american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

60 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
action in opposition to rapists who do not allow the “trees [to]
breathe.” This rhetorical voice foregrounds collective action, and, in
the words of Scigaj, it works “to revise perceptions and coax sustainable
actions in readers” (277). If the poem is successful in equating
those who harm the environment with rapists, then it suggests a
potential shift in how we think about humans’ relationships with the
environment. Snyder’s collective “we,” moreover, and the presumptions
he makes in speaking for his constituents, as it were, engages the
sensibilities of the Whitmanian tradition in a line extending through
Neruda and Ginsberg.
Like “Front Lines,” Adrienne Rich’s “For the Record” (Your
Native Land, Your Life) employs an authoritative, confrontational
voice. Rich, unlike Snyder, is well-known for politically and ideologically
charged poems that have displeased a variety of critics and
reviewers, some of whom Anne Herzog discusses in her article on
Rich (258–261) and to whom I refer readers in search of sources critical
of her work. Whereas “Front Lines” implicitly challenges readers
to act as a collective to protect the environment and to revise their
perceptions of its destruction, “For the Record” challenges readers to
account for their actions and to revise perceptions of inaction. In both
poems, an authoritative tone not directly derived from experience
shows that readers cannot blame the environment they live in for their
problems. Instead, both poems challenge readers to see themselves as
sources of the world’s problems.
The authoritative voice of “For the Record” is generative of Rich’s
insistence on “her power to know the other’s pain and the injustices
that produced it” (Gilbert 155), a hallmark of poems of authoritative
agency and, most famously, of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The
poem’s speaker, therefore, does not hesitate to call forth those injustices
and blame readers for them, nor does she flinch in spanning
the globe to catalog horrors, injustices, and apocalyptic upheavals.
The first five stanzas interrogate the human tendency to project anger
upon the visible manifestations of problems rather than the ultimate
source of injustice: ourselves. In doing so, the poem gives no hint of
qualification or excuse. Rich shows that attributing poverty, war, riots,
environmental devastation, suffering, and oppression to neutral
things, such as clouds, stars, mountains, trees, houses, buildings, and
barbed wire, is absurd. The poem further suggests that the natural
environment is subject to and secondary to human agency: “if the
mountains spewed stones of fire into the river / it was not taking sides /
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf / had no political
opinions” (31–32). Natural resources are also innocent, but not the