Though some of us firmly believe that language is everything—the bricks and mortar of states and people—it is nonetheless an ever-shifting “transit zone.” How can one confront this mutable middle? When Yau notes that “turbulence” is “central to our current state of affairs,” he might also tell us that our centers are turbulent. The heart (of the human, the nation-state, the globe, the global economy) is both “impasse and passage.” Just as Berryman’s multiple speakers externalize an interior conflict, Hong’s boomtowns externalize our messy selfscapes, become palpable metaphor for the border and bridge between Self and Other, while cogently referencing the paranoid border building taking place in our more literal territories.62
Hong wouldn’t have us read this as a particularly contemporary phenomenon. In Engine Empire, she drops us into three eras of boomtowns. The first section of this artful triptych takes place somewhere on the outskirts of our past, in the American West:
All around us forts like built and unbuilt, half-
walled towns as men yoke themselves to state,
but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains
scullground to silt sand,
afar, the boomtowns of precious ore.63
Here, a band of skuzzy prospectors kidnaps a young boy (“Our Jim”) from his abandoned homestead, a boy who proves to be both a boon (he’s a good shot) and all kinds of trouble:
But our adapted boy’s head done turned.
All he does is sing, his throat a tender lode of tern flutes
disturbing our herd, singing of malaria,
his murderous, lime-corroded Ma.64
The second section is in the present boomtowns of China:
Boomtown is Shangdu’s brand name. How do you like Boomtown Shangdu? Everyday, 2,000 more people flood into Shangdu to work in our 2,000 factories. Do you know why? Shangdu is booming!65
And the third is in the near future, in the World Cloud:
I hail an aerocab,
turn up my personalized surround sound
track: wistful to anthemic
to voice
recognition66
Her old-West boomtown serves to disenchant us of any pre-Google romanticism. We were brutal prospectors when there was gold in them thar hills, and we are brutal prospectors still, whether the hills contain oil, silicone, blood, or information (whatever floats your boat, whatever powers your engine, your empire). Navigating alongside other (often doomed) pioneers, we recognize the boom as both opportunity and catastrophe, the city as both residence and exile.
The most delightful and terrifying realization one can have about Calvino’s Invisible Cities is that each of the cities, ultimately, is made entirely of words.67 And then so are our own. If we’ve learned anything from our literacy-resistant history, it’s that while the Empire maps its holdings, it leaves its future up for grabs. Hong compiles both historical and contemporary studies of boom and bust, of economy and territory, and spins out their tense web of half-built apartment buildings, a world more information cloud than city street, nations already stripped of their resources. In the information age, language—whether computer code, redacted text, or private message—is currency. Phallogocentricism ensures that we code this currency, as we always have, masculine. Conscripted into this economy, we motherless children, we masculine-coded good workers participate in our own obsolescence, whether we be “old travelers forever dying” whom “Our Jim” must “drain […] of the last dregs of their consciousness,” or the Cloud World husband who “used to stare into the middle distance / for weeks until you lugged him to bed.”68
Hong’s Engine Empire isn’t a complete dystopia. We readers might have hope precisely because her speakers are able to analyze their alienation and loss in the moment it occurs:
the booming trade of information
exists without our paid labor
what to do with all this leisure
I blink at my orange trees
spangled with captions,
landscapes overlaid
with golden apps and speculation
nudging hope like the sham
time machinist who returns from
the future, convincing
everyone with his doctored
snapshots of restored
prosperity and a sea full
of whales huge as ocean liners
singing the call-note of our
relieved tears.69
The residents of the Cloud World, encased in smart snow, remind us of William Gibson’s “Winter Market” with its uploaded pop star, neither the human she once was, nor completely posthuman. They recall Jean-Francois Lyotard’s speculations in The Inhuman, “Can Thought go on without a Body?” When the commodity is no longer the worker herself, but her words, her knowledge, her informative experience, how do we value these? In an interview, poet Catherine Wagner argues:
Yet is this a good thing for poems, is it a good thing for mothers, to say of them “they are special, they do their work outside the paid economy, they are pure and holy, we love them! let’s have Mother’s Day, let’s have National Poetry Month”? When in fact they are absolutely part of this economy, they just participate in it indirectly. Their roles in it are obscured. The more we holy them up and “value” them by insisting that they are not part of it, the less they are valued in any way that results in real benefit to them. […] Poems are in the system (see Bourdieu’s essay “The Market for Symbolic Goods”). I want poems to display or expose this fact somehow, not to ignore it, and certainly not to pretend to get outside of it.70
The “booming trade of information” may indeed cut the worker out of the pay cycle, but it cannot cut her out of the equation. Information makes for slippery inheritance. Poets who recognize language as a basic unit of power remind us that we must not pretend it is separate from other material goods and currencies. To do so is to alienate ourselves from the means of production and to alienate the product from the material world. It is also to ignore what’s been stolen from us by those who’ve much longer been granted the authority to speak words, no matter to whom those words belong.
Engine Empire addresses a global economy that outpaces our speculative literature in its absurdity and horror. The rules of commerce evolve more rapidly than the human worker, who, once obsolete, becomes nothing more than a taxable object. Hong’s disgruntled boomless sibling will remind us, if you can be spoken, you can be commodified:
Ma has passed the village gathered and wailed w’ trumpet lungs,
wile I daydreamed of leaving these parched shriven hills,
traveling far into the mirror cast of Shangdu’s
chandeliering lights,
Then that melon-bellied landlord, a genius
for making tithes, skulked by and tithed me, tithed the grievers,
who quickly scrambled to escape the tithe,
tithed our ma for the burial.
Even the dead don’t escape the tithe.71
But if the power lies in information, in language and in naming, then perhaps the poet is the one to help wrest it back from the corporate state. Kristeva comes to this conclusion about poetry’s ability to subvert the sellout effect inherent in naming the thing:
Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components—that is doubtless a way to curb mourning. To revel in it at times, but also to go beyond it, moving on to another form, not so scorching, more and more perfunctory […] Nevertheless, art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing. First by means of prosody, the language beyond language that inserts into the sign the rhythm and alliterations of semiotic processes. Also by means of the polyvalence of sign and symbol, which unsettles naming and, by building up a plurality of connotations around the sign, affords the subject a chance to imagine the nonmeaning, or the true meaning of the Thing.72
In Hong’s tri
ptych of boomtowns, we know the mother(tongue) has been targeted, and we know she’s refusing to go quietly. Language is no stable currency, and who better to sabotage it than this poet?
From Translating Mo’um’s use of han-gul (“the language first used by female entertainers, poets, prostitutes”), to Dance Dance Revolution’s Desert Creole pidgin, to Engine Empire’s “two-bit half-breed” Jim who “sang in his dreams, so raw / he sucked us inside his fevered innards,”73 Hong teaches us that language can be the tool of the oppressed only if we grasp it, turn it, twist it, until it breaks. Only if we take it back and haul it out across the border, bastardize and bequeath it anew. We won’t imagine Hong’s an easy path to follow, or that we readers don’t risk it all when we accept her maps. Speculation, whose insistence on looking, chancing, and advancing is the work itself, imagines no promised land or safe returns, and Hong makes no promises she can’t keep. Still, there is hope in world building despite all odds, at the end of a boomtown so indistinguishable from its beginning, with the sirens wailing “these are odd times, Sister.”74
NOTES
1. Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (New York: Norton, 2007), 74.
2. Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire (New York: Norton, 2012), 89.
3. Ibid., 79.
4. Ibid., 61.
5. John Keene, “Tonya Foster and John Keene,” Artists in Conversation, Bomb, Sept. 15, 2015. Available online at bombmagazine.org.
6. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 145.
7. See Joyelle McSweeney, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
8. Cathy Park Hong, Translating Mo’um (New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2002), 72.
9. Ibid., 53.
10. Ibid., 35.
11. Ibid., 42.
12. Ibid., 64.
13. Ibid., 65.
14. I borrow this figure from Frantz Fanon and discuss her in greater detail later.
15. Alison Kinney, “Hostages,” Project As[I]Am, November 21, 2105. Available online at project-as-i-am.com.
16. Of the pidgin in Dance Dance Revolution, Hong has said, “But spoken, English is a busy traffic of dialects, accents, and slang words going in and out of fashion. Slang is especially fascinating. I love outdated slang dictionaries—these words are artifacts that tell you the mindset and squeamish taboos of a certain milieu during a certain time period. I wanted the English in the book to be a hyperbole of that everyday dynamism of spoken English.” See “An Interview with Poet Cathy Park Hong,” interview by Joshua Kryah, Poets & Writers, July 11, 2007, available online at www.pw.org.
17. Hong, Translating Mo’um, 23.
18. Ibid., 35.
19. Ibid., 41.
20. John Yau, “At Play in the Fields of Language: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong,” Hyperallergic, December 2, 2012. Available online at hyperallergic.com.
21. Kristeva, Black Sun, 27–28.
22. In the notes to Translating Mo’um, we learn that “[t]he standard Romanized spelling of Mo’um is Mom” (74).
23. Here I rely largely on Kristeva’s notions, but also on Cixous, Wittig, and Irigaray.
24. Hong, Translating Mo’um, 33.
25. “Engine Empire by Elsbeth Pancrazi,” Artists in Conversation, Bomb, May 9, 2012. Available online at bombmagazine.org.
26. Hong, Translating Mo’um, 23.
27. Kryah, “An Interview with Poet Cathy Park Hong.”
28. Hong, Translating Mo’um, 17.
29. We might also note that although the GIs are marble-mouthed mangling the Korean language, they do so with bravado and a wink-wink-nudge proprietary prowess that is their gendered, global, and often racial privilege.
30. Kryah, “An Interview with Poet Cathy Park Hong.”
31. Personal communication.
32. Hong says, “I don’t think a project-oriented book is all that different from a collection of discreet verse. We always have a project in mind—sometimes it’s more consciously labeled, whereas for others it’s more subconscious. You could interpret Dickinson’s poems as a collection of one project.” See Kryah, “An Interview with Poet Cathy Park Hong.”
33. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 164.
34. See “Karaoke Lounge,” 35–36.
35. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 27.
36. Dance Dance Revolution, back cover blurbs.
37. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1993 [orig. ed. 1978]), 7.
38. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 19.
39. Kristeva, Black Sun, 59.
40. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 25.
41. Kryah, “An Interview with Poet Cathy Park Hong.”
42. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 72.
43. “Engine Empire by Elsbeth Pancrazi.”
44. We see this experimentation with varying success in the apocryphal tales of Berryman calling up Ralph Ellison in the wee hours to practice his blackface Mr. Bones. We see it in Plath boldly choosing baby talk when adult discourse fails her and in hitching that sacred figure of holocaust survivor to her ghastly striptease. We see it also as balm and flourish when Gwendolyn Brooks shifts from high modern eloquence to Southside slang worthy first of the Chicago street, second of the canon.
45. Cathy Park Hong, “Canon-Formation,” Boston Review, December 6, 2012. Available online at www.bostonreview.net.
46. In a no-shame shout-out to other late Generation X gals, I quote Ani DiFranco: “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” “My IQ,” Puddle Dive (Righteous Babe Records: 1993).
47. Cathy Park Hong, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not KG” (my redaction), New Republic, October 1, 2015. Available online at new republic.com.
48. Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner. Available online at www.lanaturnerjournal.com.
49. Ibid., n.p.
50. Fred Moten, “On MP” (my erasure), Entropy, December 28, 2015. Available online at entropymag.org.
51. Yau, “At Play in the Fields of Language.”
52. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 25.
53. Ibid., 58.
54. Ibid., 33. It is notable that “flower-arrang[ing]” is a skill most likely possessed by a geisha, courtesan, concubine, high-paid escort, or wife from the ruling class.
55. Ibid., 35.
56. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151.
57. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 119.
58. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 154.
59. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 26.
60. Ibid., 94.
61. “Engine Empire by Elsbeth Pancrazi.”
62. In a longer essay, I might consider Hong’s relationship to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notions of third-space and nepantla.
63. Hong, Engine Empire, 19.
64. Ibid., 20.
65. Ibid., 50.
66. Ibid., 81.
67. Hong told me that she read Invisible Cities as she wrote Engine Empire.
68. Hong, Engine Empire, 25, 71.
69. Ibid., 74.
70. “Virginia Konchan with Cathy Wagner,” The Conversant. Available online at theconversant.org.
71. Hong, Engine Empire, 43.
72. Kristeva, Black Sun, 97.
73. Hong, Engine Empire, 21, 35.
74. Ibid., 60.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Cathy Park Hong
BOOKS
Translating Mo’um. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2002.
Dance Dance Revolution. New York: Norton, 2007.
Engine Empire. New York: Norton, 2012.
Originally appeared in Poetry (March 2015), also available online at the Poetry Foundation
CHRISTINE HUME
POEMS
FROM Musca
Domestica
A Million Futures of Late
There’ll be no town-going today;
I’ll be wind-rattled and listen
to the window’s answering racket.
I’ll watch flies manifest from glass
rub the runt and ruthlessness off.
I’ll have my lapses into slapsticks
of accent and stutter, girl and mother.
Today, flies will spin a crown of woozy cartoon stars for me.
I’ll roll my eyes back thinking;
I’ll be the picture of flightiness today.
Assumptions will spill from my ears—
a brain storming out in furious herds;
all summer my brain will be a pasture
of tall, hissing grass, sibilance intent on rising to character air.
Fly forgeries of z wallpaper in my room: chainsaws, prop planes, wind forcing itself through. It’s a fact that the skull makes room for the brain by talking; the brain shakes from a curse in the cranium as something dark crawls out of my mouth. The radio is pouring weather I must knit into a shawl. Evenings require a shawl and the wrong love, the wrong noise of one’s wrong thinking. Flies come to the brain every last inkling into swarm, into arias of amnesia and treble thoughts. No one can shoot something that small.
I’ll just shoot off today; I will
blurt out argot in the rawest haze.
I’ll be snoring at the kitchen table
while the radio slips into passing traffic.
I will be sworn by. I’ll be clairvoyant
by keeping half in the dark. I’ll know
apropos out-posts by staying home today;
by haunting my own enlarged attic
under worried clocks drum-humming
me down to make me one of their vernaculars—believe me,
black hole, you bright microscopia,
you know best how long I’ll stand
stitching up grass-stained synapses
in devotion to invisible demands, whatever the invisibles demand.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 27