The indefatigable Oulipian Georges Perec (1936–1982) authored an entirely e-free novel, La disparition (1969, translated into English under the title A Void). For these and other formal hijinks, for constraints so whimsically arbitrary that (depending on your point of view) they are exhilarating or excruciating to pull off, thank the mid-century French collective known as Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “Workshop of Potential Literature”). ![]() Hong’s especially straitjacketed form, which excludes all vowels but one, is called a univocalic (from the Latin for one-voweled). This ballad is also a lipogram, a text that forbids one or several letters of the alphabet. “Ballad in A” names one genre in its title: the ballad, a narrative song generally rendered in quatrains (which Hong retains), with even meter and regular end rhyme (which Hong drops). 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. Here’s a situation that’s hypothetical for some yet all too familiar for the clumsier among us.
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