Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong

As she writes in a 2014 essay, 'The encounter with poetry needs to change constantly via the internet, via activism and performance, so that poetry can continue to be a site of agitation, where the audience is not a receptacle of conditioned responses but is unsettled and provoked into participatory response.' 4 Such constant change is at once an activist demand with political significance, as well as an open invitation for the participatory imagination.

Hong's work as a poet is thus deeply immersed in questions of method-attending not only to how poetry looks, sounds, and creates meanings, but also to how encounters with poetry are themselves necessarily sites of experimentation and challenge.

How many ways can we change this encounter?' 3 'What are ways in which the poetic praxis can be a ritual for social experimentation? The poem as a public encounter is entrenched in habit. Her writing, editing, and performances across media seek to open up the 'interactive possibilities' of poetry for the sake of providing 'alternative ways of living within the existing real,' as she puts it. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.Cathy park hong is a poet dedicated to expanding and experimenting with the capacities of a living art. (May)Ĭopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Hong's earlier treatment of Korean-American themes in Translating Mo'um attracted some attention, but nothing could have predicted this admittedly flawed but highly original work: hard to excerpt, hard at times to decode, it's even harder to forget. The Historian's own reflective autobiography, presented in a terse, melodic prose, brings in other examples of global horrors (Sierra Leonean amputees) as it mirrors a reader's own unease. 'Ceded from Koryo, 'ceded from/ Merikka.' The 'Dance Dance Revolution' the Guide has seen-described, vaguely, late (perhaps too late) in the book, and named for, but supposedly unrelated to, the popular video game-thus becomes 'Kwangju Replayed,' another failed attempt to destroy an undemocratic capitalist system. The Guide's speeches-all in verse-turn repeatedly to her own life story, detailed in a superbly invented dialect, based on English but incorporating Spanish and Jamaican patois: 'I'mma double migrant,' the Guide says. The Guide has survived the historical Kwangju uprising, a 1980 massacre of students and other prodemocracy protesters by the American-backed South Korean dictatorship. This deeply political Barnard Women Poets Prize–winning second book is part poetic sequence, part science fiction: in a future city called the Desert-a Vegas-like manmade tourist trap-a character called the Guide shows another, the Historian, the sights.

Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong