american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

80 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
dichotomy, but it is useful to differentiate between poems that aspire
to general political insight and ones that comment on specific
contexts.
For both types of equivocal agency, the speaker is usually removed
from the limitations of personal experience and the conventions that
implicitly govern poems of memory, witness, and interiority. Unlike
political poems of personal experience, these poems often employ
what Jane Frazier and Charles Molesworth call “disembodied” narrators.
In an essay on W.S. Merwin, Frazier writes that “Merwin’s narrators
betray little or no personal identity and often seem as if they are
voices speaking free of the body” (341). Although the rhetorical
effects of Merwin’s strategy differ from those of the poems in this
chapter—Frazier suggests Merwin’s narrators evince a desire “to join
the self with the universal” (342)—the concept of the disembodied
narrator illuminates the ways that poems of equivocal agency move
away from the readily identifiable, prominent, involved, fully embodied,
and mostly first-person narrators in poems of experiential agency.
Poems of equivocal agency move away from the realistic narrative
impulse that forms much of—though not all of—the shape and logic
of experiential agency.
In addition to a move away from the narratives of first-person experience
by an identifiable speaker, poems of equivocal agency also move
away from the readily recognizable world. Robert Pinsky suggests that
such a move might be part of the poet’s “responsibility,” to re-present
the world from a unique angle, one that does not square with simplistic
views propagated in various media and widely accepted as accurate
and unimpeachable. Pinsky claims that “before an artist can see a
subject” she must first “transform it” in order to “answer the received
cultural imagination of the subject with something utterly different.”
Pinsky believes that transformation “comes before everything else” in
the writing process (“Responsibilities” 9). It is debatable whether or
not this step is first; however, utterly transforming the referential
world is a key rhetorical strategy in poems of equivocal agency as well
as a key element of poetry as countercultural discourse.
Poems of equivocal agency can be seen as part of a larger movement
in scholarship and literature since the 1960s. “Transforming” traditional
referential history and “the received cultural imagination”
became imperative for many writers beginning in 1960s. Since the
decade that saw the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Malcolm X, many postmodern fiction writers and poststructural
theorists have scrutinized the validity of previously unquestioned
historical accounts and the role of language in not only