American Poets in the 21st Century
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6. In 2008, Romain and his colleague Jarrod Burks published several online essays on the preliminary findings of their LiDAR research in Ohio, from which my information is taken. See “LiDAR Assessment of the Newark Earthworks,” Current Research in Ohio Archaeology 2008, Ohio Archaeological Council, February 2008, and “LiDAR Analyses of Prehistoric Earthworks in Ross County, Ohio,” Current Research in Ohio Archaeology 2008, Ohio Archaeological Council, March 3, 2008, available online at www.ohioarchaeology.org.
7. I am borrowing the language of “geometric regularity” and “geometrical harmony” from Hively and Horn (“Prehistoric Ohio,” 58).
8. These details are provided by Hedge Coke in her author note to Blood Run (xiv–v) and by the Anishinaabe poet and scholar Margaret Noori in her introduction to Blood Run (ix–xi); they are also available on websites devoted to the Blood Run site. Hedge Coke explains, “Oneota designates an Indigenous building culture on the Midwest Prairie Peninsula” (xiv). Peoples associated with the Blood Run site include “Ho-Chunk, Otoe, Ioway, Kansa, Omaha, Missouri, Quapaw, Osage, Ponca, Arikara, Dakota, and Cheyenne Nations” (xv).
9. Earlier, I employ the concept of a fourth dimension metaphorically to highlight the activist politics of Hedge Coke’s inclusion of explicitly Indigenous perspectives in Blood Run. Within Western mathematics and philosophy, however, the concept of a fourth dimension generally refers to time. Here, I evoke the possibility of a four-dimensional quality to Hedge Coke’s poetic structures to suggest their potential to link the present to the past and to project into the future.
10. For an extended analysis of the sequence produced from this “aerial” perspective, see Chadwick Allen, “Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka: Patterns of Indigenous Settlement in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka,” in Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 193–247.
11. Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, foreword by Leroy Little Bear (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 2000), 65, 234.
12. William Romain and other anthropologists describe the mound-building cultures of Ohio and elsewhere as having this kind of three-worlds worldview; see, for instance, Romain, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2000). Cajete states in Native Science that “[h]umans live in all three worlds, but we are conscious of only one. Many Native ceremonies are intended to make participants aware of the three levels or the overlaps between them. These ancient rituals alter participants’ everyday consciousness to acquire knowledge from the underworld and the universe” (41). As Hedge Coke describes them in Blood Run, earthworks function similarly to help the human community become more aware of upper and lower worlds.
13. Romain, Mysteries of the Hopewell, 253. Hedge Coke appears to affirm this interpretation in her persona poem “North Star,” which includes the line “engraved serpents, hawk wings to commemorate lower, upper [worlds]” (Blood Run, 29).
14. Romain, Mysteries of the Hopewell, 247.
15. Ibid., 253.
16. Cajete, Native Science, 217.
17. Ibid., 217–18.
18. Ibid., 256.
19. Hedge Coke’s word choice here is pointed. “Elegant” links the snake effigy’s aesthetic achievement—its artistic refinement and formal grace—to its scientific exactness and precision, likening it to an elegant theory, equation, or proof. In its suggestion of purity of purpose, “immaculate” responds to the dominant culture’s damning of Indigenous snake imagery as unholy. Moreover, “immaculate” carries the specific connotation of the Christian concept of the Immaculate Conception—that Mary the mother of Christ was conceived in her own mother’s womb without sin—linking to the assertion, articulated across the sequence, that the burial mounds at Blood Run, in particular, function as “earthly wombs” for the honored dead (Blood Run, 17). The personas of The Mounds and Burial Mound describe themselves as a “venter” (belly, uterus) (19), a “seed coat,” “testa,” and “womb” (58), and “wombed hollows” (82).
20. Twenty-four is the factorial of the number four. A factorial is the product of all the positive integers from one up to a given number, typically designated within mathematics by a given number followed by an exclamation point. Thus, for the number four: 4! = 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 = 24.
21. Esoterica is the nineteenth distinct persona to appear in the book’s sequence of thirty-seven total personas; nineteen is the eighth prime, as well as the midpoint or fulcrum in the sequence of thirty-seven distinct personas, with eighteen preceding and eighteen following. (Thirty-seven is the twelfth prime, and twelve is the product of Hedge Coke’s basic units of measurement, four and three.) “Snake Mound,” which immediately precedes “Esoterica,” is the nineteenth persona poem in the book’s sequence of sixty-four total persona poems.
22. See, for example, the discussion of the number three in Navajo philosophical systems in Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 166, 172.
23. A number of Indigenous snake effigies constructed from piled stones remain extant in North America, including what are known as the Kern Serpents located near the Fort Ancient earthworks site in southern Ohio, which align with the summer solstice sunrise. It may be useful to note, as well, that the total number of poems in Blood Run, sixty-six, can be read as mirroring the number of books in the Christian Bible. In standard Protestant and Catholic versions, the Bible is composed of an Old Testament with thirty-nine books and a New Testament with twenty-seven books. Of most immediate relevance for the analysis of “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy,” the number of books in the New Testament mirrors the number of poems in section II, “Intrusions.” The first named intruder in section II is Jesuit.
24. “Squatters” is also divided into nine stanzas (3 × 3, the square of three, or three made two-dimensional), emphasizing the intruding persona’s relationship to action that is ongoing and incomplete.
25. See Luke 24:13–35.
26. Cajete, Native Science, 23–24.
27. Hedge Coke’s mathematical and geometric coding is thus related to what Dean Rader, in a different context, refers to as the “semiotic gesture” of form that can signify, in its own right, beyond the specific content of a poem’s language. Rader argues that a Native poet’s embrace of prose forms, for example, “signifies to the reader story, narrative, tale as opposed to lyric, interiority, monologic.” Rader, “When Function Invents Form: The American Indian Prose Poem,” Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics 7 (2009): 87.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
BOOKS
Dog Road Woman. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Off-Season City Pipe. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2005.
Blood Run. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006.
Streaming. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2014.
Burn. Art by Dustin Illetewahke Mater. Asheville, NC: MadHat Press, 2017.
CHAPBOOKS
The Year of the Rat. Grimes Press, 1995.
MEMOIR
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004; 2nd ed. 2014.
EDITED VOLUMES
Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2009.
Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011.
Effigies II: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2014.
CATHY PARK HONG
POEMS
FROM Dance Dance Revolution
Roles
… Opal o opus,
behole, neon hibiscus bloom beacons!
“Tan Lotion Tanya” billboard … she
your lucent Virgil, den I’s taka ova
es talky Virgil … w
ant some tea? Some pelehuu?
Mine vocation your vacation!
… I train mine talk box to talk yep-puh, as you
‘Merikkens say “purdy,” no goods only phrases,
betta de phrase, “purdier” de experience,
twenty t’ousand guides here but I’m #1 …
once, Helsinkian arrive, I’s say “I guide I guide”
but Helsinkian yap “No! Too many guides!” den I sleep outside
’im door, ’im wake, I say calmly “I guide”
y Helsinkian say “Goddammunt, ja okay, guide me!”
… a million lightbulbs en Desert wit cleanest latrines
en our strobe lit lobbies since desert non sin … each
hotel de McCosm o any city … Bangkok ova here,
Paree ova dere …
I speak sum Han-guk y Finnish, good bit o Latin
y Spanish … sum toto Desert Creole en evachanging dipdong
’pendable on mine mood … ibid …
… Many ’Merikken dumplings unhinge dim
talk holes y ejaculate oooh y hot-diggity
dis is de shee-it … but gut ripping done to erect Polis,
we expoit gaggle o aborigini to back tundra county …
Bannitus! But betta to scrape dat fact
unda history rug, so shh …
O tempora, O mores! I usta move
around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt … now
I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Koryo, ceded from
’Merikka, ceded y ceded until now I seizem
dis sizable Mouthpiece role … now les’ drive to interior.
FROM series “St. Petersburg Hotel,” in Dance Dance Revolution
1. Services
See radish turrets stuck wit tumor lights around hotel
lika glassblown Russki castle sans Pinko plight,
only Ebsolute voodka fountains. Gaggle fo drink?
Hundred ruble, cold kesh only. Step up y molest
hammer y chicklets studded en ruby y seppire almost
bling badda bling. Question? No question! Prick ear.
Coroner diagnose hotel as king o hotels ’cos luxury
is eberyting. Hear sound speaker sing “I get laid in me Escalade
but I first sip glass of Cristal / den I whip out me pistol.”
Non worry. No pistol en hotel, only best surgeon fish y beluga
bedtime special. Deelicious. But before you tuck en king o
water bed, befo you watch pay-pa-view,
Be peripatetic y behole snow bears merry en a ball o go
be roused bine molten sauna where Babushkas bap your tush
wit boar bristle switch. No chillins allowed, vide kid. Mo mo?
Blood rust has been Windexed to amber shine,
insurrecta’s marauding soul wetted into papa-machetes,
looted radio back en turtle-doved municipal hands.
Here, city o ebening calm, ignis-rilers gone.
If you want true history, go watch tailor y milna
make magic. Dim more revolutionary den artist.
If you dream fo Paris, Paris Hotel right outside
atrium, beyond sand dunes, which form y disappear
like mekkinations o human digestion. Sand swirl
to otherworld land where blankets de weight o human
bodies tatter y pill. No tatting, no pilling here. Sand will
be en your eye, only sometimes.
FROM Dance Dance Revolution
Song That Breaks the World Record
… I’s born en first day o unrest …
Huzza de students who fightim plisboi patos!
En gangrene smoke, youngins t’rew butane Colas,
chanted por ole cantanka Rhee to step down … he did!
Chased out en a perma holiday,
Hawaii him Elba …
Fizzy ale spillim street, Korea celebring …
No money fo balloon swine y ticka-tape parade
but Koreans hab unabashed national succotash …
Whole country batty drunk, carpe cerevisi,
aroused like itchy Veegra man …
All b’mine madder … Alore, drunk medics swished
out clinics to celebre, so she allim sheself … alone
en hospital yowlim frum labor … but expert she is,
bore ten chillins whom all die befo
reachim age one … (her heart a grave
o infants, me tragic mum)
… breat’ she pansori’s breath … lika fire
breatha accordian, dum spiro, spero … y
pop me out … (me yeller fadder
hid home, hidim from froth o birth’s labor
y labor o revolution) … I’se boomerang
out, slip shod onto blood tile floor …
a squalim bile newborn …
So heppy, she rasp song sotto voce
afta I’s born … see she voce so famous a fable
o myths, even now, samsy, ju can buy her CD
in de world muzak section …
Nopullimyuleg, she singsong longest song eva …
Sing rasping raus pain …
mind de gap by way …
Hocking, coughing wit one beat
til husking one note … con ko bell,
she like a bayou wailer …
En stubble field etched by winta’s acid light,
she retch her notes … y specta’s wall o sound
chilled de tympanum o all de saram
who pause, listen, y cry, cry, y cry
for being a curs’d Korean …
Singing while carrying me bundle home,
til I’se a week old, befo she collapse to she death,
she hum her last notes:
A martyr spun nettle out of a silk shorn dress,
A lice-laced boot to my heart in
Angyang I rest …
FROM Engine Empire
Ballad in O
O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor:
odd horrors of throwdowns,
bold cowboys lock horns,
forlorn hobos plot to rob
pots of gold, loco mobs
drool for blood, howl or hoot
for cottonwood blooms, throng
to hood crooks to strong wood posts.
So don’t confront hotbloods,
don’t show off, go to blows or rows,
don’t sob for gold lost to trollops,
don’t drown sorrows on shots of grog.
Work morn to moon.
Know how to comb bottom pools,
spot dots of gold to spoon pots of gold.
Vow to do good.
Ballad in A
A Kansan plays cards, calls marshal
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls,
I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass warpath.
Marshal’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
says: that dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws fatback.
At dawn, marshal stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ass
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag flaps half-staff.
Market Forces Are Brighter Than the Sun
My Aleph, My Grand Dame, My Turks
frozen in time! Haroon, Kadoori, Sassoon
with your bolts of canary silk sheared
and sold down to Shangdu river alongside
a wedding of gamblers betting in a vintage sampan.
Barges of
creaky banquet halls,
spit out your prawn tail in this ramekin! Shots
of Crown Royal for all! Dear natty vessel
of chemical dye, dear floating factory
of cleaning supplies, let me buy
you out, my wire hanger is mannered
like the virgin neck of a Parmigianino nude,
my lint roller can defur a Pomeranian dog.
Shangdu, my artful boomtown,
I will smudge out your horizon line with my
thumb, I will stuff you cheek to jowl
and pipette you with petrol,
chasing out urchins nibbling on beetle kebabs!
Foreigners, do nip from that Blue Label
in our train which is faster than the Shinkansen,
powered by our merry laughs:
Ho Ho Ho! Ha Ha Ha! Ho Ho Ho!
Xiao, bring me my napkin,
my thumb is smudged with the horizon.
Notorious
—after Paul Chan
Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum?
You in heaven, na, be happy.
You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink
snuggly over your Bluto belly,
& this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji.
Like a short-order cook slinging hashbrowns,
you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die,
now faput. Dead. Why so chee?
Ayaya, you in heaven for white people.
Wrong ear-sucking heaven.
Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit,
you smell wet dog?
Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble:
“No Hennessey just seltzer, please,”
before they sing your hits a capella.
Shataa, Baagad Bullya,