiences.
Michael S. Harper’s “Deathwatch” represents poems that embody
first-person experience even as they connect that intimate experience
to a more expansive social context. Poems such as this one in Harper’s
oeuvre emphasize personal experience as both the focus of the poem
and as a departure point within the poem to do greater political work.
Like many other poems that have the poetic agency of personal experience,
this poem is an elegy. One in a series of wrenching elegies in
Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970) in which the poet deals with the
deaths of two infant sons, “Deathwatch” is probably the most political
of these elegies, and because the anger the father feels over the
death of his infant son is so understandable, the visionary leap
he makes from one death to a broader American context is lucid and
efficacious.
Though each of the poems in this part of chapter 1 have firstperson
viewpoints, the speaker in “Deathwatch” never refers to himself
using the first-person pronoun “I,” but the poem remains in the
first-person throughout. In the first stanza, 5 the speaker retells
the words of his wife, who has just given birth to a premature son.
These two lines are structurally simple—both start with “she tells me
how” and end with his wife’s testimony about surgery and their baby
(65–66). In both cases, the speaker is in an object position, and so
uses the first-person object pronoun “me.” 6 Further, when the
speaker refers to himself elsewhere in the poem, he does so formally.
When the wife refers to their son, she says that he is “strong, / like his
father.” In the second stanza, when directly addressing his dead son,
the speaker says that the infant had “the face / of your black father,”