{"id":19706,"date":"2011-08-23T08:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=19706"},"modified":"2011-08-23T10:51:15","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T14:51:15","slug":"cathy-park-hong-on-engine-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/23\/cathy-park-hong-on-engine-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Cathy Park Hong on ‘Engine Empire’"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The summer issue<\/a> of <\/em>The Paris Review includes a series of poems by Cathy Park Hong. Hong has published two books of poetry, <\/em>Translating Mo\u2019um<\/a> (2002) <\/em>and Dance Dance Revolution<\/a> (2007). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

The poems published in this issue come from a longer work, entitled \u201cFort Ballads.\u201d How does it fit into your forthcoming book, Engine Empire<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cFort Ballads\u201d is part of the first section in Engine Empire<\/em>. The poems in the collection range from a trilogy, ranging from Western ballads to love poems set in present-day industrial China to poems set in a virtual future. \u201cFort Ballads\u201d follows a band of\u00a0outlaw fortune-seekers who travel to a California boomtown during\u00a0the 1800s.\u00a0The boomtown isn\u2019t real; it\u2019s full of strange, violent, sometimes surreal happenings. It\u2019s my own way of mythologizing California, which is where I\u2019m from. The main character is \u201cOur Jim,\u201d who\u2019s half Comanche Indian. In creating him, I was thinking of the typical iconic Western guys, like Billy the Kid, but his story is also reminiscent of Huck Finn and maybe a little of Faulkner\u2019s Joe Christmas. He\u2019s an orphan, a cipher, a boy trapped between identities, both innocent and vengeful. But the section isn\u2019t all narrative\u2014there are sound poems in there as well, where I let myself wallow in kitschy Western vernacular.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Your West has the familiar accoutrements\u2014Winchesters, buffaloes, teetotalers, and Indians\u2014yet it is eerily unromantic. What\u2019s your reading of the myth of the frontier?<\/strong><\/p>\n

At first, I was nervous about exploring the Old West\u2014it seems like a territory written by and for men. When I told people I was writing Western poems, they were like, Why are you<\/em> interested? Why not? The Western has been done so many times that anyone can have a go at it. I think of Michael Ondaatje and his Collected Works of Billy the Kid<\/em>, or the poet Joyelle McSweeney, who made a brilliant mash-up of Hannah Weiner and Annie Oakley. I just saw a terrible Korean film adaptation of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly<\/em>, set in the desert of 1930s Mongolia. The Western is now a global fantasy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there\u2019s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier. In some ways, my book explores the myth of Manifest Destiny, in all its colonialist and capitalist implications. I start with the American Western, because the genre embodies the most familiar idea of the frontier, but I also explore the idea in the section set in China and in the last, futuristic section. Right now, we see China as this autocratic, neoliberal Frankenstein that\u2019s growing out of control. But are the Chinese so different from Americans back then? Or even us now? In certain ways, the Western ideals of the frontier, of escaping regulation, are still alive today, but now they are carried on in the life of corporations rather than individuals.<\/p>\n

The frontier is always the border of something, virgin territory where we can build new worlds, remake ourselves; always there\u2019s this obsession with remaking ourselves. So to dream of the frontier is also to desire immortality. But there is no such thing as new territory. There are always previous civilizations, societies, families, and cultures. So when we build new worlds, there will be violence.<\/p>\n

The violence in your poems doesn\u2019t seem to be cleansing, or redemptive, as it is in many myths.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh no, I\u2019m quite critical of that. I don\u2019t create redemption for my characters. The narrative of redemption is a false and lazy conceit in art. Redemption through the act of violence is avoiding culpability.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Your speaker uses a rather gorgeous colloquial, full of echoes and innovations. How did you arrive at it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was in Los Angeles one summer and watching a lot of Sergio Leone films, and then my poems began to have this bad accent. This is not unusual, since many of my poems have bad accents. Added to that, I read Zane Gray, Larry McMurtry, Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner\u2019s Light in August<\/em>. I had a couple of wonderful Old West dictionaries, and I also reread Osip Mandelstam\u2019s poetry over and over. He is the odd writer out of that m\u00e9lange I just mentioned, but there is a hauntedness to Mandelstam\u2019s imagery that I wanted to capture. And I read Harryette Mullen, because she has such great fun with idioms, and I wanted that spirit. The Western vernacular is full of absurd puns, alliterations, scat rhymes, and so much of it incorporates Spanish and Native American languages. I wrote a few lipogram and abecedarian poems to accentuate that liveliness. A phrase I particularly love is \u201csilk-popper,\u201d which means stagecoach driver, or \u201cbuck nun,\u201d which means bachelor. Of course, I\u2019m not claiming any kind of authenticity. I was led more by my ear than anything else.<\/p>\n

You seem to enjoy the clash of incommensurables\u2014kitschy vernaculars and high lyricism, awkwardness and eloquence, or, in your first book, English and Korean. <\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

I grew up speaking two languages, both of them mangled, so I am quite at home mashing disparate languages, idioms, and vernaculars together. This is probably most evident in my second book, Dance Dance Revolution<\/em>, where I tried to invent a Creole. Engine Empire <\/em>is more disciplined, in that I tried to keep it to one colloquial per section. I love finding the most awkward or unpoetic forms of expression and turning them into high lyricism. I\u2019m a magpie for weird words. It\u2019s a good way to help \u201cenlarge the English stock,\u201d as Hopkins once said.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The poems are made up of quatrains and couplets, and also stand-alone lines. None are orthodox sonnets, but they all seem to be close or distant cousins. How did you think about form while writing these poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s so interesting, because I wasn\u2019t consciously thinking of the sonnet. But I was writing sonnets for other parts of the book and teaching them, so I must have internalized the form. I knew I wanted to write ballads and I tried to keep to quatrains, but I kept breaking them up into couplets and single lines because narrative pacing became more important than having a regular number of lines per stanza. There were a few sections that were originally a page long in prose, and I ended up whittling them down, until I got the sonnetlike form you see now. It was important for me that the sections be both fragmented and episodic, and that the titles act as both an interruption and guide to the poems. I love this one poem by Anne Carson called \u201cLife of Towns,\u201d where the titles themselves work as poetic lines, which is what I hoped to achieve with \u201cFort Ballads.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poems have a terrific pace, cutting between the close-up and the long shot. Did you learn that from Leone?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a deliberate influence, but maybe it was subconscious. Seeing so many movies, maybe I just soaked in that cinematic rhythm. I joked about writing a Western movie after I wrote \u201cBallad of Our Jim,\u201d and I even pitched it to a filmmaker friend, but he wasn\u2019t having it. Oh well! I\u2019ll have to shelve it for the future.<\/p>\n

Purchase the summer issue<\/a> to read Cathy Park Hong\u2019s poems<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The summer issue of The Paris Review includes a series of poems by Cathy Park Hong. Hong has published two books of poetry, Translating Mo\u2019um (2002) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. The poems published in this issue come from a longer work, entitled \u201cFort Ballads.\u201d How does it fit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[3386,3401,3389,3378,3381,3377,775,1815,2555,3399,3373,3372,3392,3376,3390,3388,3396,3379,3380,3387,3398,1723,3402,3393,217,1766,3383,3395,165,3375,3397,3391,3400,3385,3384,3374,3382,3394],"class_list":["post-19706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-and-the-ugly","tag-anne-carson","tag-annie-oakley","tag-ballad","tag-billy-the-kid","tag-boomtown","tag-california","tag-china","tag-cormac-mccarthy","tag-creole","tag-dance-dance-revolution","tag-engine-empire","tag-faulkner","tag-fort-ballads","tag-frontier","tag-hannah-weiner","tag-harryette-mullen","tag-huck-finn","tag-joe-christmas","tag-joyelle-mcsweeney","tag-korean","tag-larry-mcmurtry","tag-life-of-towns","tag-light-in-august","tag-los-angeles","tag-mark-twain","tag-michael-ondaatje","tag-osip-mandelstam","tag-poetry","tag-sarah-lawrence-college","tag-scat","tag-sergio-leone","tag-sonnet","tag-the-bad","tag-the-good","tag-translating-moum","tag-western","tag-zane-gray"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCathy Park Hong on 'Engine Empire' by Robyn Creswell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 23, 2011 \u2013 The summer issue of The Paris Review includes a series of poems by Cathy Park Hong. 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