american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

46 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
both the difficulty of his task and the ways that disaster utterly
redefines personal and collective experience.
In the second stanza, Kinnell tests his populist, inclusive, democratic
mettle. He begins with four listless, bathetic lines that show “The
banker,” “Humberto,” “The trader,” and “The mail sorter” at their
tasks in the towers. Kinnell makes the intention of these simple sentences
transparent in the next eight lines, which alternate between French and
their English translations. They show in a transparent way that the
attacks killed “poor and rich” and “wise and foolish,” amongst other
classes and types of people. The message is simple, undeniable: death was
indiscriminate. Two aspects of Kinnell’s strategy stand out. First, the
technique is heavy-handed, unnecessary, and a bit contrived, although it
is interesting that the only named person in the poem is a wage worker
with a Romance language name. Second, the use of French is perplexing.
Perhaps Kinnell was thinking of The New Yorker audience (if indeed
he composed it for that audience), but the immediate translations negate
the need to read French. The French, however, is less appropriate than
Spanish, which was spoken by countless thousands in the World Trade
Center, especially by its wage workers. Spanish would have been more
realistic and more true to life than French, and to this reader at least, less
contrived. Kinnell, though, may have been bound by his knowledge and
experience. If knowledgeable in French but not in Spanish, he may have
felt more comfortable with using the former to suggest the hundreds of
foreign nationals who lost their lives in the attacks. The use of French
may also resonate more given the conflict with the French about the war
in Iraq. Though the conflict was not yet astir in September 2002, the
poem’s French could be seen now by supporters of the Iraq War as
denigrating the French for refusing to be part of the U.S. coalition,
which would be a serious misreading of the poem.
If Blanchot believes that writing about disaster is an impossible
task, Cixous provides a better, although disheartening, strategy for
writing about disaster. For her, “things which are unspeakable” and
that “take our breath away” should be addressed by “inscribing the
question, signifying our impotence, our obligation, our memory of
what is happening” (232). Kinnell does precisely this when he uses a
deflated, hopeless voice to catalog the varieties of death in the towers.
The syntactical parallelism is striking:
Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.
Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.
Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.
Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.