american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CHAPTER 2
Equivocal Agency
Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.2.76–86
Introduction
If the poems of embodied agency in chapter 1 foreground models of
agency that style personal and communal experience as politically and
poetically viable, the poems in chapter 2 largely bypass questions of specific
experience. Political poems of equivocal agency do not focus on the
first-person experience of an event or on the retelling or memory of an
experience. Nor do they focus on the authoritative voice that comes
from faith in one’s knowledge, experience, or righteousness. Instead
they generally center on a speakerless scene, create a fantastic picture, or
imagine a world that may or may not exist referentially. They exaggerate,
stretch, invent, and play with the world as it is in order to create worlds
as they may be in the future or as they seem in the present. In Hamlet,
Shakespeare creates a dialectic between appearance and reality, between
“seeming” and “being.” In his response to Gertrude, Hamlet expresses
discomfort with her refusal to acknowledge that his grief is authentic