american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 79
events, the poems in chapter 2 may not refer directly to a discrete
event or to a historical period. For example, the Charles Simic war
poems I discuss do not refer to a particular war or sociopolitical context;
in contrast, most of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poems are
bounded by that war and a soldier’s experience of it. Further, Robert
Bly’s poems about the Vietnam War do not rely on poetic agency
from experience. Instead, his protest poems are surreal, imagistic
pieces with startling juxtapositions and strange disconnections from
the referential world.
There is also a sharp divide within political poems of equivocal
agency. Whereas many have a referential context discernable from the
poem’s content, subject, title, or strategic placement in a volume of
poetry, others do not have a specific context or subject. To utilize the
above examples, Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poems appear in a volume of
exclusively Vietnam poems, Dien Cai Dau, where the title is in
Vietnamese. Further, the front cover features photographs of soldiers,
the back cover a photograph of Komunyakaa in uniform, the epigraph
is dedicated to his brother “who saw The Nam before” Komunyakaa
did, and the first line in the volume is “We tied branches to our helmets”
(“Camouflaging the Chimera”). In contrast, even though
many readers may know that Simic grew up in German-occupied
Belgrade during the 1940s, “Paradise Motel” (A Wedding in Hell
1994) and “Cameo Appearance” (Walking the Black Cat 1996) do
not have specific contexts as part of their rhetorical strategies. The
architecture of these poems is designed to suspend time, place, and
experience in favor of imaginative breadth. 1
There are two primary rhetorical strategies in poems of equivocal
agency. The first strategy is comprehensive, in which the poem is
divested of identifiable context in order to create a more encompassing
and inclusive vision of a socioeconomic reality. These poems are
largely unbounded by the limitations of strict context-formed discourse.
To continue with the war example, these comprehensive
poems are about war in general or some aspect, result, or effect of
contemporary warfare. The second strategy is particular. These
poems are directed at and comment on a specific context, situation, or
dynamic. They are not about war or about poverty; they are about a
war in Vietnam or poverty in Detroit. There is, however, a substantial
area of overlap between the two types of equivocal agency. Both types
employ similar strategies, but their intended interventions diverge.
A poem that speaks to racism in general uses a different strategy and
perhaps has potentially different effects than one that speaks to racism
in South Africa. I do not intend to create a strict global/local