Engine Empire
by Cathy Park Hong

Reviewed by Rebecca van Laer

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Published: October 29, 2013

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Cathy Park Hong is both one of the most overtly political and most linguistically inventive poets writing today. Her first two books – Translating Mo’Um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002), and Dance Dance Revolution (W.W. Norton & Company 2008), winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize – explore diaspora experiences; the first focuses on the experiences of Asian Americans, and the second is a Sci-Fi novel in verse in which the main characters are tourists and refugees in a resort town. Engine Empire, Hong’s third book, maintains this commitment to social commentary via its form: extended narrative and linguistic innovation.

The text unfolds in three parts, exploring, respectively, the American Gold Rush, a fictional boom in the city of Shangdu, and a future in which data saturates the air: “Ballad of Our Jim” contains narrative poems spoken from a communal “we” that observes Jim, the section's poet-figure; “Shangdu, Our Artful Boom Town” presents poems from various observers of that city's progress; and “The World Cloud,” narrated in an unfixed and floating lyric voice, unfolds in a future in which consciousness is now shared. Each of these sections focuses on sustained narratives that explore the fate of the individual’s voice (and thus the poet’s voice) in moments when humankind’s push into new frontiers (be they literal or technological) threatens to overwrite individual experience.

The first section, “Ballad of Our Jim,” tells the tale of a gang riding Westward in search of gold, and shows how the gang's relentless focus on wealth corrupts Jim, the young boy who is kidnapped into the gang (and who eventually becomes a ruthless killer). Although his voice is rarely represented within the ballads, usually voiced by the “we” representing the gang, he is consistently described as a singer or piper. Thus it is that Jim, the poet of the group, comes also to be the strongest agent of violence in the pursuit of riches. He always remains somewhat apart, however, resentful of his role and protective of his individual voice. This section of the book features the most formal experimentation — we might think of this section’s Abcedarian and its vowel ballads (ballads in which a specific vowel appears in every word of the poem) as, in a sense, voiced by Jim who is elsewhere silent; the restrictive forms of these poems, then, are figures for Jim's constrained existence. Ballad in I” reads:

Sing in this blinking twilight, in this mining district filling with wild Irish striking it rich, spinning

Christ, swigging spirits, rigging spits,

 

picking fights, swinging fists,

slitting switching skin in livid fits, crippling limbs, spitting kinnikinnick,

filling trim tins with hissing piss.

 

His mind’s still spiting, knifing with skill,

his victimizing intrinsic within his mind, grinding within his skin,

Jim sings: I’m tiring, I’m tiring.

 

His grim instinct wilting.

Dispiriting Jim, climbing hill’s hilt, drifting Jim, sighing in this lilting, sinking light. (36)

Here, the poem is structured through an artificial and original form of constraint; the repetition of “i” enables a vivid understanding of the “I” who is absent from “The Ballad of Jim.” The short “i” sounds in the first two stanza suggest the swift life Jim lives, while the second two, moving to a longer vowel sound, show Jim’s exhaustion over the course of his journey towards gold; he moves from singing to sighing. His thorough and unavoidable absorption into a group single-mindedly focused on the pursuit of wealth has gradually erased his ability to sing, and even to think, so that even when finally apart from the group he sinks and wilts.

The text’s middle section, “Shangdu, Our Artful Boom Town,” which takes place in a “contemporary” environment, most fully articulates the social and aesthetic conditions the book will explore; this section suggests that the book's exploration of fictitious worlds is meant not to describe empires but to imagine the ways in which they affect the possibility of and for poetry. The real Shangdu, or Xanadu, was the center of Kubla Khan’s empire and was visited by Marco Polo; the city’s tale inspired both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Hong comments overtly on the first text, addressing Coleridge in “A Little Tête-à-tête.” The speaker addresses Coleridge on a golf outing:

Dash off? Why must you dash off? To dash down what you just dreamed? But my friend, I’ve already dreamed up this Xanadu, a mere 40 miles from Shangdu, with the profits of my lint rollers and rolls of polysynthetic fur! Oh, I see: every second you stall until you write your opiate dream down, your Elysian visions will escape your grasp,

and your verse will finish leadenly.

 

[...]

...My girl lives in one of these houses, wishing to be a poet like you. Will you go and tutor her? I will pay you handsomely. I always tell her, you must practice everyday. She practices, everyday. (58)

Here, the speaker suggests that the type of composition Coleridge practiced—the production of imaginative images—is no longer necessary in a world where a golf course is as elaborate and surreal than anything that could be dreamed. In this situation, the poet ceases to be a visionary and instead becomes a worker, her work the description reality. (This is exactly what Kubla Khan demands of Marco Polo in Calvino’s text.) However, the book as a whole undermines this view of poetry at every turn. Hong’s poetry rarely indulges in physical description of the three worlds in Engine Empire. Hong takes the incomprehensibility of empire through description as a given, and instead explores the consciousnesses on which empires leave their imprints.

The final section of the text, “The World Cloud,” takes the idea of groupthink into the future and tries to imagine what poetry would be like in a world in which not only data, but also human consciousness, is adrift in what we today call ‘the cloud.’ In this future, human bodies are stagnant, but human minds can travel at will, even into other minds. “Engines Within the Throne” describes this situation, in which consciousness has become virtual:

but this smart snow erases

nothing, seeps everywhere,

the world is our display

 

and now every industry

has dumped whole cubicles, desktops, fax machines into developing

worlds where they stack

them as walls...(68)

In this section, the idea of a lyric speaker shifts and blurs as various voices from within the cloud speak partial sentences. The voices that we hear are from individuals living in first world nations, part of a new leisure class free from the need for cubicles or war barricades, with nothing to do but think and observe others’ thoughts. In this future, no one has memories — all memories have been “outsourced except the fuzzy/childhood bits...” (68). Individuals can think freely, and all of them perform a “benign surveillance” on each other. The homogeneity of this experience, while it might abolish injustice and the problems of corporeal being, begins to dissolves the very idea of the human:

I can burrow deep inside, find a cave

pool with rock-colored flounder, and find you, half-transparent with depression. (69)

Here, just as the flounder blend into the surface they swim above, the human becomes “half-transparent,” permeated as she is with the world cloud in which she lives. Although the poems in this section are full of fascinating metaphors for the future they describe, they express, above all, the hopelessness of living in what might seem to be a utopia.

Engine Empire then, imagines various settings in which human beings are not quite individuals, but instead engines driving the motion of progress, or of empire. The sections imagine ways in which the individual may cope with her setting: one may abstain from speech altogether (Jim), try to describe and comprehend the bizarre world one lives in (Coleridge), or accept the life available in the empire one lives in (the world cloud). The text as a whole, though, does more than the voices in any of these sections: it explores the social and technological conditions of possibility that constrain speech (and poetry), and also make it necessary. The last poem of the book, “Fable of the Last Untouched Town,” concludes,

The snow glowed bluely in my little hovel. My little lamp.

Then one night I don't know why I swallowed it.

 

And this is what I saw.

(93)

This final poem reveals Engine Empire's structure to be circular, and suggest that this poem’s speaker, “untouched” by technology, is the one who sees the technological progress that unfolds in the book’s three sections. But it is technology (the lamp), fully accepted and incorporated into the speaker’s perspective, that makes vision possible at all.

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