A Booming Outpost of Poetry: Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire

Caitlin Maling

Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire.
           W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. Hardcover, 96 pp, $24.95.


        Concerned with frontiers of economics, language, culture, and technology, Cathy Park Hong’s triptych Engine Empire opens upon a Wild West of the Civil War era where “ricket-limbed Southies / couldn’t let their grudges aside and mauled / each other to blood strops.” This is a Wild West as Tarantino might imagine it, thoroughly poly-vocal, hyper-real and Technicolor:

       Our Jim kills our first, a Miwok, who done tried to sneak
       off with our mules. For days, we drug his gutted body, tailed
       by a lariat of vultures peck him raw,
       a procession of wild, piss-eyed lobos.

       The scenes and themes are familiar but Hong takes them to poetic extremes, combining the colloquial “who done” and “we drug” with the heightened diction of “lariat” and the polyglot of “lobos” and “Miwok.” In employing these contrasting dictions she skillfully highlights the contradictions and absurdity inherent in the mythologization of nation making, as she writes in “Ballad of Grace”: “the mighty empire is a false pond / in this eternal light where night never descends” and “yet still, still the isolated men settle to dig / and dig, furrowing wilder / into the earth. / We see the empire rising.”
        The empire that rises in the second section of the triptych is Shangdu, a mirror of contemporary Shanghai. In this section we shift from the physical frontiers of the Wild West to the boundaries of culture in an age of globalization. In a series of prose poems, “Adventures in Shangdu,” Hong masterfully transfigures this cultural metamorphosis in the experiences of an unnamed occupant of the “Lucky Highrise 88” apartment complex; in “Of the Old Ukrainian Embassy” she writes: “Boom town is Shangdu’s brand name” and later, “twenty years ago, there was nothing but a gas station and a few scattered pig farms along the river.” Now travel guides:

      do not mention how Officials used to dump all the cripples from 
      the Capital into Shangdu. Now that Shangdu is booming, they have 
      rounded all the cripples and exiled them to a remote outpost up north. 
      That outpost is also beginning to boom.

     After being immersed in the self-consciously inventive use of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition in the prosody of “Ballad of our Jim,” to arrive in the realm of prose is unsettling. Attenuated by the previous precision of form, we feel as though we have been let adrift in the amorphous shifting space of Shangdu. Hong effectively makes the reader a participant in the experience of cultural dislocation; everything is destabilized, what was a pig farm is now a brand name, and somewhere nearby is the unknown but humorous threat of a booming outpost of cripples. 
      When we enter the final section of the collection, “The World Cloud,” we realize what has been at stake: Hong presents us with a version of the not-too-distant future; a future where empire building is complete, and culture, no longer shifting, is inseparable from technology and commodification in the form of ever-present “smart snow,” a manufactured particle that brings technological input directly into the body. In “Engines Within The Throne” the narrator says:

       now we have snow sensors,
            so you can go spelunking
       in anyone’s mind,
       let me borrow your child

       thoughts, it’s benign surveillance,
           I can burrow inside, find a cave
       pool with rock-coloured flounder,
       and find you, half-transparent
       with depression.

       Hong is wrestling with how the boundaries of self can exist in a world of constant connection and technological input. Mirroring this, the lyrical “I” speaker of many of these poems feels the most intimate with the reader, almost as if it’s the reader’s mind which is being burrowed into. Like the poem above, these pieces either float down the page like snow, or they rage in litanies directly addressing the reader, as in “A Visitation”:

      Outside your window, you see a flower you don’t recognize.
      The voice of Gregory Peck booms: Honey Suckle.
      You don’t know anything anymore.

      The speaker tries on these different modes of connecting with the reader, and to themselves, but is constantly over-taken by the input of the snow as in: “Go, go, I breathe the air / flossed with silence / moving me to melt / into any form what / choice when they / finish your thought.”
      Despite the focus on alienation and the concern Engine Empire shows for the processes of globalization and industrial imperialism, the skill of Hong’s work is that it highlights how art can interact with these concerns while still being joyful, for there is indeed a lyrical joy to her multiplicity of forms. The most striking of these forms come in “The Ballad of our Jim” section, when she presents a series of lipograms limited to the use of one vowel. These poems, instead of feeling restricted, speak to the capacity of poetic language to redefine itself and the world:
    
       Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
       Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
       and thwart Law’s brawn,
       slam Law a damn mass warpath. 

       In a recent talk hosted by the Poetry Society of America, Tony Hoagland identified that the future of poetry’s engagement with the politic would have to involve a poetry dealing with the forces of capitalism and globalization. He proceeded to state that such a poetry would require new ways of making poetry, new forms. In Cathy Park Hong’s triptych Engine Empire we see one emergence of such a poetry.