american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 83
trauma theory, but I want to suggest that a possible factor in some
critics’ aversion to poetry of witness and experience is partly due to the
suspicion of experience and memory caused by the prominence of
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), trauma theory, and the issues
surrounding recovered memory. In addition to critics’ explicitly stated
concerns about poetry of experience as a mere mimetic exercise in
which the poet is a simple recorder of the world, trauma theory suggests
that “experience” itself is a questionable signifier.
Trauma theory, though, is rife with problems. 4 In “The Trauma
Trap,” in the March 2004 New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews
outlines some major difficulties with trauma theory that challenge its
central claims. For instance, the problems with recovered memory:
How is it possible that some memories (those recovered during
regression) are more legitimate than others? How is it that the
memory of trauma does not stand apart neurologically from normal
memory? Crews points out that there is no evidence of memory
repression in any study of holocaust survivors. He shows that memories
of traumatic events are actually better remembered than ordinary
ones. The idea, I believe, that an agent cannot know her experience
must be abandoned. Our experiences must not be thought inaccessible
to us; in poems of equivocal agency that depart from strict models
of experience, for example, we must first know our experiences before
we consciously (and strategically) depart from them.
Although it is imperative to discount any notion of trauma as a
“missed” experience unknowable by an agent except through recovered
memory therapy, the connections between trauma theory and
the rhetorical strategies and figures of voice in poems of equivocal
agency are instructive. Cassie Premo Steele argues that trauma is not
recorded in the usual, narrative way we remember experiences;
instead, they are “encoded” in images that give us “insight into the
questions of ‘experience,’ so often deadlocked between praise from
humanist feminists and rejection from poststructuralists” (3–4). Like
the memory of a traumatic experience, which may be disjointed and
disordered, the poems in chapter 2 often shift and displace any
simple narrative of experience. They often fracture—or refuse to
use—the humanistic, unified, singular speaking voice and opt instead
for the primacy of images, sensations, and sounds, or for voices that
expose the limitations of “experience” narrowly understood as what
can be turned into an accessible, realistic narrative. As Steele claims,
poems can be like memories in that they comprise images, feelings,
rhythms, sounds, and physical sensations of the body as “evidence”
that transforms experience into poetry (5). Poems of equivocal agency