american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

58 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
the “verbal record” of the “poet’s originary experience in nature”
(28–29, 80). As such, the poet’s experiences with the environment are
the driving force of a poem’s creation. Experience, therefore, is primary,
and language is a “flexible tool” used to represent and transform
these experiences into poetry (80). Whereas Scigaj’s focus on the
“referential base of all language” (5) would seem to take some of the
creation out of poem-making, Snyder’s “Front Lines” employs both
micro-level metaphors and an extended metaphor. This figurative language
has the rhetorical effect of heightening the stakes for the environment.
Also, though the poem does not explicitly refer to the
speaker’s experiences, many readers are likely familiar with Snyder’s
history as a logger, fire lookout, and environmental activist.
Snyder begins “Front Lines” by personifying those who harm the
environment as rapists and the environment itself as a woman practicing
self-defense. The first line depicts succinctly what these rapists cause:
“cancer” (18). He thus creates a strangely powerful mixed metaphor
of rape and cancer. Like a metastasizing cancer, rapists spread across
the land and destroy it. The depictions that follow of the rapists’
actions and their effects on the earth are unequivocal. In the second
stanza, their actions are perverse: the “Realty Company” and its
clients “say / To the land / Spread your legs.” Here, Snyder compares
the depraved abuse of a woman with the greedy abuse of the
land for profit. In the fourth stanza the rape imagery is more visceral
and figurative. The speaker imagines the bulldozer as a man raping a
woman; it “grind(s),” “slobber(s),” “sideslip(s),” and “belch(s)”
“on top of ” the earth and its bushes, which Snyder pictures as having
“skinned-up bodies” (my emphasis here and below). Snyder paints
the wanton siege of the environment by greedy men and their
machines as a stomach-turning rape scene.
All rapes are brutal, but they are doubly so when both men and
machines are the perpetrators. The angry and intrusive machines in
“Front Lines” point to a disturbingly problematic relationship
between humans and the environment. The pathetic fallacies show
how much agency humans have ceded to conscienceless machines and
further suggest that humans have become like machines in their
unthinking (and programmed) abuse of the earth. “A chainsaw
growls ” like a predatory animal and “jets crack sound” overhead as if
disturbing the basic senses of the natural world. Under the influences
of such predatory machines there can only be “foul” breezes. The
poem suggests that such a proprietary and destructive relationship
with the land leads to or is symbolic of the overall “sickness” of
America. As Katsunori Yamazato has claimed, Snyder “indicts” an