american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 45
themselves. Des Pres goes on to say that the position of outside
observer is the same position most readers occupy as distant from
disaster “but well within reach of its shock waves” (23). Kinnell’s
speaker struggles to give voice to the event, its aftermath, and his
experiences of them. He makes clear that he is both apart from and a
part of the scene, both an insider and outsider.
When the poem opens with the line “From our high window we
saw the towers / with their bands and blocks of light,” the speaker
immediately establishes his role as a witness, and thus an outside
observer. But he also inscribes the experience as collective (“our high
window” and “we saw”), so in some ways he is an inside observer as
well. Though it is possible that Kinnell refers to himself and his
partner/wife in this line, there is no question that millions of
New Yorkers could view the towers from their windows. Yet this lofty
vantage point also gives the poem a stigma of wealth. Despite the fact
that many housing project apartments had views of the towers,
Kinnell’s speaker’s view seems from the penthouse. He attempts to
reconcile—with mixed results—this vantage point with populist principles
later in the poem. After setting up the towers as a visible entity,
he suggests the haunting surreality of their loss, of the observer’s
inability to see them again: “we grew so used to them / often we
didn’t see them, and now, / not seeing them, we see them.”
These lines construct a world in which disorder reigns and the senses
are unreliable perceptors of experience. The loss of the towers, the
opening stanza implies, challenges our ways of experiencing
the world, especially our ways of seeing it.
After the opening ten-line stanza in which the speaker sets up the
vantage point of his experience, the second stanza takes two strange
turns. It shows a poet struggling with, and succumbing to, the difficulty
of writing about a widely viewed event. The speaker contends
with questions that challenge the existential status of an artist faced
with disaster. What does a poet do when his experience is so drastically
different from the experiences of New Yorkers who lost loved ones?
Especially now that occasional poetry is an artifact of the past, how
does a poet respond to such a tragic public event? Maurice Blanchot
suggests that disaster makes writing a difficult if not impossible
enterprise. According to Blanchot, the disaster is an experience of
being rendered completely passive. The disaster, moreover, is a pervasive
and general experience of calamity that redefines the limits of
human experience and what are signified as “disasters”:
“disaster . . . does not have the ultimate for a limit: it bears the ultimate
away” (28). Kinnell’s response to the terrorist attacks reveals