~SUSANNA CHILDRESS~
FOUR
REVIEWS: JERICHO BROWN, STEPHANIE
BROWN, WILLIAM GREENWAY,
AND CATHY PARK HONG
Hit it!—The
Love Song of Jericho Brown’s Please
Voice and voicelessness is the book’s
phenomenal
extended metaphor . . .
Too many times in the past few years I
have finished a recently published volume of poetry and put it back on
the bookshelf thinking, “Okay, okay, I get it: not only have you
suffered but you’re really
clever.” Jericho Brown’s Please
not only
led me away from this begrudging confession but allowed me while
reading to become far more aware of the poems than of the poetry. That
is, the book seems less a grand endeavor that orchestrates to bring
attention to itself as such than a collected set of deliberate, sharply
crafted pieces which reflect an unpretentious yet demanding batch of
sensibilities — each poem is both gift and plea. Maybe I should put it
this way: Brown’s debut volume avoids the self-conciliatory,
self-congratulatory tone he might well have taken on, and that’s not
because there’s nothing here to mourn or be proud of. The poems are
smart and raw, but readers will recognize this as distinct from clever
or pitiable, in part because the writer does not ask his readers to
recognize them as such. Any insight, any complexity here is the result
of intricate tonal and metaphorical maneuvering, crafting, nuance:
questioning and requiring all at once, the way the word please is both
a desire and a demand.
What makes avoiding self-conciliation and
self-congratulation more of a feat is that, among poems that clearly
employ personae and others that do so more opaquely, all are to varying
degrees and by various means self-referential, and with lesser
frequency but equal intensity, reader-referential. Brown opens the book
with “Track 1: Lush Life,” a familiar scenario in what might be a jazz
club but with such an unfamiliar and pointed analogy as to be
applicable to the reader in both an eerie and endearing way:
The woman with the microphone
sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The
mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to
the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice.
You can’t tell
The difference between a leather
belt and a lover’s
Tongue…. She does not mean to
entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to
me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing
the whole night long.
Besides the layered tensions of intimacy and
violence (readers may gloss over the lover’s tongue as leather belt,
and vice-versa, as proverbial jest, but just when we’ve forgotten the
literal possibility of such an intersection, it appears, and
numerously, in later sections of the volume even while images of unjust
beatings — often with belts — show up throughout), we also find the
layers
of reverence and intimacy as well as the paradox of request and demand
as a unified gesture. Additionally, the line, “She does not mean to
entertain / You, and neither do I,” does two things: readers are
introduced to the speaker within or beyond the second-person
point-of-view, which then allows us to recognize the perspective
heretofore not as a “Gotcha!” but the complication of both holistic
invitation and experiential impossibility, something of a “You think,
reader, you can inhabit my world, and though you won’t, fully, ever,
let’s go after it anyway — why not?” We understand, too, that this is
not
a door opened for our use of the poet, a way to be entertained, as
Brown puts it. He will not be clever for us, to amuse or to dismay.
Instead, the summons is more dangerous: the poet will sing, but readers
best prepare themselves for harm, perhaps pleasurable in its torment,
but injurious nonetheless.
For an example of metaphorical nuance (and it’s
everywhere, but this particular instance happens early on and therefore
readies us for later occurrences), take the multi-sectioned
“Scarecrow.” The poem begins, as one might anticipate, with an address
to Dorothy and seems conciliatory or at least sympathetic to being on a
journey with a line like this one: “Everyone needs something to hang
onto. / It helps us keep the crows away.” But then we move to a picnic
where the scarecrow invites the reader to imagine a body, “burning from
foot to breast,” hanging from the poplar at the edge of the field, and
the speaker admits, “I had a mind / to cry; I shut my marble eyes / Too
afraid to scare a bird.” What follows in the third, fourth, and fifth
sections is a meshing of the speaker as both scarecrow and human, a
tender but thorough taking on of the persona: from “Wants to Know,”
section III, “What does the crow love / Other than himself?”; from
section IV, titled “On Graduate School,” “I am here to learn: that
which fears me / Must be crow / In this hall of heavy doors / Where my
body is a blemish”; in section V, “In the Pulpit,” “I am a mouthless
man of straw” is repeated three times, along with the admission, “I’m
not dumb, but I wish I were. / A fool bothers the Father about a
brain.”
Such a complete collapse of poet and scarecrow is both pleasant and
harrowing, as is the complicated symbol of the crow; further, the two
references to longing after intellect demonstrate already its
maneuverings so that subtlety and paranomasia (a technique Brown
delightfully employs elsewhere but does not, thankfully, overuse) lead
us to serious contemplation of those out in the “field,” the
marginalized, the voiceless.
The emphasis on voice — on singing, the world of
music, is also one that Brown returns to time and again. One of the
first and most memorable is located in “Again,” where the speaker
begins with a confession of literary intrigue: “You are not as tired of
the poem / As I am of the memory.” The memory is a toothache that
returns, an ingrown hair which impulsively leads to a painful scratch.
But then readers are presented with the memory(ies) itself: the speaker
walking with his mother “Around the one-story neighborhood / That I
loved / Though nothing I’ve written tells you this” and the
recollection, in present tense, of his mother sleeping against his
father’s chest — “Give a man a minute. / She’s asleep and I’m typing it
/
All over again.” Brown repeats the phrase “Give a man a minute” another
time in the poem, preceded by “I know you / Don’t want to believe that
/
But…” and even at this (early) point in the volume, readers understand
the urgency — the potential voicelessness, misunderstanding,
meaninglessness — of the speaker’s reckoning with his parents and a
childhood that is like the repetition of too many others: “I’m so sick
of it— / Another awful father / Scarring this page too— / A bruising
scratch.” Minus typical self-pity, the self-awareness here allows
readers to see how worn thin the speaker is with the repetition in his
own life and others’; voicing this makes it palatable.
Voice and voicelessness is the book’s phenomenal
extended metaphor, and not one I am compelled to unpack here except to
mention two aspects. The first is that the desire to speak is not
commensurate with the ability of the throat and mouth to speak but,
most often, the situational power of having a voice by which speech —
or
otherwise meaningful acts of communication — is possible. Similar to
those fumbling characters in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, each
one so needy not for words themselves but a voice by which to offer
them and the substantial and individual ache underneath them, the
speakers in Brown’s Please
negotiate such a conundrum with music, and
even so, often find themselves with words but without voice, the wrong
kinds of voice, the wrong kinds of listener, the inadequacy of voice
without the corresponding soundtrack of compassion, complexity,
reception. In “Track 4: Reflections” Diana Ross bargains, “If the red
sun rising makes a sound, / Let my voice be that sound.” The speaker or
speakers in “Autobiography” beg(s), “Keep holding that last
note keep singing while / I get the splinter
out / Keep singing for Jesus baby and everything / Will be alright.” In
“Pause,” the speaker would like to ask those who believe humming is the
outward expression of happiness, “If they ever heard of slavery, / The
work song — the best music/ is made of subtraction, / The singer seeks
an
exit from the scarred body / And opens his mouth / Trying to get out” —
and
later admits, “If I had known the location of my own runaway / Breath,
I
too would have found a blues.” The speaker of “Turning 26” has “A
candle / Lodged at the portal of my throat.” And Janis Joplin in “Track
5: Summertime” offers the titular confession:
….They called me
Bitch,
but I never bit back. I
ain’t a dog.
Chainsaw, I say. My voice hacks
at you. I bet
I tear my throat. I try so hard
to sound jagged.
I get high and say one thing so
many times
Like Willie Baker who worked
across the street—
I saw some kids whip him with a
belt while he
Repeated Please….
God must love Willie Baker—all
that leather and still
A please that sounds like music.
See.
I wouldn’t know a sparrow from a
mockingbird.
The band plays. I just belt out, Please. This tune
Ain’t half the blues….
The second aspect to consider regarding use of voice
in this volume is the one that Brown (or the poems’ speaker) finds, the
music — often exploring the mournful wail of rhythm and blues — he and
his
lovers make while he alternately confronts his sexual identity and
revels in the often violent but always earnest sex act(s). In “Robert,”
the speaker admits, “I couldn’t place the joy / Turning a white boy /
Red” but nonetheless delights that “No one can hear a drum / Beat from
the belly of the whale.” The speaker offers retrospective understanding
in “Derrick Anything But” by admitting to singing in the church choir
to “keep everything awful / Out my mouth / If I held the high notes.”
After witnessing a gesture of affection between two men and an
onlooker’s scorn, the speaker in “Lunch” manages to “open my
appropriate mouth / To order.” The speaker finds his voice in “Burning
Bush,” but only when “entered”; in the very next poem, “I Have Just
Picked Up a Man,” however, the speaker recognizes that “if he is
afraid, he’ll talk. / Or if he is hungry, he’ll listen.” In “Rick,” the
speaker negotiates with his lover, “Say you’ll die / With me. Open your
mouth. Say / I knock on your door in the midst of a blizzard / …. Say
you
let me in. Say it / Like you mean it” so that say, like please, is both
speculation and command. And in the final poem, “Because My Name Is
Jericho,” the last lines read, “I am just as much a man / As Joshua.
I’ve got the silence to prove it.”
Throughout the volume, the intricate layers of
hands, mouths, and being or not being consumed (as food, as fire)
indicate both the complicated physical and psychological reality of the
love and the song in the poems of Jericho Brown. As well, in these
poems readers find what is smart but not belting itself out as clever,
what is full of the blues but not demanding its own dirge.
* * * * *
“With A Cold,
New Kind of Smile”: Stephanie Brown’s Wholesome Disdain
Brown intimately laments and rages against
both the
public
and private idiocy of lives
punctuated by the pursuit
of wealth
and entertainment and not interior consequence
towards either personal
or social equilibrium . . .
The first line of the first poem in
Stephanie Brown’s Domestic Interior —
“They were potato chip
eaters” — harkens Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Bean Eaters” but immediately
locates
us in a separate hemisphere of stasis and poverty, one readers soon
recognize as the withering, emotionally (perhaps morally) bankrupt and
privileged world of white suburbia. In “I Observe This Morphic Field,”
as with any well-placed opener, what we are offered prepares us for
that which follows, both tonal and situational — the speaker acts as
observer and conflicted interpreter, trying to make sense of the
reactions, or perspectives, or lives of those who, in this poem, watch
extraordinary amounts of television:
I mean they weren’t embarrassed
by all the hours.
I mean they thought back
nostalgically to cute TV-kid actors.
I mean they said, “awwwww,” when
recalling this kid.
I mean they sang along to the
theme song without ironic distance.
Given over to this trenchant, conversational tone,
the speaker embarks on a reverie that includes 1984, the couple’s
insipid animal hunger, and clean rivers — the last lines again echo a
well-known poem, this time William Stafford’s “Ask Me”: “What does the newsanchor say to
it? / What does the newsanchor
say to the river?” By
bookending with clear allusions to canonical poetry a poem about the
brain-numbing, spirit-stultifying effects of, among others things,
television, it seems certain Brown will accrue serious enthusiasts and
sympathizers right away — among them teachers, librarians, anti-TV
folk,
and more generally, cultural critics. As one might guess, Brown doesn’t
stop with TV. In “Domestic Interior,” a more helpful title in some ways
since such portrayal, after all, is more than observation, Brown paints
another scene, shines her light on another couple to reveal their
domestic abuse and name the petty survival of their front: “A loose
cannon always marries a wet blanket…. / Watch her: she will take on
nervous, aggressive mannerisms…. / Sulky dude, he sits there, slumped
posture / tree stump…. / And he softly fingered her black eye / When
she
cried it was wonderful / How close they felt….” The tragic elements in
this situation are mediated by what is so easily recognizable — the
coping mechanisms, the unattended root issues — as to be pathetic,
absurd, annoying. “Private School” follows suit in rakishly depicting
the ridiculous, snubbing antics of the elite:
The volunteer today
wears Hermès.
She crashed the truck in Santa Fe!
What a weekend getaway!!
Oh my God! Oh no! offer
her loyal foes…
She is married to Fame and
sometimes shows her belly button in too-tight clothes
Trophy for the famous prize—
Her husband, who never smiles,
never.
Throughout the volume, but especially in her first
section (titled
“Neighbors”), Brown intimately laments and rages against both the
public and private idiocy of lives punctuated by the pursuit of wealth
and entertainment and not interior consequence towards either personal
or social equilibrium; in later poems, like “Snobs,” “Marble Obelisk,”
“The Divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Moore,” and “Satanists Next Door,” there’s
still the feeling that, even if metaphorically, those around Brown
deserve the complex disdain of honoring all that might have been in
their lives and providing the scathing truth of all that is not.
So what readers may end up wondering, should their
sensitivities be placed anywhere near my own, is this: while it may
feel good to take literary aim at those who, certainly, will not be
reading the poems (getting to, finally, laugh in horror, not with them
but at them), and around or underneath whom most of us have suffered in
one way or another, it is possible that Brown carves out too much room
to feel smug about oneself, since the speaker seems almost entirely to
be pointing away from herself with that sharp finger of accusation —
what
might pass as a Plath-like, I’m-just-being-brutally-honest spotlight,
because Brown variously but inevitably flicks the switch and light
floods the dark corners of these situations, these “types,” like the
volunteering, rich Dads who are “thoughtful, kind, respectful, polite,
adorable, greedy, luxurious, glad-handing, varsity-level.” Readers will
see what there is to despise here. Readers will join Brown in despising
that which needs despising. The problem is that Brown does not give
readers much of a choice: at the end of “Private School,” when we learn
that the speaker has pulled her child — “And I had to hang my head in
shame / and walk the other way” — it not only comes as no surprise, but
seems intended in its rendering to request sympathy from readers. How
otherwise could readers respond to, “You gotta show your gottalottabux
and if you don’t have them you have to / Pretend.” Indeed, were it not
for other poems that make possible the culpability of the poems’
speaker in certain small ways, it would be easy for readers to assume
Brown’s scorn is largely judgmental and not in the least circumspect,
not moving towards genuine lament but its own bumptious
self-congratulation for escaping the noxious, vacuous, fraudulent,
unenlightened world of her neighbors.
Most of the poems in Domestic Interior are still
tinged, even if around the edges, with a pitiable sense of what the
speaker has to put up with — the hard-scrabble heritage of her Irish
immigrant grandfather, a mentally disturbed sister, rude patrons in the
library where she works, rampant classism, an alcoholic spouse and all
manner of marital strife — but a number of self-consciously,
deliberately
condescending poems are capable of unraveling the caustic string of
pearls Brown has tied around her neighbor-folk and the otherwise
impenetrable inhabitants of her world: “Invective” wins a white ribbon
for its crippling irony, making forlorn any attempt to get the last,
nastiest word in; “Pension, Venezia” a red ribbon for its self-imposing
narrator who attacks the big questions we must all, suburban and non,
ponder about marriage (echoing subtly the ways which Lowell and Sexton
and Levertov, among others, have); “Ten Years” and “Temper” share a
blue ribbon for asking readers to go back to those first poems and
envision the speaker as observing and interpreting herself:
He closes his eyes, and there he
goes, not believing in enthusiasm, or being talkative.
He knows it was all about fear,
nervousness, fear of nervousness, nervous feelings of fear.
His afraid-self married my false
self.
O the wedding: soup to nuts!
Yes, yes: Now what?
(from “Ten
Years”)
There is the husband, the wife,
and the temper.
There is the house, and the
driveway, and the cracked, declining cement, and the temper.
The front door, the glass bowl,
the temper.
A bill on the table. A key to
your heart.
Furry cheese and a spilled open
box of rice.
No tape—ennywhere in this entire
house—!
The doctor, the wife, the temper.
(from “The
Temper”)
Stylistically, Brown’s clausal line breaks and
occasional long lines give us a sense of statement, of assertive
observation and interpretation, as if spoken into a tape recorder
during some after-session diagnosis: these are the facts, these are my
ideas and opinions, this is my conclusion. But Brown
introduces intermittent use of rhyme; her language is mostly
plain-spoken and sometimes awkwardly descriptive, moving in and out of
poetic-diagnostic mode: “Her heart has run out of steam. / Her vitriol
has run out of scream. / Her engine has rusted and died on the tracks
like the strong nineteenth-century body that did manual labor” (from
“Prescription Pills”). It seems to be a way of
coping — to make a “lyric,” something sing-song or playful-sounding in
the midst of scorn, upheaval, heartbreak, despair. If it ends up
feeling a little claustrophobic, that’s because it is. The discomfort
here is palpable, and that is Brown’s skill, honed and hardened and
incandescent with ire.
* * * * *
Plight and
Play: William Greenway’s Journey to Amusement
Greenway doesn’t shy from the existential
questions here
of purpose and belonging,
human connection and the
tendency
toward and away from (the
possibility of) God . . .
William Greenway might be one of those
rare poets of
our day (or any, given how recently we’ve been provided with nonstop
jet service from one continent to another, hidden baggage fees
notwithstanding) who can as aptly plunk his readers down on the banks
of the Chattahoochee as the specter-laden cliffs of Iskeroon in Wales. Everywhere at Once
seems to particularly shuttle readers back and
forth, here and there, thither and yon. This ninth book of poetry draws
on some of Greenway’s familiar themes, figures, and modes — his
parents,
his religious upbringing, that impending bodily demise called aging,
his non-existent children, characters and lines from Shakespeare as
well as various canonical and cultural sources for the epigrams that
begin nearly every poem, and, not least, the reconfiguring of
clichés and further connotative, aural richness of language. In
this volume, however, we’re meant, if the title is any indication, to
be whisked about, unsettled and even disoriented. The effect is in many
ways pleasurable because it is not somatic — no jetlag while we bend
toward another time zone, or heartburn while we try out unfamiliar
food, or linguistic vertigo while getting a handle on dialects,
accents, and cultural nuance. All the same, we’re meant to feel the
visceral strain: in the titular poem, which happens to be the first in
the book and therefore a preface of sorts, Greenway asks, “Why does my
brain always suddenly / flash to the places I’ve been in France or
Italy, / and mostly Wales, when I’m only / boiling an egg or putting on
my shoes…?”
Landing in these different locales (often the same
places multiple times) does the psyche’s investigative work of
journeying, of seeking out place — or home, if such a link is not
implicit but possible — and Greenway doesn’t shy from the existential
questions here of purpose and belonging, human connection and the
tendency toward and away from (the possibility of) God. Consider this
excerpt from “The Place You Belong”:
All your life you try to get back
somewhere, maybe the place
your family went on vacations
where you always wanted
to live….
Maybe Jesus dreamed in his tomb
of Bethlehem, always thought
he might get back, maybe even
retire….
convert that little barn beneath
the date palms into something he
could
live in, the desert hills in the
distance
pink as his mother’s cheeks.
Here and in numerous other poems, the journey seems
to be Greenway’s frazzled, dismayed weaving toward (and away from and
against and buckling on the margins of) faith. He announces in several
places that he’s a preacher’s kid — a (southern) Southern Baptist’s
preacher’s kid — and wears this like an angry badge; what is
compassionate in some spots is wholly caustic in others. But it seems
his non-relationship to God is worth exploring, even if begrudgingly,
and in this Greenway departs slightly from previous volumes. In
“Smackdown,” for example, he begins with beleaguered candor, “Sometimes
I pray to God: okay, / if You want her that badly, take her, / end her
suffering, and mine too…. But then I think, no, by God, / I’ll wrestle
like Jacob for her….” The catalyst for any communication with God in
this volume has, in fact, everything to do with Greenway’s long-time
spouse whose frayed health is the subject of several poems, and over
and again it is she who is Greenway’s savior and not a deity, the real
miracle not Christ’s incarnation and resurrection but the near-literal
event of his beloved’s after a stroke and coma: “There are no atheists
/
in hospital waiting rooms, / only… hoping for the stone / rolled away,
and
her not ascending / like dew-steam into some high heaven, / but coming
back here, down into / the lowly embraceable body.”
With all that said, and perhaps despite it, William
Greenway seems bored. It is a troubled boredom, certainly, one that the
poet honors for its pervasiveness if not its complexity. Except for
travel, and even in travel we find a privileged sense of ennui (lovely,
to be sure, but traveling between Wales and Mississippi, the poems
insinuate, can get downright wearisome),
it is almost as though
Greenway wants to be filled with wonder, awe, reverence, but finds our
groping, earthy set of hopes and trials one protracted plane ride after
another — to be endured but not necessarily enjoyed — especially if it
is a
means to no known end. The veneer of the poems tempts readers to think
otherwise, that he’s enraptured with the careful, corroding beauty of
life’s “whirling compass, the bong / and ping of the psychic pinball /
of
karma,” and so, too, imply the blurbs on the back of the book, citing
how various the locations and situations of the poems, how lively a
companion this poet is on such a journey. What readers will find is
that for half the willful accounts of the strange, busted, unjust,
flailing, whirling, hapless, surprising, and gorgeous — that very human
experience is flattened and deflated by an announcement of the tedium
and lassitude, the repetition, hollow, and trifling: how convinced are
we to be about such things when, in “Portsmouth” he writes, “…I’d ask
why, but / we all hate rhetorical questions, // or at least we say we
do,
the way we think / we’re bored with our tedious life until it’s /
almost
lost and we long to pat it again like a dull // car ready for another
trip to work and back.” It is a statement, though for my buck it
needn’t be marquee’d quite so brightly for readers to see the sign(s).
The most interesting lament of being uninteresting shines with irony;
in “The Unusual Suspects,” he lampoons even this lamentation:
If only we’d had an indecent
upbringing,
not fallen in with bland
companions,
we, too, might have made nothing
of our lives, become most wanted,
armed
and dangerous, instead of
disarming,
smug, small-time, and still at
large.
Evident in this excerpt and throughout the volume,
Greenway seeks to amuse syntactically, aurally, and colloquially,
perhaps in response to this very monotony and longueur. As Greenway
writes in free verse and non-syllabics, one aspect of his poetry that
would otherwise be hard to reconcile is the periodic but random use of
rhyme. It’s true that form happens to be “hot” again, and delightfully
so, so it ought not surprise readers to pick up newer volumes of poetry
and find in their pages a villanelle or ghazal or sonnet now and again,
or a set/section of poems in form, or perhaps an entire book employing
form. What might perplex readers in Everywhere
at Once,
however, is not being
able to recognize either technically consistent use of rhyme (towards rhythm, which might
set itself up as a subtle gesture within or even
against a poem’s thematic meaning(s)) or an inconsistent enough use to
be itself a pattern or a thumbing-of-the-nose-at pattern, a move toward
more fragmented “order” such that it is lilting but self-consciously
not part of a rhyme scheme. What we find here, however, is more subtle
thematically but also more self-saluting, as though the poet happened
upon certain couplets or lyrics he found too clever to disregard and so
tossed them into the poem unchecked, like stones to ripple the water
(but not where we might’ve expected, say, in a poem titled “Long Love
Sonnet”). Where these moments of correspondent sounds could work as a
gentle rhythmic jolt or disruption, they instead feel morphic in tone,
too cunning to be coy: “ravens and gulls / hawk their hungers all day,
/
and gales shriek at night / like a cat fight” (the only end-rhyme in
the
entire poem).
More consistent is Greenway’s play with
language-as-sound: homonyms like Burghers/burgers and mourning/morning;
reiterations like ferries/ferry, hovercraft/hovers and corpse/corpus;
one-letter variations like skull/skill and stones/scones; full-bodied
alliteration like “whirl of the wheeling world,”
instructional/constructional, meditation/legislation, and, in a more
brutal example, “the tanker truck / backed up to the house and hosed /
its bourbon into the basement / …the castanets of cassettes / on the
porch
as the porn man made / his rounds.” The potential for aural gimmickry
is
high, especially in those spots where such techniques are overused, but
should one recognize this as insistence and not intensity, it’s
possible to perceive Greenway as genuinely trying to amuse himself —
and
his reader — to cling to the story’s sounds as a diversion since the
story (or reflection of/on experience) itself is, more likely than not,
not quite diversion enough.
* * * * *
An Enthusiastic
Non-Review of Cathy Park Hong’s Dance
Dance Revolution
Hong’s volume of
poetry leads us
into the potential of
plurilingualism with gusto . . .
After attending a recent lecture by Dr.
Suresh Canagarajah, a linguist
who teaches and conducts research at Pennsylvania State, I found myself
both more able to appreciate Cathy Park Hong’s 2008 volume of poetry, Dance Dance Revolution,
and further stymied by the scope of its experiment. The premise or
context of the book is its first experiment: an imagined near-future
world (2016) transformed by imagined events in the near-past (1988), so
that readers must first leap both time and reality to land in the space
the writer carves out, a city called The Desert where global cities are
represented by tourist resorts; on the outskirts of this planned city
is New Town, whose inhabitants are citizens of nowhere, the political
outcasts of the 1988 upheaval, and who make what they must economically
out of the cultural intersections in The Desert. Readers are introduced
to this landscape by two voices: the Historian and the Guide, whose
family history and whose personal history, respectively, are
intertwined
with the quashed Dance Dance Revolution of 1988, a bloody and silenced
affair not unlike Tienanmen Square.
The second experiment, in tandem with the first, is
the way these two voices tell their stories — fragmented by
associative,
nonlinear, and non-narrative leaps — and in particular what Adrienne
Rich
calls “Desert Creole,” the Guide’s language (Adrienne Rich offers a
preface for the book, which she selected for the 2006 Barnard Women
Poets Prize). Hong’s book has been dubbed “a polyglot explosion” by The
Believer, and after listening to Dr. Canagarajah, I’m as
inclined to
believe that what Hong undertakes in this volume is nothing less than
plurilingualism — waltzing in and out of 300 languages, according to
the
Historian — where no one language is privileged or highlighted, the
hybridizing of which a linguist like Canagarajah asserts is both
possible and already extant. To try and excerpt this meaningfully,
however, would demean the reader’s experience in encountering a truly
plurilingual text.
So it is that the tidy inappropriateness of
summarizing the book’s main gestures and analyzing its major themes
keeps me from trying to offer a traditional review. Instead, I pose a
challenge: it’s possible that readers will either be enthralled and
fascinated by the project of this volume, its set of experiments, or
entirely put off; instead, readers might take on one of two more
obliging stances — as a cursory reader or a more rigorous one. “Let it
pass,” as Canagarajah suggests, since a word or phrase not understood
in the first, second, or third encounter will be understood during the
fourth. Readers might also recognize that leading linguists see
homogeneity as the exception, not the norm, and that Hong’s volume of
poetry leads us into the potential of plurilingualism with gusto,
expanding and making possible a place where no common code is expected
and the process of language, rather than the product, allows the speech
act to be consensus-oriented rather than a target-language to be
“mastered.” This is the joy and challenge of both language (and
therefore communication) as metaphor in Hong’s volume and the
social-political stories of the particular individuals therein.
Please, Jericho
Brown. New Issues Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1930974791 $14.00
Domestic Interior,
Stephanie Brown. Pittsburgh University Press, 2008. ISBN:
978-0822959977 $14.00
Everywhere at Once,
William Greenway. University of Akron Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1931968560
$16.95
Dance Dance Revolution,
Cathy Park Hong. W.W. Norton, 2008. ISBN: 978-0393333114 $14.95
© by Susanna Childress
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