american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

52 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
experience and the ways that events shape lives. The speaker’s creative
agency is after all an impassioned response to the very conditions of a
collective experience of poverty.
The preceding examples of experiential agency suggest that there are
complex social frameworks for agency. Poets who write using experience
elucidate these complex conditions in part by using figures of voice
that place poems in social space. Experience, for these poets, is a political
force and a useful tool for writing poetry. Further, the conceptions
of agency in these poems are evolving, shifting, and constantly in play,
which make any poem’s conception of agency difficult to capture.
Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory shows that the reproduction of social
practices, both positive and negative, occurs through agents rather than
through laws, institutions, structures, or principles; as such, because
agents can be unpredictable and precocious and because their experiences
can be confusing, this broad framework is always in motion.
Finally, like poems of authoritative agency, which often directly
confront readers, poems of experiential agency do not recount a limited
range of American experiences. Rather, they are exemplars of a
strategy unconfined to a type of experience or to a certain set of political
and social engagements. I could have chosen Mark Doty’s “Homo
Will Not Inherit” (Atlantis 1995), which abstracts somewhat the
poetic agency derived from experience, or one of numerous Philip
Levine poems in lieu of “Then Comes A Day,” as Levine often employs
similar strategies and time frames in his speakers’ experiences. Also,
many recent and visible poems, such as Eliza Griswold’s “Buying
Rations in Kabul” (The New Yorker June 27, 2005) and Billy Collins’s
“Statues in the Park” (The New Yorker July 25, 2005) employ voices
with poetic agency similar to those of experiential agency. 10 These two
poems rightly imply that political poems that use experience and a
recognizable first-person speaker are the most prominent of political
poems in the literary establishment and appear with some frequency in
magazines such as The New Yorker and in journals such as The Virginia
Quarterly Review. Experience, however, also has a prominent place in
poems of migratory agency and in much hip-hop, but as secondary
factors. Many poems in the next section are similar to ones discussed
thus far, but with important differences in tone, attitude, and the ways
that speaker-poets represent their relationships to their communities.
Authoritative Agency
Political poems of authoritative agency are usually confrontational and
often didactic; they are insistent, demanding, and unrelenting.