american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

78 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
rather than staged. However, Hamlet’s words also reveal a certain irony
as he consciously takes on and performs an antic disposition throughout
the opening acts of the play even though he claims that he has “that
within which passes show.” The infinitives that define the play—“to be”
and “to seem/appear”—are useful for beginning to understand how
political poems of equivocal agency work. In these poems there is no
strict “to be”; instead, they have something akin to what Tim O’Brien
calls a “surreal seemingness.” In The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes
that “there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story
seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it
seemed” (78; original emphasis). Poems of equivocal agency stage the
power of the imagination, thereby calling into question any strict divide
between truth and falsity, being and seeming.
The poems I discuss in this chapter problematize direct notions of
experience, while utilizing equivocation, paradox, strangeness, irony,
and rhetorical guises. The strategies of these poems show the importance
of the speakerless scene, abstract language, nonspecific diction,
and nonconcrete references. These are often the poems that intimidate
students looking for definitive answers to questions such as What does
this poem mean? and What is this poem about? These poems often defy
simple interpretation and pose challenges to critics attempting to tease
out patterns of rhetorical strategies between poems. Further, though
these poems are clearly political, their content, especially for a poem
such as Harjo’s “A Postcolonial Tale,” may require a more focused
interpretative endeavor, a deeper engagement from readers, and a willingness
to suspend disbelief and strict notions of referentiality. As such,
the subject may be injustice or poverty writ large rather than small.
In the introduction to Against Forgetting, Forché points out that
poetry of witness often uses paradox and equivocation. She suggests
that the language of the everyday is inadequate for poems of witness in
the violent and repressive contexts in which they are produced. She
writes that when the “quotidian has been appropriated by oppressive
powers” so that language becomes unusable for protest, poets must
pursue truth through indirection (41), a claim that connects subtly
with Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s notion that poems that highlight their differences
from normal speech can be the most politically adroit. So, too,
poems of equivocal agency generally rely not on first-person speakers
poeticizing experience, but on indirection, utopian/dystopian visions,
and transpersonal experiences, sometimes evoked via parodic, staged,
distant, and fragmented voices.
Whereas poems such as Harper’s “Deathwatch” and Kinnell’s
“When the Towers Fell” refer to verifiable personal and historical