““I SEE A WORD like a Russian nesting doll. How can I strip it to what its imagined core would be?” asks Hannah Sanghee Park in an interview with Jessica Laser. Her Walt Whitman Award–winning poetry collection, The Same-Different, searches relentlessly for the “core” of its own language.”
“She treats language as a semantic force field that shapes and fragments her speakers’ self-expression.”
“Park’s signature move could be described as imaginary etymology. She mines words for visual or auditory illusions of semantic depth. Her successive lines follow from each other based on such sensory contiguities, and are tied together by them.”
“Park’s successive words unravel, accordion-like, into lines with the integrity of fully formed objects.”
““Bang” highlights the random ties between words and their referents. Yet it also ironically indulges in a more naive, hopeful fantasy that there is something organic and meaningful about such auditory connections — that the word “river” somehow prefigures the “rift” its speaker tries to make sense of, and contains its infinite time frame.”
“The poem takes its force both from this imagined series of connections, and from their obvious, vulnerable unsustainability.”
“This lyric strategy has its precursors in modernism. It makes one think of Heidegger’s philosophical philologies, or of the Russian Futurists’ zaum (trans-sense) poems, or of the famous “place-names” section of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.”
“Like Proust’s place-names, Park’s expanding lines are dreams of getting somewhere — and rhetorical performances of getting somewhere — even as they stop short of accomplishing mental travel.”