![]() Reading and rereading a single poem illuminates other virtues: Hong’s ear for patterning, her daring stunts within formidable constraints, her alchemy with familiar genres. Read Hong’s books cover to cover, and you’ll discover not only inimitable speakers but also their many-peopled environments, their routines and still-evolving languages, their self-serving histories and world-changing technologies. In an interview published alongside “Ballad in A,” Hong, who was born to Korean parents and raised in Los Angeles, describes her reinvention of the Western as equally political and personal, as both “building a myth out of a myth” of American exceptionalism and reconstructing a home that feels lost: “this is my way of finding it again.” For her next two sections, Hong travels through time and space to “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!,” a Kafka-esque town in today’s industrializing China, and “The World Cloud,” a sci-fi existence verging on the post-human, where computing accumulates in a chilly material called “smart snow.” Since her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution (2007), which concocts a near-future creole, Hong’s books have been celebrated for their world building, an imaginative feat found less often in poetry collections than in novels, multi-season TV shows, and roomy video-game universes. That first section, “Ballad of Our Jim,” offers a pastiche of the classic American myth, the Western frontier: Hong follows protagonist Our Jim-half-Comanche and half-white, “a two-bit half-breed” to the band of brothers who adopt him-into the busting boomtowns of a multiethnic, loosely regulated California. (With exceptions: did you spot them?) First appearing in the April 2010 issue of Poetry magazine, “ Ballad in A” became a show-stopping set piece in the first section of Hong’s Engine Empire (2012), a triptych of speculative worlds surveying empire’s machinations in a mythologized past, a contentious present, and an unsettling future. Let’s hope that the contemporary American poet Cathy Park Hong kept her computer intact and spill-free when she wrote “Ballad in A,” her slapstick, seditious tribute to cowboy ballads and Wild West rumbles, which miraculously compacts a Western saga into 20 lines, written with no vowel other than a. With a lexicon so severely limited, could you type something that passes for a letter? A blog post? A passive-aggressive tweet? An entire poem? Yes to Atlanta, baklava, Chaka Khan no to enormous swaths of the English language and its workhorse words- I and you, yes and no, English and language. You spill something especially sugary or goopy all over your computer and a few keys gunk up now, improbably enough, the only vowel you can type is A. More Jane Doe The Ballad of Jane Doe - Emily Rohm & Ride the Cyclone World Premiere Cast Recording Ensemble.Ĥ04.Here’s a situation that’s hypothetical for some yet all too familiar for the clumsier among us. *wait for it* | cc: a melody floats through the air, when silence falls, does no one care? | cc: another sad, forgotten tune, another song that no one knows. How did you discover #ridethecyclone #newmusical #theatrekid #janedoe □ □ □". TikTok video from Theatrely "Reply to theatre magic! Here is the requested part 2 of “The Ballad of Jane Doe” from the musical RIDE THE CYCLONE! Wish we could go back and see more from the production-in this clip Jane Doe is played by Ashlyn Maddox. How did you discover #ridethecyclone #newmusical #theatrekid #janedoe □ □ □ģ3K Likes, 271 Comments. Reply to theatre magic! Here is the requested part 2 of “The Ballad of Jane Doe” from the musical RIDE THE CYCLONE! Wish we could go back and see more from the production-in this clip Jane Doe is played by Ashlyn Maddox.
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