american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 53
Frequently grounded in their speakers’ experiences, they often claim a
more encompassing sense of authority from experience than do
poems of experiential agency. They challenge their audiences and
often condemn the social and political conditions that make such
poems necessary actions in the documentation of and resistance to
those conditions. These poems, like many politically charged hip-hop
songs, seldom offer compromise or qualification. For this issue I want
to return briefly to Robert von Hallberg, who claims that many poets
in the Vietnam era wanted to “speak for the country, even at the risk
of rhetorical rotundity.” He imagines that these poets eschewed
“gradual change” and compromise because these virtues “involve
taking seriously differences that can be measured only with patience and
discrimination.” Not only does he imply that poets who write authoritative
poems and who use the Whitmanian voice lack patience and
discrimination, he also claims that their poems “encourage a lack of
proportion in political thought” (American Poetry 142). He is partly
right, for the following poems are impatient and resolute.
Yet authoritative poems also support a view that von Hallberg’s
approach is dangerous, even absurd, in the contexts of unjust war, the
civil rights movement, and environmental destruction. In these situations,
concessions and accommodations are ways to say “just wait,”
“be patient,” and “stay in your place,” admonitions long heard by
African American civil rights leaders and cataloged in the stories of
Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and most powerfully in Nina
Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn.” 11 The Black Panthers and the civil
disobedience of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s
(SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s sit-ins
and freedom marches were about a certain kind of patience but not
about concessions, nor are these poems. Von Hallberg’s admiration for
poets who “register fine distinctions where other poets and people see
none” and for poetry that speaks of “accommodation rather than
opposition” (American Poetry 228) clearly did not include many poems
by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Carolyn
Rodgers, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Thomas McGrath, Edwin Rolfe,
Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich, whose poems often view accommodation
as acquiescence to a status-quo that perpetuates racism, misogyny,
imperialism, and corporate power. Yet poems of authoritative
agency do not simply catalog speakers’ perceptions and feelings. They
are often explicit calls to act, to revolt, to protest, but they are not solely
protest poems that are protest tools first and poems second.
The first poem I discuss is relentless and confrontational, unyielding
and controversial. Nikki Giovanni’s first two books of poetry,