american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

82 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
presenting history as a continuous, unified story” (Geyh et al. xxiv).
Similarly, the narrator of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990)
distinguishes between “story-truth” and “happening-truth,” where a
story about an event that includes the sensations and feelings of its
participants can be more truthful and insightful than the rote retelling
of what happened during an event. The “what happened,” O’Brien
implies, always misses the spirit of events and the marks they leave on
participants.
In addition to these alternative literary models of history and
experience, theoretical accounts of history such as Benjamin’s “Theses
on the Philosophy of History” (in Illuminations) appeal not to experience
but to a prevailing mood about history and the wide-ranging
human consequences of historical events. These alternative approaches
to history have generally been the province of fiction and theory.
However, such techniques are not simply within their purview; many
political poems, especially those in chapter 2, forgo unified narratives
and traditional historical perspectives, preferring instead surrealism,
magic realism, equivocation, visionary strangeness, and parodic rather
than sincere voices. The poems in this chapter, moreover, reveal the
limitations of traditional historical approaches. In Private Poets,
Worldly Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American
Poetry, Kevin Stein discusses poetry that “acknowledges the inadequacy
of ‘official’ or ‘objective’ histories” and that “juxtaposes its own
in opposition” (19) to those histories. Though poems of equivocal
agency sometimes utilize their “own” histories, they usually implicitly
claim that “official” histories inaccurately represent actual events in the
service of dominant social, economic, and political interests.
These poems loosen the strictures of historical narrative, and they
also move away from the potential limitations and pitfalls of lived experience
as the decisive arbiter of knowledge, creative vision, and political
power. Experience, they suggest, must never bind poetry if it is to
remain independent from fact-based reporting. Poststructuralism
reveals flaws in Western logic, and a brief digression into the claims and
failures of trauma theory helps illuminate some important techniques
in poems of equivocal agency. According to trauma theory, traumatic
events are not remembered in the ways that normal events are. A traumatic
experience, the theory goes, is a “missed” experience inaccessible
to normal memory and thought processes. Cathy Caruth defines
trauma as an “overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic
events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed,
uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive
phenomena” (11). I do not intend to belabor the intricacies of