Section VIII: "Dakota" by Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries
The poem grasped my attention at the first sound of the drums and the Tarantinoesque countdown from ten that precedes the poem. Then, my attention piqued as the flashing word “Dakota”, which I read as the title, gives way to “FUCKING” in all caps, filling the screen. When other words replace FUCKING, it’s clear that Dakota is our main character, and the poem is on its way. While I love other poets and tradition literary works, I can’t say they capture the reader’s attention in quite the same way. For example, one of my favorite poems is Percey Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” in which Shelley’s words and rhythms brilliantly capture the cadence of the blowing wind. Dakota takes that style and throws in a shot of vodka and Redbull, adds sound, and forces the reader to read and hear the poem in a much more specific way, creating an even more intense and controlled experience for the reader.
As the poem continues, the reader’s loss of control becomes more poignant as the words flash by more and more rapidly, making it difficult to even keep up. This produced, in me, a sense of disorientation. This disorientation became especially meaningful as it became more obvious that the poem deals with a group of American Indian youth, out for a crazy night. The youth bicker and insult each other, jokingly, while waxing philosophical about life and its meaning or meaninglessness. The loss of control in my viewing experience created a sort of similar emotion the youth must be feeling in the poem. As the poem continues, the youth presumably are listening to music as they drink and fight. The speaker, if you can call it that, bounces back and forth between discussing the music they’re listening to, describing the evening’s events, and making metacommentary on other works of literature, all via words flashing by at various speeds atop a raucous drumline which eventually is joined by calls and “whoopin’ and hollerin’”. The juxtaposition of words, music, pop stars, and outside texts with the chaos of the text in Dakota gives the viewer much more to think about than is physically and mentally possible, as they try to keep up with the flashing words on the screen.
After watching/reading Dakota over and over, I feel that I understand the poem as little as I did the first time watching it, even though I also get a better sense of what it may be about. The more I think I understand what is happening, the more I realize I don’t understand. The sense of no control stands in stark contrast to interactive poetry since the viewer only presses play. This lack of control adds significantly to the meaning and power of the text in a way that traditionally printed or static words could not likely achieve. This style of poetry makes me think of Hayle’s notions of deep and hyper attention, though in an interesting way because the disjointed and disruptive pace and style of the poem makes viewing difficult while also adding to the meaning of the poem, which, I think, is a brilliant way to leverage the constraints of electronic poetry
