Getting ready for Cathy Park Hong!!

Hey all! I am getting excited for meeting Cathy Park Hong this week and I am one of the people going to lunch with her so I wanted to get a little more familiar with her work. Theo had suggested ‘googling’ her, so I did and I found her blog. It’s pretty interesting to read and I found that it was a pretty good way to get an idea of what kind of person and poet she is. It also included a few links to some of her poetry, which were neat to look at. To be honest, I have not really loved Hong’s poetry that we have read in class. I liked “Oncology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins,” but I didn’t really feel much of a connection to the poem. I got a similar feeling from the excerpts we read from Dance Dance Revolution—the poems were certainly creative, but they were difficult to become really interested in and to establish a connection with. (And, judging from the review of the book by Jess Y., the rest of the poems in Dance Dance Revolution were also difficult to understand.)

However, after looking at Hong’s blog and checking out some of the links, I have found that not all of Hong’s poetry is quite so distant and difficult to connect with. I read her poem “Adventures in Shangdu” online and I liked it quite a bit more than her other poetry we have read. While the theme of the poem kind of reminded me of the poems in Dance Dance Revolution that we read, the format and language of the poem was quite different. It was in regular English, which made it much easier to understand. Also, Hong used imagery, detail and some humor, but her tone and unique poetic style was still very evident. The connection between this poem and those we have read is very clear. “Adventures in Shangdu” seemed to be short snapshots of Shangdu, creative descriptions and small anecdotes that were interesting and fun to read. (I especially liked “Of the World’s Largest Multilevel Parking Garage.”) There were a few poems that didn’t totally make sense to me, but overall, I liked them.

I would definitely recommend ‘googling’ Cathy Park Hong and checking out some of her other poetry (and her blog) before we meet her in class on Thursday. I hope everyone else is getting excited too!

See you all tomorrow!