american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 43
The speaker-poet contextualizes his son’s death within the
landscape of what Harper has called Americans’ “psychic weight of discovery”
of racism’s horrors in a country ironically founded upon a
supposedly egalitarian Bill of Rights (Antonucci 507). In the
third stanza, the speaker connects his experience to W.E.B. Du Bois’s,
specifically to a letter Du Bois received from a student presumably after
Du Bois’s own son died. In linking his personal experience to a specific
historical incident, Harper avoids the faults Robert von Hallberg finds
with much Vietnam-era political poetry by Bly, Duncan, James
Wright, and others. When von Hallberg criticizes the techniques of
what he calls “visionary political poetry,” he does so because it leaps
from observation to visionary prophecy; he finds that its excessive
oracularity does not “permit the exercise of analytical intelligence.” He
also writes that rapid juxtapositions do not allow for concessions, qualifications,
and “rational virtues” (American Poetry 139). Even if Harper’s
technique did not circumvent such criticism in its specificity, the
speaker-poet is uninterested in concessions, qualifications, analytical
intelligence, or other “rational virtues.” The death of infant sons and
the brutalities of racism are difficult to make the subjects of concession
and rationality, especially in the context of a letter that denies
African Americans their essential humanity and “a collective history of
mourning” (Ramazani 259).
The voice of the speaker is full of rage rather than qualification or
concession. In Harper’s poetry, according to Niccolò N. Donzella,
this rage works to “to introduce sleepwalking natives” to their lives as
citizens ignorant of the complexities and paradoxes of America (806).
This rage, an emergent quality of lived experience, is evident in the
poem’s final stanza and three-line coda, where the poem is styled as an
elegy: “This is a dedication / to our memory.” Because the speaker’s
memories remind him of the letter Du Bois received at Cornell,
Harper ends the stanza with the question asked of Du Bois: “ ‘Will
you please tell us / whether or not it is true / that negroes / are not
able to cry?’ ” The question is depraved and disturbing, but elusive,
for even Du Bois is not “sure of the answer.”
The speaker, though, provides a de facto answer in the coda, which
has a marked change in tone: “America needs a killing. / America
needs a killing. / Survivors will be human” (original emphasis). These
lines call for an exorcism that destroys the conditions and systems of
thought that enable racism and help prevent people from seeing others
as fundamentally human, capable of feeling pain and sorrow. This
extrapolation from individual experience to a social conclusion based
on that experience is both intensely personal and intensely political.