american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

62 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
readers to act by refusing to ignore suffering. This command reaches
its pinnacle in Rich’s use of apostrophe (“you”), which is the crucial cog
in the poem’s rhetorical strategy even though it does not appear until
the final line. Two critics help to understand how apostrophe operates
in Rich’s work. For Terrence Des Pres, Rich uses apostrophe to subvert
the humanistic “we,” which he says has been “one of the more
successful illusions of high culture” when used to refer to “all of us or
‘man’ in general.” He points out that this “ ‘we’ has always been the
property of an educated elite, male, white, and eurocentric”
(357–358). Unlike Snyder, who uses “we” in “Front Lines” even
though the poem works against “man’s” destruction of the environment,
Rich uses “you” as a direct injunction to readers and to
challenge the ways we speak of the collective and of community. For
Alicia Ostriker, on the other hand, feminist poets use apostrophe “to
challenge the neutrality of the reader” and to address “a ‘you’ who is
perceived as an antagonist” (“Dancing” 215). In “For the Record,”
Rich claims that no individual is neutral in the suffering of others;
further, “you” are an antagonist if you do not act against injustice.
By grouping “you,” the reader, 14 with the marginalized and stereotypically
destructive elements of society, the poem styles all people as
responsible for fighting social ills. As such, the poem attempts to
create feelings of guilt. Herzog suggests that “For the Record” evokes
shame and guilt in the last seven lines, but not in a “self-righteously
accusatory or self-flagellating” manner. Instead, she claims that “they
are spoken in a communal context” (267). Though the final lines are
a communal call to action by means of an individual recognition of
complicity, they are undoubtedly accusatory and self-righteous. The
speaker does not ask herself where was I? and thus remains above
contempt. Nick Halpern explains that Rich’s “prophetic mission”
places her in but mostly above her poems: “She writes poems in which
she imagines herself as a solitary figure in the sky.” Though she does
write poems in which she “represents herself as a figure in the city, in
the streets,” Halpern notes, “too often” she is “not like someone who
is leading an everyday life but someone who is walking the earth”
(184–185). This seems to me exactly the dynamics of “For the
Record.” The speaker-poet simultaneously walks the earth and hovers
above it in the sky, seeing all and demanding that those who lead
“everyday” lives take responsibility for what they do. Her blistering,
authoritative tone attempts to spur readers to forgo indifference for
socially motivated action. This didactic voice is present in many poems
of authoritative agency and may seem heavy-handed to some readers.
Yet Rich’s strategy makes it difficult for even these readers to extricate