american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 51
stems from memories that “arise from the exigencies of conscience”
(Montenegro 36) and demand resolute action. While Forché is uncertain
of the redemptive value of remembering, Rodríguez’s speaker
implies that redemption, though difficult to achieve, is possible, not
simply an irony of being buried in “Resurrection Cemetery”
(my emphasis).
Ultimately the speaker of “Then Comes A Day” searches for justice
and redemption even as the poem questions whether redemption is
possible amid such decay. Natural processes suggest that redemption
is indeed possible: the earth has the speaker’s dead friends’ fingers,
“but not what they touched”; each death is “new life”; from wombs
“revolution is birthed / through an open-mouth scream”; and in the
final stanza, dawn breaks, bringing “first light” to the cemetery. Yet
these flickers of redemption occur only on the path of a constant
search for justice, a “long, crevice-filled road / I’ve been stranded on
all this time, / trying to reach a destination that climbs / uneasy over
the horizon.” The speaker’s search for justice is uncertain, dangerous,
and partly successful in isolating him in a fight against poverty and
community dissolution.
For the speaker, however, this lengthy fight for justice can be
redemptive if and when the “revolution” is fulfilled. This realization
emanates from his personal memories of loss. Near the end of the
poem, the speaker discovers that “Twenty years come / that don’t
make a day, / then comes a day / that makes up / for twenty years.”
Two decades of defeat can therefore be redeemed in a single day in
which revolution and justice become realities instead of distant
possibilities. This revolution is both personal and collective; it facilitates
a leap from individual experience to communal experience and
from memory to present reality. In this process, the speaker “leaps
from the narrative to the visionary levels,” a “dominant” strategy of
much 1980s poetry pointed out by Charles Altieri. 9 For Altieri, this
“scenic style” is firmly entrenched in the Romantic tradition where
poems often “achieve closure” by a visionary leap. He criticizes this
mode because it implies that the speaker’s discoveries are contingent
upon events; thus, the self is “created rather than creative” (Self 15).
For “Then Comes A Day,” where the speaker’s active experiential
agency literally moves the poem and the voice of experience actively
creates the poem’s perceptions, avoiding Altieri’s objections is important.
Whereas the poem “achieves” a semblance of closure in the
speaker’s leap, “Then Comes A Day” is based on events in the speaker’s
life; declining to use these experiences in order to achieve some type of
closure would necessarily discount the primacy of the speaker’s