american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

50 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
emphasis). Rather than improve this poem’s community, “progress”
and “gentrification” have “discolored” the neighborhood. The community’s
new “ ‘immigrants’ ”—a term the poet puts in quotation
marks to question its meaning—are not poor blacks, Latinas/os, or foreign
nationals; these “immigrants” are presumably wealthy, gentrified,
white people. These wealthy “immigrants” suggest an urban renewal
project prominent in city centers that often evicts poor, actual immigrants
to make room for wealthy people who have no desire to live in
mixed communities. Rodríguez’s clever play on the terms “progress”
and “immigrants” calls into question the American doctrine of progress
as a means to prosperity for all.
The manner in which the speaking “I” first appears anchors the
poem’s experiential agency and its attack on “progress.” In the third
stanza, the speaker points to the rift between his past experience and
his current identity: “It has been twenty years since I roamed these /
earthen streets. Coming back, I am as new, alien, / except in the old
cemetery where many of my / friends are buried.” Here we see the
prominence of the speaking “I,” a marker of many poems of experiential
agency. Two decades later, Rodríguez’s version of this speaker is
the walking dead as well as an “alien” whose community is found only
amongst headstones. His memories are also primarily of loss, as they
call forth “so many funerals” and “revenge, / as thick as mud.”
Further, none of his friends died of natural causes, but rather by
drugs, gangs, police, suicide, car crashes, and “diseases / science conquered
long ago.” The speaker’s experience is marked by loss,
displacement, and isolation, but how the speaker contextualizes these
memories matters most.
In the final four stanzas, the speaker struggles with memories of
dead friends and with rage produced by justice long-denied. When he
says self-consciously, as if to himself, “I have carried the obligation to
these names. / I have honored their voices / still reverberating
through me,” the speaker is “not simply a phantom manipulator of
words but a confused actual person, caught in a world of catastrophe
that the poem must somehow mirror and transcend” (Ostriker
“Beyond Confession” 35). This “confused actual person” is then a
composite of the lost voices of his fallen friends that course through
his body; the speaker seeks both to reflect these voices and to use
them to fight for justice for the dead. When Forché explains her reasons
for writing poetry about what she witnessed in El Salvador, I hear
the speaker of “Then Comes A Day”: “In my own life, the memory of
certain of those who have died remains in very few hands. I can’t let
go of that work if I am of that number.” For Forché, this process