american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

people who manipulate them for violent means: “The trees didn’t
volunteer to be cut into boards / nor the thorns for tearing flesh.”
For Rich, built structures are incidental to social injustice as well. By
showing that “things” are forcedly involved in terror as instruments of
human cruelty, the poem places blame directly on each human “whose
signature / is stamped on the orders, traced / in the corner of the
building plans.” The evocation of the South African homelands of
Apartheid (“barbed-wire / stretched around crouching contemporary
huts”) suggests that terror is often systematically conducted under the
auspices of convention and order. In its totality, this epic catalog of
injustices is a streaming sequence unbroken by a period, a strategy used
to overwhelm the reader with a sense of injustice. However, it also
makes the problems global; as an unintentional side-effect, individual
action seems futile in light of pervasive, global suffering, which is a
shortcoming of this type of poetic agency and voice. In attempting to
show the prevalence of social injustice, they often style it as so pervasive
that human agency seems futile to affect change.
For Rich, attributing injustice to human conventions, material creations,
the environment, and social and political practices instead of to
human actions and decisions, is cowardly and dangerous. “For the
Record”—the title gives her claim rubber-stamped (and ironically, institutional)
authority—insists that all individuals are responsible, including
those who do not act. It is unacceptable, according to the poem, for any
person to respond to human atrocity with a dismissive that’s just the way
the world is and there’s nothing I can do about it. In this poem, the issues
are decidedly not too big for people to do something about them,
which somewhat belies the lengthy catalog of problems the speaker outlines.
The poem implies that even those who cause no harm but do
nothing about these horrors are as worthy of blame as those who commit
the acts. The final seven lines of the poem make clear this strategy,
its authoritative agency, and Rich’s desire to provoke readers to act:
Look around at all of it
and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.
EMBODIED AGENCY 61
Here Rich directly challenges readers to ask who is responsible for the
suffering cataloged in the poem. “Look around at all of it” commands