Ballad in A is a lipogram. Now, a lipogram is a type of poem in which you restrict the use of certain letters. For example, for Ballad in A, Cathy Park Hong only allows herself to use one vowel, and that vowel is 'A'. But Doug! [SOUND] What about 'I"ll'? Fine. One time, she uses the letter 'I'. One other vowel. But you get the idea. Now what does that do? Well, for us, it gives us this collision of sounds, that a, a, a, and sometimes the hard A of ei. It also makes it so that if I were to highlight this poem, I would basically just make this gigantic mess of pink highlighter. So what I want you to do, is I want you to pay attention to those terms that we talked about at the beginning of the module. Perfect rhyme [SOUND], slant rhyme [SOUND], and especially, assonance [SOUND], that repetitious vowel sound. I want you to keep those things in mind and reread this poem aloud to yourself. I'll wait. You're back, excellent. All right, so let's talk a little bit about this poem. The scene in this poem is a pretty archetypal scene. If you've ever watched a Western, you've seen this whole thing happen. Some guy runs in from out of town, starts some junk, runs out, insults the sheriff or marshal, goes out, the marshal has to set things back to right, they have a gun fight and it ends. Now, usually of course, the good guy wins. But in Cathy Park Hong's poem, both of them end up dead. One of the things that all of this repetition of the 'a' sound provides for us, is on the one level, it gives us the opportunity to tell a relatively straightforward story. But, because of the constraints of the lipogram, it creates a much richer sonic experience than perhaps we'd had if we just told it using any vowel sounds we'd like. Further, because of the forced decisions that Hong has to make to meet the requirements of her lipogram, she creates a scene that is sometimes, I would say, a bit surreal or maybe even cartoony, which gives the story a whole different kind of tension. All that comes from the sound that populates her word choices. So for example, you might not think that the meanest thing a person could call another person is 'crawdad', but suddenly we have that playful sound. One of the things that Hong likes is to find terms that are a little bit more archaic or surprising to fill her poems and give them these different textures. Now, if we look at the poem, we have this whole idea of "Kansan's cantata rang at that ramada ranch." Now, you hear that rhyme? Cantata and ramada. That goes to the ranch. And 'Mañana', another rhyme in there, that "Kansan snarls I'll have an armada,". You hear that run of rhymes? Cantata, ramada, manana, armada. Hong has bars, yo. Straight bars. Anyway, when we're looking at that, think about the idea of the difference between "I'm going to have me a posse", which is what you might usually hear in a Western, to the "armada", which is a huge fleet of ships. I mean, imagine the level of guns that our Kansan is saying he's going to bring to this marshal. Another thing that we have is, as we move down in the poem, we have, "Marshall's a marksman, maps Kansan's track", and so he's tracking the Kansan. And then one of the funnier images for me, but also one of the few that seems like you would actually inherit it in this language, in Western, is the gnawing of the fatback, right?. So even here we have different textures of the letter 'a'. Different sounds, gnaw, a, a, against the fat, a, a, back. So even when one is using just one vowel, think of the range of sounds, the subtle shifts that will charge these moments of difference from the hard rhyming and the repetition, the assonance, into moments that are more subtle, slight changes in the sound. It's really dazzling what Hong is doing with this poem.