Sakura of DOOM

My foray into the world of poetry continues, this one prompted by Asia Pacific Arts' Best of 2007: Wordsmiths.

Dance Dance Revolution has nothing to do with the video game; instead, it's set in the not-too-distant future, in a place only called the Desert. The Desert is hotels and glamour and rich tourists in the center, and poverty everywhere else; the introduction compares it to Dubai or Las Vegas, though probably more apocalyptic. We're introduced to the Historian, who has come to interview the Guide, a Korean expat survivor of the Kwangju Massacre turned tour guide.

The Historian introduces the volume by saying that the Guide, like many others in the Desert, speaks Desert creole, a mix of hundreds of languages. The poems in the books are a mix of actual Desert creole and a mix of English clarifications that the Historian has provided/inserted; any ellipses are when he didn't clearly record what the Guide was saying.

This was a very difficult book for me to get through; the Desert creole meant having to sound out everything in my head as I read it. I did like the conceit of the book, and there are bits of prose taken from the Historian's memoir (largely set during his childhood in Sierra Leone). And some passages I took to very much, particularly the one below. But overall, I suspect this would reward a rereading or three on my part, only I don't quite have the mental energy to do so.

( The Lineage of Yes-Men )

This piece is a pretty good example of the Guide's voice, though this piece and others on Korea have more Korean than the rest of the book. From what I recall, much of the language doesn't play with Asian languages (the APA article says it's largely English, Spanish and Jamaican), which I sorely missed, particularly considering that the Guide is Korean. I'm sure adding in Asian languages would make the poems even more difficult to read for the average English-speaking reader, but still.

This will be an interesting book to revisit some day when I can concentrate more.

Sitting in the internet lounge thing of a Honda dealership, in which my poor car is being maintenanced. I have hit 6000 miles. In three more months, I will have lived in CA for a year.

A year -- it hardly feels so long!

I've been reading everyone's replies to the food post with great interest, and now I want to dig up some sort of cultural history of food. Better yet, since the boy is going to dinner with some business school friend, I am going to see if I can bully them into eating Afghan or something Middle Eastern, because reading everyone's comments is making me very hungry!

Aliera's Chinese poetry post has led me to find Chinese Poems, which is a cool and nifty site because it has simplified and traditional characters, along with pinyin, along with a word by word transliteration and a final translation. My Chinese is horrible, but the poems just sound wrong in English -- the rhythm and the rhyme is missing, and for Tang poetry in particular, which is rather sonnet-like in terms of strictness, it's very disconcerting to hear it in free form verse!

In general I've never been that big of a fan of poetry, with the exception of ee cummings and sonnets. And Yeats. And maybe TS Eliot if I read enough. Oh dear. I take that back. Anyhow, I adore Chinese poetry, even back in the bad old days of Chinese class and being laughed at for horrible pronunciation. First, poetry is a lot easier to memorize than Confucian analects or various classical essays. And we memorized so much stuff -- I had to memorize even more because my Chinese was so bad I couldn't think of definitions to phrases on my own. So I memorized the phrases and the definitions word for word. For one class back in eighth grade (seventh grade level Chinese), we memorized the entirety of Bai Juyi's Pi Pa Xing (maybe three pages, front and back?). I still remember the first four lines, and a scattered couplet or two in the middle.

( Cut for much blathering on Chinese poetry )

This blathering has been brought to you by Honda, who is still working on my car...