The Political Poetry of Rich and Forche

I think that a lot of poetry, not just political poetry, is un-metered and image based. Modernism and the powerful influence of cinema have made these qualities predominant. Nevertheless, I agree that there is “something about . . . the visual image . . . that is somehow more appropriate to this kind of political poetry.” And yet, I am not sure what that “something” is exactly.
The political poetry we are reading resembles, and perhaps may be connected to, the confessional poetry written by people like Lowell and Plath. Lowell’s confessional poetry, in particular, seems devoted to visually documenting his past. I think of a poem like “Father’s Bedroom,” in which he describes in detail the contents of the bedroom in order to provide a glimpse of his father’s life. The documentary mode used in this poem is similar to the “particular rhetorical mode . . . [of] ‘witnessing’ or ‘testimony’” that Helle finds in the elegiac poems of Forche and Rich. Witnessing and testifying obviously have much to do with documenting people and events. So it is not surprising that such a mode could exist in contemporary poetry, nor is it surprising that a journalist like Forche would be attracted to it.
I am also not surprised that, in this age of visual media, the witnessing and testifying would be very visual. The first section of Forche’s The Country Between Us contains elegiac poems about the “afflicted body” of El Salvador, to borrow a phrase from Helle. When I was in high school I saw a video about the atrocities in El Salvador. Those images remain in my head: Archbishop Oscar Romero, to whom Forche dedicates the first section of The Country Between Us, lying dead of a chest wound; soldiers firing on the people who attended his funeral; the bodies of murdered nuns being dragged out of pits. Although not an elegy in the strict sense, “The Visitor” is a poem in which Forche gives witness to political persecution, and thus mourns for the “afflicted body” of both the prisoner and El Salvador. I would have to say that the sensory images in the first stanza are as memorable as the video I saw so long ago. In this case, the aural images are emphasized in the quiet aspirate endings of words like “Spanish,” “left,” and “breath.” It is interesting that Forche uses an occasional internal slant rhyme or slant end rhyme to emphasize the sensory. This kind of rhyme is not for music, but for remembering and experiencing Francisco’s pain and isolation. You could also say that Forche uses “visual rhyme” in “The Memory of Elena,” in which the meat and seafood in a paella resembles human body parts: “camarones, fingers and shells, / the lips of those whose lips / have been removed, mussels / the soft blue of a leg socket.” Rhyme and sound, it seems, become important tools when they can heighten sensory experience.
Rich uses visual images to show the afflictions that she feels are hidden or ignored. She is interested in “’Naming and mourning damage, keeping pain vocal so it cannot become normalized and acceptable’” (qtd. in Helle 63). A clear instance of this effort occurs in the first stanza of “A Woman Dead in Her Forties,” in which Rich describes the results of the mastectomy that her friend underwent. In the poem, she rues her and her friend’s failure to discuss cancer and its effects on the body. I suppose Rich is also trying to revise the convention of the “beautiful dead woman.” According to this convention, the woman’s dead body becomes an aesthetic object, as in a poem like “The Lady of Shallot.” Perhaps another advantage of the brutal and vivid documentary image is that the poet can avoid aestheticizing affliction.