american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 49
In Rodríguez’s poem, the speaker’s present experiences force him
to revise his perceptions of both past and present. Even though white,
upper-class Brahmin James’s experiences were much different
than a poverty-bound Chicano’s, their ways of (re)organizing and
understanding experience are strikingly similar.
In “Then Comes A Day,” the speaker returns twenty years later to
the neighborhood of his youth to face his violence-filled past. The
primary political voice of the poem comes in the speaker’s perceptions
of the collision of his past with his present experience. Rodríguez
opens the poem with the speaker’s observations from within a
confined, decaying space. His voice and its poetic agency are bounded,
limited, narrow, and impoverished: “The Resurrection Cemetery is
an oasis of green, / encircled by the rising structures of the
Edison / Utility Company and new roads interwoven through / the
felled homes that once flowered with families” (cited in Poetry Like
Bread 183–184). The poem begins then from within a calm center, an
oasis, the Resurrection Cemetery, which implies that death is the only
place where peace can be had amid such decay. The two proper
names, the only two in the poem, are also important in that they render
the space knowable, local. The speaker’s reference to a specific
community makes the poem not a general political poem about
poverty and injustice, but a particular political commentary. Further,
the use of proper names can be understood as a strategic use of
Ernesto Cardenal’s exteriorismo (exteriorism), which included the use
of proper names and places and concrete diction in response to
the abstract romanticism of much Latin American poetry. 8 In “Then
Comes A Day,” the use of concrete diction and proper names locates
the poem and the speaker’s experiences in a specific space so that its
politics work “glocally”—on local issues impacted by global forces,
such as economic “progress” and migration/immigration.
The first stanza shows the poem’s abiding concern with experiences
of loss and decay and their effects on community, a concern akin to the
community-based aesthetic I explore in independent hip-hop music in
chapter 4. Rodríguez’s words for the “old neighborhood” are full of
decay: “sprinkled,” “remains,” and “splinters” describe the “woodframe
shacks.” The speaker implies that in this context the issue of community
fits under the larger official discourse of “progress,” a largely
unquestioned principle often used to quell dissent about urban development
projects in American cities. The Nobel-winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz suggests that this discourse is used to show that the
“growing divide between the haves and the have-nots” “is progress”
that poor communities and countries “must accept” (Stiglitz 5; original