american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

48 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
subjective, disjointed, and fragmented. He does not attempt to create
a unifying or objective narrative. Are poems about events such as this
one always political though? The answer must be yes in that they
encourage readers to understand an event in a certain way. An affirmative
answer does not denigrate those who lost their lives, nor does
it necessarily suggest that Kinnell is using the event for political ends.
It merely suggests that perceptions of the event and works about the
event will always be political. There are, however, differences in strategy
and political commitment in poems about events, as will be obvious
in Amiri Baraka’s poem about 9/11 and in two hip-hop artists’
responses I discuss in chapter 4.
Finally, when the speaker of “When the Towers Fell,” alludes to a
searchlight looking for bodies that “always goes on / somewhere,
now in New York and Kabul,” Kinnell takes the greatest risk of the
poem. He moves from a confused lament for and witness of those who
died in the World Trade Centers to those who die in what he implies
are needless and meaningless wars and terrorist attacks the world over.
More specifically, his implicit condemnation of the war in Afghanistan
suggests that there are thousands of innocent dying there as well.
However, it seems a risky strategy in that Americans roundly supported
the effort to oust the Taliban. Kinnell does not flinch in his
lament for those who suffer in tragedy, whether they are Afghanis or
New Yorkers, and his strategy reveals a willingness to run the risk of
alienating part of his audience.
Kinnell has won many prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer
Prize (1983); the next poet I discuss is less visible. Luis J. Rodríguez,
a Los Angeles-born Chicano, brilliantly uses personal experience to
give poetic agency to the Latina/o community. “Then Comes A Day”
(1989), a reflection on Rodríguez’s youth as a gang member, portrays
experience a bit differently than do the poems discussed thus far. The
poem’s speaker holds the memories of past experience up to the light
of present experience and explores the ramifications of the two juxtaposed.
The speaker of “Then Comes A Day” appears to live by
William James’s pragmatist credo: “I live, to be sure, by the practical
faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience,
for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any
one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be
reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken
attitude” (207). For James, all principles are potentially revisable
based upon new experience, and everything about our experiences
and our understanding of the world is subject to change. As James
might have said, nothing outside the flux secures the issue of it.