Cathy Park Hong

Posted in Past Guests

Cathy Park Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by W.W. Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, was published in Spring 2012 by W.W. Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is an Associate Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is regular faculty at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Notorious

After Paul Chan


Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum?
You in heaven, na, be happy.
You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink
snuggly over your Bluto belly,
& this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji.
Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns,
you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die,
now faput. Dead. Why so chee?

Ayaya, you in heaven for white people.
Wrong ear-sucking heaven.
Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit,
you smell wet dog?
Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble:
“No Hennessy just seltzer, please,”
before they sing your hits a capella.

Shataa, Baagad Bullya,
very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi.
Silly as a cricket in pubes.

Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar.
A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun
and swatting away chweetie pie cupids,
looms Fatmouth God,
frowning like rotten turbot.

But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens,
so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky
melts to Op Art swirls
of Cherry Coke red, burning upup

white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt
& black cell phone towers.
This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh
& video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis.
But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis?
Where is 2Packi?

–
From Poetry (March 2015)

Links

• “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith.” New Republic. 1 October 2015.
• Cathy Park Hong on ‘Engine Empire,’” Interview with Robyn Creswell. The Paris Review. 23 August 2011.
• “At Play in The Fields of Language: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong (Part One)” by John Yau. Hyperallergic. 1 December 2010.

Media

Seminar with Montana Ray | October 6,2015

Reading with Montana Ray | October 6, 2015