american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

44 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
It distills the speaker’s rage into a repetitive chant. However, as
Ramazani suggests, Harper also “risks merely reversing the very
scapegoating he condemns” (259) as his strategy refuses concession
or qualification. For the speaker, infant death and racism deserve no
concessions. Harper’s strategy makes individual experience political
and gives that experience poetic agency. Even so, though the poem
foregrounds individual experience, it veers dangerously close to an
axiomatic refusal to see personal tragedy as in some ways distinct from
collective tragedy.
Whereas Harper’s techniques in “Deathwatch” force readers to
view a personal experience in broad political and cultural terms and to
see how the voice of lived experience can contest a discriminatory
ideology, Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell” derives its experiential
agency from the witness to a communal, shared happening. The
poem was published one year after 9/11, and it directly explores the
experience of watching the terror attacks. For some critics, the poem’s
publication in The New Yorker creates substantial problems of
reception. Marjorie Perloff, who notoriously doubted that poems in
The New Yorker are capable of political force, once pointed out that
W.S. Merwin’s eerie Vietnam poem “The Asians Dying” (1967),
which I discuss in chapter 2, originally appeared “on a glossy page
between those gorgeous ads for fur coats and diamonds and resorts in
St. Croix” (“Apocalypse” 130). Cary Nelson disagrees with Perloff’s
assessment that the poem’s placement obviates its political impact. He
suggests that magazines such as The New Yorker have always been rife
with contradiction (120–121). It is also possible that political poems
are even more conspicuous and jarring when juxtaposed with luxury
advertisements. After all, what media does not contain mixed messages?
These often disconcerting contradictions abound in hip-hop, where
some rappers often celebrate a variety of contrasting values. The context
for Kinnell’s poem is also unique in that it speaks to New Yorkers
about a New York event. It is difficult to find fault with its appearance
in the quintessential New York periodical, even if it reaches a largely
white, cultural elite.
In his discussion of Wallace Stevens and the Greek poet
Constantine Cavafy, Terrence Des Pres argues that both saw poets as
“outside observer(s) distressed by the march of events” but not “inside
participant(s) overwhelmed and mute in the face of events themselves”
(23; original emphasis). His formulation applies to Kinnell’s speakerpoet.
In “When the Towers Fell,” the speaker is both an outside
observer of the event and an inside participant (but not one literally
inside the towers), as many New Yorkers would likely describe