american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 47
The eighth in the series is the most abstract and lyrical and seemingly
the most painful for the speaker: “Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity
in last bits of love-time letting—I wish I could say—their vertical
streaks down the sky happen more lightly” (my emphasis). This line is
markedly different from the four above, which are matter-of-fact and
concrete (with the exception of the third one, which is more lyrical and
abstract). These four lines assert the speaker’s impotence and tortured
memory, but in different ways. In the more concrete, distant lines the
speaker speaks calmly, coolly, without emotion, whereas in the eighth
line the speaker interrupts himself with “I wish I could say.” Strangely,
though, the speaker does say in the poem what he is unable to say in a
reality based on his experience. As such, he signifies the feeling of passivity
the experience gives him; the poem is thus an intervention in the
city’s memory of the event, but a failed one. Though the line is the
most lyrical of the eight, it is interrupted by dashes—“I wish I could
say”—that signal a failure to transform memories and experiences into
poetry, a strategy that is similar to Forché’s and Komunyakaa’s
discussed earlier. The repetitive lines make the deaths vivid, but they
also suggest the difficulty poets face when the attacks have been seen
hundreds of times on television and in memory.
The problem Kinnell faces in making poetry out of 9/11 is best
understood by considering connections between artistic and historical
accounts of an event. In Private Poets, Worldly Acts: Public and Private
History in Contemporary American Poetry, Kevin Stein discusses the
differences between “a poem about an event and an historical account
of the same event” (6). He points out that objectivity is not the
province of either form, especially in light of the debunking of the
notion of historical “objectivity” and the “official story” done in
much poststructural and postcolonial theory. 7 Stein points out that
Barthes’s “The Discourse of History” shows that historical accounts
are similar to novels, stories, and poems that deal with history—each
are “constructed from fragments of experience” and pasted together
to make “a unified ‘whole’ ” (6). “When the Towers Fell” is certainly
“constructed from fragments of experience” (as are many poems of
embodied agency), both the speaker’s and others’ experiences told by
the speaker. But it is not a unified whole unless one considers a poem
itself a unified whole, even when it pastes together perceptions, memories,
images, and a frantic monologue. The poem thus enacts the
fragmented nature of the event proper and the ways that the event
disrupted the clean narratives of many lives.
Kinnell’s poem is different from historical accounts that purport to
objectivity in that the experiences the poem includes are consciously