american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EMBODIED AGENCY 73
justice. These poets, he suggested, tacitly support a conception of
romantic individualism that their poetry largely works against.
I responded naively with Forché’s justification for writing about
events she witnessed in El Salvador: “If I did not wish to make poetry
of what I had seen, what is it I thought poetry was?” (“El Salvador”
257). Though Forché certainly justifies a political poetry of experiential
agency, does she also reductively justify the appropriation of others’
suffering, the poeticizing of the horrific, and the romanticization of
the poet’s role as dramatic witness? While she gives authority to personal
experience and a justification to poetic agency borne of
experience, she also suggests that poetry is a type of referential
reportage. But most crucially, for present purposes, her quote points
to a conservative, reactionary element present in much contemporary
political poetry, especially poetry of embodied agency—many political
poets want the self back. After the doubts poststructuralism and postmodernism
have cast on the “self” and the work poets such as John
Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and the Language poets have done to fracture,
question, and disorder the “self,” many political poets want to make
sure that individual identity and personal experience—and the agency
and authority derived from them and the sense of community they are
part of—remain vibrant elements of poetry. The poems discussed
in chapter 1 (and numerous others that share their strategies) insist
that using the self’s experience is a primary strategy for making
poetry political.
Martín Espada’s “The Meaning of the Shovel” (135–137), for
instance, showcases the difficulties engaged poets such as Forché face
when negotiating the pursuit of justice and the parameters of appropriation
for poetic gain. In Espada’s poem, the speaker-poet attempts
to find the language—as well as the justification for his practice as aid
worker and creative writer—for representing the poor and oppressed
and for bridging the gap between US poet and poor Nicaraguan.
Here are the opening lines, in order of stanza (per the subtitle, the
speaker-poet speaks from within Barrio René Cisneros in Managua),
that see the speaker-poet engaging in standard practice aid work:
(1) “Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week / I saw a funeral in the
streets of Managua”; (2) “I dig because yesterday / I saw four walls of
photographs”; (3) “I dig because today, in this barrio / without plumbing,
I saw a woman”; (4) “I dig because today I stopped digging /
to drink an orange soda. In a country / with no glass”; (5) “I dig
because today my shovel / struck a clay bowl centuries old”; and
(6) “I dig because I have hauled garbage / and pumped gas and cut
paper” (my emphasis). In each of these stanzas describing some