Brian Brodeur | April 2022

Brian Brodeur

With the 2012 release of Engine Empire, Cathy Park Hong has added her voice to the chorus of literary balladeers, revitalizing this tradition by adapting it to suit her own unique aims. Hong does not work within the normative formal strictures of the ballad stanza, opting instead for unrhymed strophic free verse that only approximates the form through the use of occasional quatrains. Though Engine Empire is a triptych that tests the myth of the “boomtown” during three separate time periods (Civil War–era California in section one, present-day China in section two, and the distant future of some unnamed land in section three), section one, a sequence of fractured pseudoballads entitled “Ballad of Our Jim,” is the most conspicuously narrative. More specifically, the linked, chronological, and plot-driven “Fort Ballads” and “Bowietown Ballads” recount the western migration of a fictitious team of ragged young men who dodge the Civil War in pursuit of the “precious ore” of abandoned mining towns.¹ These Western marauders exist on the fringes of 19th-century capitalism, pushing the limits of societal morality and human decency.

Through analysis of these two microsequences, I’ll demonstrate how Hong’s ballads update the ballad subgenre of narrative poetry in two ways: 1) by restoring the ballad to its “rude” and “uncultivated” origins,² and 2) by placing it within a new, postmodern, literary context of what might be described as the fractured outlaw ballad. Hong’s updating of the ballad allows her to slip between tradition and innovation, parody and sincerity, violence and beauty, as well as narrative and lyric. In so doing, she argues forcefully for the vitality of a poetic tradition many current practitioners and critics view as outmoded. More broadly, these poems point a path forward for experimental approaches to narrative poetry in the 21st century—making it new by recontextualizing the old. In order to argue this point, I’ll summarize certain relevant aspects of the ballad tradition, noting how Hong’s work operates both within and outside the literary ballad of the Romantic era and the older oral ballad.

 

Since the appearance in 1765 of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry—an influential three-volume anthology of traditional ballads and romances—the ballad began to shift from an oral to a literary tradition. The old ballad, a verse-narrative usually delivered by an impersonal third-person narrator through dialogue and action, was typically composed in rough iambic and anapestic quatrains, rhyming either abab or xaxa. Before Percy’s Reliques, these ballads had rarely been collected in print but were sung on the streets and in the countryside to musical accompaniment by and for an illiterate or semiliterate population. As a poetic subgenre, the ballad was dismissed as vulgar by polite society. Percy himself considered most examples to be “rude survivals of the past” and “of no intrinsic value,” and took it upon himself to doctor many of them to accommodate the stylistic tastes and conventions of the 18th century³

This attitude persisted among “cultivated readers” even after the ballad revival of the Romantic period, which culminated with such canonical examples as Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” poems too unified and subtle to ever be mistaken for transcriptions of older songs.⁴ Romantic, Victorian, and early-modern poets alike would routinely regularize the form in print so that it eventually became necessary to distinguish between two emergent types of ballad: “traditional” (oral) and “literary” (written). In Lyrical Ballads (1798), for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge famously reappropriated and hybridized the subgenre for their own use. By rejecting the narratives of violent and supernatural spectacle—qualities associated with the ballad throughout the 18th century—and by making meter and rhyme more intentional, these poets exalted the ballad to the level of lyric, arguing that their poetic “experiments,” as Wordsworth called these poems, could accurately reflect the feelings and experiences of everyday.⁵

Lyric poetry, in other words, is designed to be sung, to be expressed melodically, whereas dramatic poetry is designed to be spoken, to be communicated among performers within a dramatic context.

This literary exaltation of the popular genre continued throughout the 19th century when poets such as Rossetti, Meredith, and Swinburne incorporated elements of traditional German romances into their literary ballads.⁶ These were followed by many examples from Hardy, Houseman, and Yeats in the British Isles, as well as Longfellow, Poe, and Dickinson in the United States. What these American examples have in common is an appropriation of the ballad stanza, as Paul Fussell argues in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, in order to create “the illusion of primitive sincerity and openness”⁷ associated with traditional Scottish examples like “Barbara Allen” and “Sir John Graeme” and American adaptations like “Frankie and Johnny” and “Springfield Mountain.” This appropriated illusion of sincerity allowed poets to crank up the irony so essential to lyric-narratives like Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” (479) and Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales.”⁸

Hong’s ballads rely on this ironized illusion of sincerity, but fused with conventions associated with the American Western. In this respect, Hong finds a way of joining the ballad with the experimental traditions of postmodern American poetics by accentuating the ballad’s popular and often lurid beginnings. This kind of historical and cultural foregrounding brings a playful note to Hong’s ballads while simultaneously allowing her to, as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, “force” the ballad “back into [its] uncomfortable social contexts.”⁹

Section one of Engine Empire contains three types of ballads: 1) the grouped subsequences of “Fort Ballads” and “Bowietown Ballads,” which are narrative poems spoken by a collective first-person-plural “we” that serves as a kind of chorus singing the exploits and values of the tribe of “brothers” marauding across the Great Plains; 2) the hyper-assonant lyrics titled “Ballad in O,” “Ballad in A,” and “Ballad in I,” which, rather than rhyming abab, release their barrage of respective vowel sounds to cacophonous effect; and 3) the lyric-narratives of “Abecedarian Western,” “Man that Scat,” and “The Song of Katydids,” poems that share a locale, time period, tone, and style with the other two types but little else. Though these eight poems constitute the entirety of the “Ballad of Our Jim” section, “Fort Ballads” and “Bowietown Ballads” are the only subset to explicitly feature the titular character.

As we discover in the second poem within “Fort Ballads,” Jim is a “boy” in “rags and twine suspenders” who the brothers “pluck [. . .] from the litter” of children they find orphaned at Fort Mann in Ford County, Kansas, initiating him into their gang because one of their own has been “axed in the head by a rancid trapper.”¹⁰ Gradually, Jim becomes the group’s mascot and balladeer, surviving all but two members who eventually conspire to shoot Jim for an unspecified reward, killing one of the only surviving brothers in the process and leaving the last brother to recount the tale.¹¹

From the beginning of their association with Jim, the brothers recognize his mental instability, observing that his “head done turned,” one symptom of which is Jim’s compulsive singing, the medium of communication he seems to practice most:

All he does is sing, his throat a tender lode of tern flutes
Disturbing our herd, singing of malaria,
His murderous, lime-corroded Ma.¹²

“Tender” and “tern” bespeak the foreignness of Jim’s character in this rough, western landscape, especially among the animalistic “herd” of self-seekers who have “adapted” rather than adopted Jim.¹³

The harshness of Jim’s song seems to surprise the brothers who, unlike Jim, are relative newcomers to this untamed land. Like Wordsworth, Jim sings in an idiomatic language actually used by men (or boys, in this case). Once Jim escapes the traumas of his early life—exemplified above by his witnessing of the malarial death and burial of his “lime-corroded Ma”—into the relative “tranquility” of his company of brothers, those traumas compel him to sing. Through these songs, he transforms those past excitements into poetry. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Jim, who we can assume is either illiterate or semiliterate, favors the spectacular subjects of murder and malaria to the “ordinary things” that we find in Lyrical Ballads “presented to the mind in an usual way.”¹⁴

As Nick Groom observes in The Making of Percy’s Reliques, the traditional ballad was “typified by perpetually recycled patterns of bloody or salacious plots, treacly sentimental trash, and popular songs stolen from parks, gardens, and playhouses.”¹⁵ Groom could just as well be classifying the American Western. Throughout both “Fort Ballads” and “Bowietown Ballads,” Hong manages to return the outlaw ballad to its metrically rough and thematically vulgar origins, but only allows herself to do so through a combination of the untutored personae of Jim and the first-person-plural narrator of these songs; these poems are, after all, the ballad of our Jim. Significantly, we only experience Jim’s songs secondhand—as received, interpreted, and summarized through the collective consciousness of the “we” narrator, a voice that begins its own bloody and salacious plot by recounting Jim’s own. The same sort of culturally representative first-person narrator can be found in traditional outlaw songs such as “Jesse James” and “Sam Bass,” though this character is more typically an “I” rather than a “we.”

This act of recycling narratives, of course, is older than Homer and provides yet another connection between Hong’s postmodern literary ballads and the traditional examples represented in anthologies…

In Hong’s “Ballad of Infanticide,” as the brothers devour salt pork they’ve stolen from “a fort of teetotalers / who begrudg[ed them… ] succor,” we discover even more about Jim’s depraved origins. Jim sings his Hellenistic tale about “an Injun killing ranger” who beds “his Comanche guide,” has two sons with her, and subsequently leaves her for “a fair-haired sheriff’s daughter.” But, as Jim laments in his “devil song,” the jilted Comanche lover

[…] won’t go quietly:
she poisons his new wife with a malarial dress,
and that ain’t the worst of her sins, that tar-eyed witch
strangles her own newborn,
and the other son flees—¹⁶

With the exception of the escape of the “other son,” Jim’s song shamelessly recycles the plot of Euripides’s Medea, in which the titular character, a mere barbarian married to the Greek hero Jason, murders their two sons when Jason leaves her for the princess Glauce, whom she also murders with a poisoned dress. It soon becomes apparent to the “we” that the “other son” is actually Jim, “a two-bit half-breed” who, by association with Medea’s doomed sons, seems to have only temporarily cheated his own bloody fate.

Through conflation of these two narratives, Hong not only links the mythic violence of ancient Greece with that of the American West, but the tragic action of Greek drama with the salaciousness of the ballad tradition in English, bringing to Jim’s story a claim of cultural verity it might not otherwise possess. (Another episode of “Fort Ballads” features a Homeric parallel between Jim’s murder of a Miwok mule-thief, whose “gutted body” he drags behind him for days until the thief’s sister begs for his remains “so she can morn him,” recalling the triumvirate of Achilles, Hector, and Priam we find in Books 22 and 24 of The Iliad.) In this way, the first-person-plural narrator of Hong’s poems enacts the entire history of oral poetry. By reciting or recounting the song of a new “half-breed” member of the tribe—a narrative that plagiarizes another culture’s mythos to explain Jim’s own beginnings—the “we” alters both narratives irrevocably, making these stories his own.

This act of recycling narratives, of course, is older than Homer and provides yet another connection between Hong’s postmodern literary ballads and the traditional examples represented in anthologies like Percy’s Reliques. But this recycling and conflation is also evident in the diction Hong employs throughout these songs, which can be divided into the following ten categories: historical (“Winchesters,” “Tombstone,” “Miwok”), period (“strops,” “beeves,” “harridan”), kitschy colloquial (“varmint,” “bug juice,” “tarnation”), antique colloquial (“Injun,” “Southies,” “queer”), scientific (“Cretaceous,” “alkali,” “ursine”), compound (“tarrope,” “deadmouthed,” “Goddamnfilthy”), dialectical (“They done lampblacked their faces,” “what we cain’t find,” “Chinaman knifed fer being what he is”), Biblical (“pent,” “avarice,” “punition,”), Spanglish (“loco mobs,” “starved lobos,” “hatajo of mules,”), neologistic (“scullground,” “gropping,” “yamp”), and metaphorical (“their faces seared by blast winds,” “shoots him to a batter / of brain and dust”). Rather than merely imbuing the monologues of the “we” with historical authenticity, this encyclopedic mishmash of poetic registers brings to these ballads a parodic quality; by aping these disparate, sometimes contradictory verbal textures, Hong essentially mashes them together into a single voice, exploding them within the confines of the same expansive narrative, creating out of the old something strikingly new.

But Hong’s motivation is not to establish a credible human voice spoken within a dramatic context. It is not, in other words, to create the illusion of dramatic monologue in order to dupe the reader into thinking that these texts are transcriptions of speech between a narrator and a silent auditor, as Browning does in “My Last Duchess” or “Andrea del Sarto.” Though these ballads are ostensibly spoken by a narrator who is not the poet herself, Hong’s poems never venture beyond a lyric context. As the Princeton Enyclopedia reminds us, lyric—which originates from the Greek lyra, a musical instrument—was originally meant to be sung, chanted, or recited to musical accompaniment.¹⁷ In lyric, as opposed to narrative (or epic) and dramatic poetry, “the musical element is intrinsic to the work intellectually as well as aesthetically: it becomes the focal point for the poet’s perceptions as they are given a verbalized form to convey emotional and rational values.”¹⁸ Lyric poetry, in other words, is designed to be sung, to be expressed melodically, whereas dramatic poetry is designed to be spoken, to be communicated among performers within a dramatic context. Though written in personae, Hong’s pseudoballads are lyric rather than dramatic in that they must be either read silently or aloud (i.e., “sung”) in order to achieve their full realization as works of art.

An amalgamation of the “brothers” of this tribe—the collective lyric “we” of the narrator—only becomes an individual “I” in the final poem of “Bowietown Ballads” when all but one of the brothers—and Jim himself—has died. After the initial flood of outsiders, of “cowpokes and canvas-wagoned / Easterners,”¹⁹ into the fictitious mining town of the poem’s title, the upstart “Law” places “a mighty / bounty” on Jim’s head for the murder of several prospectors whom Jim has killed in order to eliminate the competition.²⁰ As stated above, the reward proves too tempting for the two remaining brothers who sneak into Jim’s bedchamber with pistols one night. Hearing the assassins cock their weapons, Jim wakes and wrestles one of the guns away, firing. This gunshot represents the moment in which the surviving brother achieves selfhood:

It was my brother Campbell who fell to his knees
and blubbered: Why Jim we adopted—
Jim shot him so hard that bullet ripped through
his head and skimmed my jaw.
Then I shut my eyes real tight.
Don’t know how long I waited before I reckoned,
he was gone.²¹

Signified by a single em dash, the gunshot interrupts Campbell’s final words, a failed appeal for pity. Campbell, the only other brother besides Jim whose name is ever mentioned, gains individuality only at the moment of his death. Significantly, the bullet—the implement ultimately responsible for that death and the creation of two individual characters unique from the collective “we”—skims the “jaw” of the final brother. Rather than stopping his speech, this wound ironically enables him to sing with his own individual voice. But all that this last brother is able to sing about is the death of Jim, the original balladeer of the outlaws, a position this “I” accepts by default when Jim dies. In this respect, the surviving brother achieves individual selfhood free from the “herd”²² only by claiming the collective experiences of the tribe as his own, a point Hong emphasizes by titling the subsequent poem in the sequence “Ballad in I.”

More fascinating, however, than the details of the double murder is the way the two assassins become “sucked […] inside” the ballad Jim sings in his sleep before he wakes to the cocking of pistols. Like Jim’s other ballads, we only receive this last one secondhand, and it proves to be as strange as any of John Berryman’s own dream songs. “But,” the collective “we” observes, “[Jim] sang in his dreams,” summarizing the dream in their own words as

a cloudburst of a horse rising to a stolen remuda
as if all of Mexico was raided: stallions, peg ponies, hogbacks—
Git out he cried yet we were boiled
inside him where
we saw a cross-dressing squaw in chaps,
charging that mutant, mural herd through Bowietown
[…]—Git out.²³

The repeated imperative “Git out” serves four functions: 1) to wrangle the stallions, peg ponies, and hogbacks from their pens or from Mexico into the United States or from Bowietown into the surrounding wilderness; 2) to warn the two intruders to leave his bedchamber, though Jim, still asleep, is not yet consciously aware of their presence; 3) to implore the two intruders and, by extension, the entire tribe of brothers to “get out” of his head, i.e., to stop listening to his songs, which he sings without intention or agency; and 4) to beseech the songs themselves to escape from his lips into the outside world, like a pregnant woman laboring to deliver a child. As intimated above, Jim is only freed from his burden of song through death, which seems to come finally as a kind of fulfillment and release, the realization of his violent destiny.

These persona poems yoke the dramatic, lyric, and narrative modes, mismatching contrasting poetic registers in order to create a sound we have never heard before in American poetry—or one we have heard before only in dreams.

In a 2007 interview for Poets and Writers, Hong has this to say about the Virgil-like tour guide she creates in Dance Dance Revolution (2007), the book Hong published before Engine Empire: “Unlike fiction, there’s more of an obligation for grave truth-telling in poetry. The voice assumes a truthful virtue even when the poem purports to not have a voice. I wanted to escape from that and create a character.”²⁴ The most striking character Hong creates in Engine Empire is “our Jim,” an untutored balladeer possessed by the songs he makes (or that make themselves) out of his own experience. The tribe of outlaw “brothers” adopts these songs as part of their own mythos, chronicling their fortune-seeking exploits across the Great Plains in the voice of a collective “we” that divides into separate selves only when the band of “brothers” disperses or dies off. In these violent accounts, Hong restores the ballad genre to its rough and salacious origins by parodying the conventions of oral poetry as well as those of the Old West (with a nod to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). These persona poems yoke the dramatic, lyric, and narrative modes, mismatching contrasting poetic registers in order to create a sound we have never heard before in American poetry—or one we have heard before only in dreams.

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Brian Brodeur is the author of five poetry collections, including Every Hour Is Late and the chapbook Local Fauna. Founder and coordinator of the digital interview archive How a Poem Happens, as well as the Veterans Writing Workshop of Richmond, Indiana, Brian teaches at Indiana University East.

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