| Title | : | Dance Dance Revolution |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393064840 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393064841 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 128 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2007 |
Dance Dance Revolution Reviews
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From the aether, Berryman shakes his head in disbelief, wondering, “How’d she do that?”
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“In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca,” so scribbles the Historian of Cathy Park Hong’s second book of poems Dance Dance Revolution, an unusual journey into a post-apocalyptic landscape that grows more and more familiar with each visit to a different site.
To translate and facilitate the tour, the Historian enlists the help of a Guide, a speaker of this Desert Creole who proudly proclaims her authority as a navigator:
O tempora, o mores! I usta move
around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt…now
I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Koryo, ceded from
‘Merikka, ceded y ceded until now I seizem
dis sizable Mouthpiece role…now les’ drive to interior.
Virgil-like, the Guide spins her poetry and politics into revelations of global conflict, racial tensions, economic instabilities caused by terrorism, corruption and internal uprisings—devastations that resulted in a “dead scald world full o rust puddles, grim service men, / y ffyurious mekkinations.” And though a second world has been built to conceal the broken one, its attraction exists only at surface level. The damaged psyche seeps through very easily via the stories of the “guides who ache for their own/ guides / who mourn / who lead / men from human rinds of discontent.” Here, law is “the sin of choice.”
The Guide weaves the history of the troubled city with her own participation as a revolutionary (“to fightim me yesman lineage”), which compels the Historian to write down her own strained father-daughter relationship set in a more safeguarded, but no less alienating, childhood. She too must come to terms with superimposing truth over deception, reality over memory, and language over language.
By the conclusion of the tour, from the karaoke lounge of the St. Petersburg Hotel to the New Town detention center (a cursory glance “lest ye covet a forkin sinus punch on ye gob”) to the Grove of Proposals where one can toast “to bountiful gene pool, / to intramarry couple breedim beige population,” the Historian (like the reader) has become attuned to the din of Desert Creole and to the spin of “stingy” history. By then, the Historian’s personal connection to the Guide has been disclosed and indeed, the reader can identify with the irony and layered meanings in the Guide’s final statement: “If de world is our disco ball, might I have dim dance.”
As a vision of the present Babel channeled through a futuristic one, Hong succeeds with stunning inventiveness. Dance Dance Revolution is a forthright critique of U.S. meddling (and fumbling) in world affairs, and is unafraid to take a heavy step into the lightly tread arena of American political poetry. This cutting-edge book is a warning to the complacent populations, as well as a “guide” to survival in the apocalypse the world is experiencing at the moment:
You can be the best talker but no point if you can’t
speak the other man’s tongue. You can’t chisel, con, plead,
seduce, beg for your life, you can’t do anything, because you
know not their language. So learn them all.
REVIEW PUBLISHED IN lunapoetry.blogspot.com -
I put off reviewing this collection because I really, really want to say that I loved it. Unfortunately, this is a case in which the concept -- and even the execution -- is impressive as f*ck but just ... not fun to read. Hong's Guide (yes, in the spirit of Dante's Virgil) speaks in a language that mixes vocabulary and grammatical structures from a bunch of different languages, including Middle English, and yeah, it kind of reminded me of reading passages The Canterbury Tales in undergrad. You need to hear the verses aloud to understand them:
"Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere. / Become a Jees cucking stool fo means o survival / me lineage biggum on survival. / 'E tell me dis pep gem: / You can be the best talker but no point of you can't / speak the other man's tongue. You can't chisel, con, plead, / seduce, beg for your life, you can't do anything, because you / know not their language. So learn them all" (46).
And I know I just said these poems weren't fun to read, but I guess that's not 100% true. It IS fun, sometimes, when it all clicks and you feel super smart -- but it's fun in the way that a really complicated puzzle is fun. You feel accomplished. But no one would ever read this book on the beach with, like, a hazy IPA.
Basically, this shit is art ... but, like, art you need to read all the placards to *get.* -
An ambitious, fascinating collection, detailing a fictional account of a desert world in a language that is an amalgamation of 300 tongues. I think you'd have to be very creatively and intellectually brilliant to take on this kind of project, and Hong pulls it off so well.
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It pains me to give 2 stars to this collection of poems by Cathy Park Hong because I very much appreciated Minor Feelings. I feel like she was doing something profound here with the execution of these poems, but I just didn’t get it??
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The Desert of Dance Dance Revolution is a place seemingly only inhabited by exiles. People their struggle to hold onto their identity in a place whose population (and landscape?) are rapidly changing. Tourism is apparently its most profitable industry: not enough to keep everyone afloat, it nonetheless shapes the region, lending it the character of a facade without an interior.
We experience it from two removes: a tourist/historian comes to visit to clear up a part of her personal history, meeting a guide whose spiels and stories are recorded as poems. From beneath the indeterminate geography of the Desert, a traumatic personal (and political) history bubbles up.
The "Desert Creole" in which most of the poems are written is, on a scale of A Clockwork Orange to Finnegans Wake it's much closer to the orange. Grammatically it's very close to English, and borrows from several different dialects, with some vocabulary from various other languages and Latin phrases thrown in. As a simulation of a truly multilingual pidgin it's effective while still being fairly understandable—I know English pretty well, a bit of German, less Spanish, and nothing else, and didn't find it particularly rough going (though your mileage may vary).
The book manages some pretty cool effects but some aspects felt a bit incomplete or didn't totally work for me (the historian's memoir's especially). I have to say I would love an expanded version.
I recommend it in any case. [In the vicinity of Gladman's Ravicka.] -
Juan Felipe Herrera asked us to introduce a really exciting poet we were inspired by these days to our poetry workshop.
I chose Cathy Park Hong because of this book & here is what I wrote:
The poet who has completely altered my consciousness this year is Cathy Park Hong, whose Dance Dance Revolution won the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize chosen by Adrienne Rich. Hong creates her own dialect (a desert language compiled from an amalgamation of 300 tongues), landscape, geography, history -- a poetic sequence in a way that takes my breath away. I find her work exciting -- I think it breaks new ground & pushes aesthetically towards a border poetics that is political & engages what's going on in the world today, but not in a rhetorical way. Her work is challenging to the reader, but in a way I find transformative. She has DUENDE in buckets! -
This is a unique title in the canon of poetry reflecting the intensity of globalization. The book is mostly composed of poems written in a "desert creole," which is a collection of many languages and often reads like traditional creole language reads/sounds. Difficult to read, it does provide an extensive representation of the culture behind the language, including the lives lived within the pseudo-dystopia, ever-present desertification of the future-present. The book was hard to follow but I found the imagery of this desert landscape and the wilds within imaginative and captivating.
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So frickin brilliant, the rest of us can just go home now.
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not sure what to rate this, it's hard for me to decide but thjs was a really fun and interesting reading experience. i can't wait to talk abt this w my class next semester
// sealey challenge day 4 -
if you're gonna make a conlang then you should have fun with it, and i think this is a fun one. also there's a call to violently upend the existing social order which i liked also.
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I never leave reviews but I don't feel right about leaving a 2-star without an explanation for this one. This is one of the most technical books I have ever read and it feels strangely above my reading level in such a way that I had a hard time reading it and could not generally recommend it.
I don't feel smart enough for this book but I want to be. I might try the audiobook or revisiting it in the future. -
Hong's poetry tests the boundaries of English, of poetry itself when she plays with this pidgin English. In the tension between the Historian and the Guide she teases us, asking us to think critically about what is kept and what is left behind in history, the lives that are extinguished between history's paper-thin pages.
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This might be the most ambitious poem-project I've ever heard of and/or read, and it totally works. Also, I read this right around the first time I went to Vegas, so it all made perfect sense.
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Traditionally I’ve seen poetry as strictly collections of poems, but Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong weaves in and out of narrative and poems, all of it poetry. Using pidgin english accumulated from different cultures colliding in a land called “The Desert”, Hong tells two stories that meet at the end. The narrator “Historian” is narrated through a fact finding vacation by “The Guide”. At times entirely conversational story telling from the guide, the characters grow as the history of The Desert is revealed. Nothing is fully clear until the final pages when the connections teased out through the book are finally solidified. I generally liked this book, with my only problem being how inaccurate it felt for me to hear the words in my head. I think what would take this from a memorable book of story and poems to an unforgettable story is seeing it live. While I’d love to hear Cathy Park Hong read these poems and this book, I think it would come most alive as a one-person show. I can imagine seeing one actor play all the characters that come across the pages of this book, centering The Historian before The Guide takes over, morphing from the characters of her youth, into the modern-day citizens featured throughout The Desert. The more I think about it, the more I can imagine lights, sound, and a talented performer could bring this story to life the way it feels on the page.
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Park Hong's collection is innovative and interesting but challenging! She invents her own dialect for her characters that when you put the time in is rewarding and brilliant but I had a hard time putting the work in. I should have read this collection in the winter when throwing myself at a book of poetry would distract me from the gray malaise that hangs in the Minnesota sky but I didn't and felt that I didn't enjoy this collection as much as I could have. It is highly acclaimed and I understand why but I wish I had read it in a class or with a friend to better understand all the moving parts/been committed in spending serious time with the book. Cathy Park Hong is a brilliant author and her poetry always leaves me thinking and interrogating. However, I enjoyed Engine Empire more than this work. A+ title.
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Three stars just for the really cool concept and how innovative it with respect to linguistics, dialect, and culture. Also phenomenal world building and atmosphere with the dialect, sounds, and settings. But I can't say I found the story very compelling or moving, and I felt I wasn't as emotionally invested in the story or characters as I wanted to be. And I felt it should have been more powerful, given how interesting and ripe the plot exposition + story concept was.
Overall, I had a lot of fun, but I couldn't grasp much substance past the form, world, and sound. -
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to really read this book. About 85% of it is written in a fictional language described "an exuberantly expressive amalgam of new and extinct English dialects, Korean, Latin, Spanish, and other miscellaneous pidgins". This made it difficult to read each individual poem. I spent a lot longer on each page trying to sound out what was written, which took away any enjoyment I had and made it difficult to get a sense of rhythm or sound. I was disappointed in this formatting choice as the premise is very interesting - a historian interviewing an important revolutionary figure in a desert city. I also don't understand why the author chose to write in such an inaccessible way. It didn't feel like other poetry books, where authors bring in their native languages as either a love letter to these languages or as a way of adding a sense of place and heritage. I initially called this book pretentious, but I can admit that maybe it's just meant for a small, niche audience that doesn't include me.
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“...I’s unpeel mine insides fo one clean note
tru all de marshy crowd sounds, tru all de trademark
cowed libel, I’s unpeel mefelf lika pin-hole
neck sweater...”
Wonderfully strange and intensely imagined to a degree that rivals Plath’s Ariel. Hong tangles herself in all the dominant metaphors we use to describe immigration, foreignness, and travel, and occasionally gets stuck. A crucial read for any poet concerned with voice and, I’d argue, all American citizens. -
Read a lot of good recommendations about this, but I couldn't get into it. I know it's supposed to be part of its draw, but the language/dialect was really distracting for me. Wouldn't rule out giving it another chance down the road when I have less going on at the time, but I'll have to remember to give myself more time and space to digest it.
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man, cathy hong park is so much smarter than me.
i want to get my hands on an audio version of this book, every time i read a verse, i would think to myself, this practically begsss to be read aloud.
i finished this poetry collection with the distinct sense that i did not even understand a quarter of all the things cathy hong park was going for, but was an excellent read all the same -
I think I need to read this again, probably several times, to get the most out of it. I really appreciated what the author did here, but my brain was not quite ready to process all of the subtleties and connections. As a concept, this was a really cool experimental poetry collection / verse novel, though.
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Woah, expanded my conceptual boundaries of literature and language, sometimes I wish I had a guide to decode. As a Korean American I sopped up every last morsel of hangeul and pined for more. Very creative!
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Super inventive; incredibly playful with use of language. Should reread.
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Interesting concept; poor execution.
