american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

84 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
highlight and cut short that transformation, refusing to move
completely from image into narrative coherence or closure, preferring
instead to leave images open and ungrounded by experience.
Poems of equivocal agency, therefore, are usually indirect; they
tend to approach a subject—indeed, the very notion of a subject—
indirectly, from oblique angles. In contrast to Forché’s “The
Colonel,” Kinnell’s “After the Towers Fell,” Snyder’s “Front Lines,”
and other poems of experiential and authoritative agency in which the
speaker approaches the subject directly and transparently, the poems
in chapter 2 approach their subjects with a set of different lenses.
Whether in the surreal space of a Simic cityscape, or in the haunted,
ubiquitous presence of ghosts on the reservations of Alexie, these
poems forgo certainty for atmospheres redolent with indescribable
presences.
These poems, finally, are often unbounded by strict temporal and
spatial considerations, and they are removed in part from any conception
of agency that explains experience. Any account of human
agency, for Anthony Giddens, has two imperatives. It must be
“connected to a theory of the acting subject” and it must “situate
action in time and space as a continuous flow of conduct” (2; my
emphasis). Giddens outlines precisely why and how poems in chapter 2
challenge the frameworks for agency. In these poems there is often not
a singular, identifiable acting subject with the characteristics of a real
person in the world. They do not contain a continuous flow of actions
in time and space. Because they are freed from the constraints of
human agency, which must always operate in time and space not in
discrete moments but continuously in response to conditions, situations,
and other agents, these poems have grander, more spectacular
(and often more imaginative) political voices and visions.
Comprehensive Equivocal Agency
Charles Simic’s poems best represent the voices of comprehensive
equivocal agency. The prevailing critical sentiment about his voice
centers on its enigmatic, minimalist, riddling, and surreal character.
Poet and critic Bruce Weigl has written that Simic “remains an
enigma, even within the eclectic tradition of postmodern American
poetry.” His poems, moreover, differentiate him from other contemporary
poets because of their “particularly inclusive and worldly
vision” (1), a quality key to poems of comprehensive equivocal
agency. The speaker in many Simic poems is “oddly anonymous, a self
without a self—a passerby, comfortable in his self-imposed exile”