American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi.

  Silly as a cricket in pubes.

  Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar.

  A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun

  and swatting away chweetie pie cupids,

  looms Fatmouth God,

  frowning like rotten turbot.

  But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens,

  so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky

  melts to Op Art swirls

  of Cherry Coke red, burning upup

  white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt

  & black cell phone towers.

  This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh

  & video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis.

  But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis?

  Where is 2 Pack?

  POETICS STATEMENT

  Sometimes, when I’m stuck writing poetry, I will browse Engrish.com, a humor site that uploads photos of translated signs from China, Korea, and other East Asian countries that botch up English phrases like “Caution, Butt Head against Wall” or photos of Asians wearing T-shirts like “I feel a happiness when I eat Him.” The most viewed photo is an ad featuring a cute illustration of a popular milky beverage with tapioca pearls that has the caption, “I’m Bubble Tea! Suck my Balls!”

  You might be wondering why I go to this gag site for inspiration. I like to collect Engrish platitudes because they could be a line in a poem. Take the phrase “I feel a happiness when I eat him.” It has all the traits of a surprising poetic line: a familiar sentiment has now become unfamiliar because chance has turned error into Eros; even that indefinite article “a” is a hiccup that tweaks the tone into a piquant animatronic pitch. With the right grammatical transgressions, anything can become poetry. This, by the way, is not another tired postmodern exercise. Bad English is my heritage.

  Since I am a Korean American female poet, I am heir to nothing in particular. The closest lineage I have are writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry, who deterritorialize it, queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it into another language. Over time, there has been an efflorescence of verbs that describes what Deleuze and Guattari call the minoritization of language, or, in other words, the hijacking of Standard English and warping it to a fugitive tongue.

  English is an ever-expanding system of dialects. To vandalize it is part of language’s natural progression as we have the pleasure of experiencing these mutations in song and speech but less so in written form. For instance, much of American musical innovation comes from black English. The poet Nathaniel Mackey wrote an essay called “Other: From Noun to Verb,” making a distinction between the noun other, which is social, and the verb other, which is artistic:

  Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.1

  Mackey borrows his title from Amiri Baraka, who describes the persistent pattern of white musicians plundering black music and rebranding it as their own as turning “a verb into a noun.” For instance, swing, the verb, was a black innovation, which meant simply to react to music, before it was co-opted by white musicians into the commercial brand, “Swing.” Mackey makes an appeal to wrest the white man’s noun and turn it back into a verb by “breaking into” English, or using Kamau Brathwaite’s term, “Calibanizing” the colonizer’s English by alloying new words out of vernacular and patois.2

  Since I published my first collection Translating Mo’um, I have taken my source of shame—my bad English—and turned it into a source of pride, turning patterns of speech not normally used in poetry into a stylized language that synthesizes the careening sounds of a globalizing world. I am invested in “othering” English by code-switching between different forms of regional and racialized English.

  There is nothing new to the aesthetic I’m proposing, but that is exactly the point. I am working with an already corrupted language, and no amount of scouring will “make it new.” English is an imperial language, and it continues to expand today because English is our neoliberal lingua franca. In China, one does not buy a T-shirt for what it says, but because it appears to be English and it’s in the Gucci font. Engrish is the language for consumers: it is the language of brand recognition and tourism and outsourced labor. To other English is to make audible the power inherent in the language, to flay it open and reveal its dark histories.

  If we are to decenter whiteness, we need to strive for an intersectional aesthetic where poets from nondominant groups engage in and interact with each other’s languages, politics, and cultures. As Donna Haraway writes in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” she’s not interested in identity politics but in affinity politics. I too am interested in affinities, the ways in which our experiences overlap as we navigate our way through systems of oppression. What visions of alternate worlds can we create and what coalitions of genres and forms can we build out of political kinship? Through an intersectional aesthetic, we can continue challenging worn sensibilities, constructing structural antagonisms to embody a transpersonal genre, a genre that is infinite wound.

  NOTES

  1. Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992), 51.

  2. Ibid., 57.

  BUILDING INHERITANCE

  Cathy Park Hong’s Social Engagement in the Speculative Age

  Danielle Pafunda

  we guide guide

  I am crammed with tongues crammed

  with guides who ache for their own

  guides  who mourn who lead

  men from human rinds of discontent

  CATHY PARK HONG,

  “Almanac”1

  Though the poetry landgrab has more to do with cool than with money, it’s always about power and territory. Frontlines, avant-garde borders are property lines. Rather than make it new, many recent avant-garde poets take it new, co-opting the lineages of those who have less authority to speak. A twenty-first-century poetics of social engagement must take it back, rephrase language until it bears little trace of the master’s accent, and speak the marginalized dialects that usually don’t get airtime until they issue from white, cis-masculine mouths. This is an emotionally demanding, labor-intensive task. Who has the resilience to confront not just that mundane anxiety of influence, but also the more wretched anxieties? Who can “lead / men from human rinds of discontent,” colonized spaces, and institutionalized experiments? This trailblazing might look like the American Dream—train-hopping and invention—it might inspire the master’s sons to playact on the high lonesome plain, but as our ballads, warning tales, and pastorals prove, the prodigal son’s privilege will insulate him. He’ll live to tell the tale of the dishonored daughter lost at sea, the jazzman suffering cognitive terrors in the impoverished alley. He’ll go home and collect his awards. Permanent leave-taking requires guts and luck, brilliance and risk of failure. Worse than the prospect of never going home again may be the knowledge that it was never home to begin with, that if you want a home, you’ll have to build it in the badlands. Lighting out, lit and trailblazing, are POC, gender-nonconforming, trans, femme, crip poets, the #ActualAsianPoets. Repeatedly assured—whether by walls or tourism—the entire world is the master’s house, where does one go to get away from his petulant children and their oppressive inheritance?

  World building rests on word building, and in supposedly fictional dialects, in territories of her own making, Cathy Park Hong speaks a truth loud enough for power to hear. With the common vernacular gone fallow, she speaks in more germinative dialects. Whether lodging the hidden city within the city or engaged in some species of ècriture féminine, as a speculative writer she offers a guidepost, a light, a shade on the horizon beckoning this way. Through dial
ect, slang, rhyme, bad English, and slippage, Hong’s many tongues carve new worlds. Look at her trembling hands and frayed (’fraid!) map, and you’ll see that Hong has long anticipated this political and poetic moment. With the aura of a retroactive psychic, she guides us into the architecture of self, underexplored zones of globalization, late Anthropocene identity politics, environmental degradation, baroque tech, physics and molecular biology, and heck! molecular gastronomy. Tired of the master’s drone, tired of hanging on, transient, unheard and frightened, we can follow her eccentric wheel ruts and thrill to find “the only hole in a world of light,”2 “deep / inside the marrow of song,”3 the “city of broken spokes.”4 Over the past two war-soaked decades, Cathy Park Hong has been sojourning and sending up flares. She builds boomtowns, worlds, even those structures in which we might shelter—homes. You don’t follow a road to get to her. You follow the tongues.

  Writer and translator John Keene says of his extraordinary stories, which, like Hong’s poems, traverse centuries to defy history,

  The stories in Counternarratives are anti-teleological; they defy “progressive history” and master narratives, suggesting possible ways that art might respond to capitalism’s effects. I also see these stories doing something deeply queer (or “quare” to use E. Patrick Johnson’s version of the term), by opening up spaces within and across their thematic and formal connections, to suggest other ways of thinking about and assembling the world. In part to disorient; it’s a kind of warping, an attempt to defamiliarize, and thereby reshape, our thinking.5

  Though fiction is the go-to, poetry and speculation make ideal companions for world building. The lyric’s main function is to express that for which we haven’t yet a working language. We tell slant truth, remove the speakers as they’re speaking, and otherwise jam the signals. Julia Kristeva gives us a dramatic portrait of poetry’s paradoxical creator, who is “[d]isinherited, deprived of that lost paradise”—the Thing/the mother/the prelingual state. Although “he is wretched,” Kristeva continues, writing becomes “the strange way that allows him to overcome such wretchedness.”6 Having lost everything before words, words are perhaps the poet’s only comfort. Driven to convey inarticulable cocktails of affect and experience, symptomatically postmodern while hauling history’s yoke, unsure of communicating even the most basic observations in any transparent manner, poets such as Hong write to overcome the rotten luck of being human in a posthuman world, where lyric’s challenge is to reconcile human atrocity with blurred ecotone, in which the virus, soil crust, or tardigrade may be the more relevant speaker. Hong’s necropastoral7 optimism constructs inimitable architectures from Harryette Mullen-esque takes on Stein and Berryman, strolls with Italo Calvino and Ursula K. LeGuin, video games and slang, exploits and exploitation. The resulting topography does justice to our deep fears, weird dreams, and secret hopes. It prophesies futures we might wish to head off, or rush into headlong.

  Beginning in the familiar arms of the lyric I, Hong strides into the curious, spurious heart of the fin-de-siècle self. Her first book, Translating Mo’um, combines post-confessional impulses and the historian’s fetishes with language poetry’s sense of play and decentered speakers. This road-to-nowhere bundle of senses and signals “forgot to wash before meals, or wipe away the sleep from my eyes, / or clean between my legs and clean off the ash that has powdered / my skin.”8 She knows better than to believe everything she’s told and to listen for the strange music: “Overheard in history’s senile tympanum / was a Song.”9 She knows, moreover, the singerself to be a wicked amalgam of market schemes and cultural detritus, “an old man in my fantasies, a darting pupil, a curious ghost.”10 Throughout the book, Hong maintains her brutally funny self-awareness:

  Along the soldered road, there is a man sleeping. I pause, wanting to kiss him. But I am apprehensive that he would awake, become offended or confused. I shut the book or I open the book, earmark the page, shut the book.11

  This young woman in “On Splitting” assumes the prince’s role of breathing life into a sleeping beauty. But unlike previous princes/authors, she knows the characters aren’t hers for the taking, and when the book shuts, she loses her place. This poem assembles a series of impressionistic narrative swatches and tableaus into a sketchy arc, a memoir for a speaker aware that her story can’t be told linearly or in a single language. We get a nod to late twentieth-century postmodern novels and their unreliable (antiheroic white guy) narrators, reminding us that the narrator who shucks off the costume of all-seeing-god-eye and admits to his moral failures may, in fact, be a more reliable if not always likable narrator. More fellow wanderer than false guide, this traveling companion can be ditched if his puka shells get too noisy. But what happens when the unheroic victim becomes the antiheroic speaker? One speaker of Translating Mo’um cautions: “I used to walk out of the classroom halfway through / story time be dragged back by the ear.”12 And “As if I wrote myself / to a sparkling erasure, // or spoke with the wooden / clack of a puppet’s mouth.”13 Irreverent, uncooperative, and ill-versed, such a speaker refuses to disguise herself as poetry’s rightful heir. Though her eventual familiarity with the Western canon and knowledge of historical facts and figures may put ours to shame, she still bucks against the colonized intellect.14

  Language in Hong’s capable hands slips eel-like, electric, out of them, and with it goes received authority. Where the road is soldered, “a man sleeping” becomes a soldier. This slippage alludes to war-torn Korea and its subsequent American military occupation. Where does a young Korean American girl fit into this story? Or where does her story fit into the story? In colonial tales, she’s been collateral damage or grateful refugee, so how might her story be told in dominant colonial language or genre? Korean American adoptee Alison Kinney’s speculative memoir “Hostages” asks this very question, allowing a throng of preverbal, harbinger, genius babies in transit to answer:

  It started with the screaming, all fifty or a hundred of us. We screamed at pitches that made eardrums bleed. We screamed the way babies scream on CIA torture tapes. We screamed to pummel you into submission, and also for the fun of it, because we’d just figured out that when we scream, you react, and that’s funny.

  We threw barf bags and pillows to the floor of the cabin, made you pick them up, and threw them again. Those of us whose legs were long enough kicked the seat backs before us, right at your kidneys. “Cut that out,” you said, and we projectile-vomited formula right in your eyes.

  Terror in the skies!15

  Translating Mo’um pushes against the borders of conventional discourse in a fashion reminiscent of both the highest art and the most subversive babies.

  Hong’s lifelong affection for slang16 aids in this process, as do the gaps in translations, the gutter and the glottal. Though the slang may pass as daring, pleasurable play—“a girl jerks off,”17 “cunt,”18 “bong hit”19—it also refuses the good manners and breeding one is meant to perform before the canon. As John Yau puts it,

  Globalism and immigration (or migration)—in the form of pidgin, mispronunciation, graffiti, and encoded signs—have overrun the various geographical boundaries as well as upended the rules defining areas of fixed vocabulary, grammar and spelling. The English language—particularly in America—is a field in which decay and replenishment are ongoing, unpredictable ruptures. No one is sure what will happen next, what transformation some part of it will inevitably undergo. It is an inflicted and vulnerable body undergoing rapid change. Parts of it are blossoming while other parts are dying. It is this often volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and unlikelihood, which Cathy Park Hong explores in her poetry.20

  Yau recognizes language as nation, landscape, territory, perishable material, and body. In each case, slang and its kin form strategies of resistance, reclamations of the mother/mother-tongue, killer toxins, and biomiraculous blooms. Because inflicting slang and neologism on discourse destabilizes both the text-in-hand and the social order, anti-immigrant nati
vists insist (in protest signs rife with misspellings) that English must be our only language, while nervous educators insist that students strip colloquialisms and first-person perspectives from their papers, and the academy still on occasion gives experimental poets the stink-eye. Hong’s play packs serious punch, and it responds to Kristeva’s lament:

  Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation, provided that it takes place under the optimal circumstances and can be eroticized—whether the lost object is recovered as erotic object […] or it is transposed by means of an unbelievable symbolic effort.21

  Hong’s writing asks why vie for space in daddy’s world? What happens if we refuse to perform that old Greek act? If we don’t kill, but translate the mother instead?22

  What becomes a more pungent approach in later collections, already threatens (and promises) in Translating Mo’um a time before (proper) language, before matricide, with a time-traveling ècriture féminine:23

  Exhibit e: Still mute, I was sent to Special Ed

  with autistics, paraplegics, and a

  boy who only ate dirt.24

  While the tone in such lines is confessional—that is to say intimate, and as controlled as Plath’s—Hong’s confession laces into other legends. She exhibits the stories of Tono Maria, Saartjie Baartman, and Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins of the freak-show circuit. She insists that we question what “senile” history has taught us and what the speaker herself presents, as she struggles with the “exhibit.” A lawyerly and curatorial concept, the “exhibit” frames the object, organizes and places it in a logical context. Who has done the framing? To believe our eyes when we confront these speechless exhibits would be to fall for the barker’s tale.

  Although Translating Mo’um draws from the real world, it isn’t wed to realism. As do Plath’s, Sexton’s, Berryman’s, and Bidart’s—and those who follow Hong: Feng Sun Chen, Ginger Ko, Ji Yoon Lee, Trisha Low, Monica McClure, Morgan Parker, and so on—Hong’s confessional transmits meaning through an I that we might confuse with author, and that we know to be figurative. Appropriating famously objectified speakers, she introduces grotesque images where realism fails to convey affective truth. But these aren’t tricks. Hong’s visible strings and pulleys make the point. She says, “My own way of engaging with the present is building these speculative landscapes. I build worlds to critique world building.”25 Translating Mo’um rebuilds Hong’s own world (history, heritage, home) in order to deconstruct it: “The author’s bloodshot eye peered into the window / of a dollhouse and the doll died from fright.”26 Does she kill off her childhood to get it out of her system? Does she tell the truth so that she can purge herself of the “obligation for grave truthtelling in poetry?”27 Is there truly a her-self in there? In “Rite of Passage,” Hong writes,