In Retrospect: An Interview with Garrett Hongo, Author of Ocean of Clouds
Welcome to “In Retrospect,” our interview series which asks renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From their early writing to their most recent collection, we’re looking to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped their body of work. In this interview, a poet whose work we deeply admire for it’s music and it’s connection to the natural world, Garrett Hongo, takes us behind the scenes of his life in writing.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Garrett Hongo: I remember writing the poem “Issei: First-Generation Japanese American” (collected in Yellow Light, my first book) in my dormitory tower room my junior year in college. It was late at night after studying, then practicing writing ideograms for my Japanese language lessons. I’d write column after column of kanji—sun, moon, sky, field, river, mountain. And also some syllabary—the phonetic symbols in Japanese. To loosen my hand and relax, I was sipping a cup of cheap wine. Eventually, an image formed in my mind of Kubota, my maternal grandfather, reading a book in Japanese and cupping his hands over a single ideogram. It was a memory from childhood, something deeply embedded in subconsciousness, but, when apprehended, had a spell to it, a calling, coming from depth. I started writing lines for what became the poem. And it came to me in the cadence I’d formed scripting ideograms and syllabary in Japanese, the cadence of a hand moving down a page forming a column of characters, if you will. There was a music to it that I heard in my head, the rhythm of strokes from a pen that could have once been a brush across paper. It was profound and an experience unlike any I’d had before. That night, I ran across the hall and showed it to my best friend, who also wanted to be a poet. He said, “This is the best poem you’ve ever written,” and I knew it was true. I’d fumbled out other things—imitations of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, mostly, and other stray attempts—but nothing of emotion, of that spell I felt, that legacy of feeling passed along to me by my grandfather. “Issei” set the tone for all of my work to come.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection of poetry spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
GH: See above?
FP: What lessons did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you applied to the process of creating your second collection?
GH: I think it taught me two things, almost contradictory: One, when you get “hot,” write a lot and every day to explore the feeling, the cadences, the imaginative world you’ve struck in your mind. Mine it. Deepen it, groove it. I was on fire for a period during the first year of my MFA program at UC Irvine when a voice and a style just came to me all of a sudden—that “chune” in the mind that Yeats describes as the precursor to any poem—and, week after week, I composed poems about my family in Los Angeles after we’d first moved from Hawaiʻi, then after weʻd moved to Gardena, a suburb mainly settled by Japanese Americans at that time. Iʻd struck an ethos of sorts, got hold of a way to talk about the lives lived by Japanese Americans through intimate accounts of my family and neighborhoods. Two, it also taught me that a book “accrues” and that you canʻt rush it. Poems come when they come and you just have to be patient enough to wait for them to. Although Iʻd written sections of my first book in a white heat as Iʻd just described, there were fallow periods of silence between them, sometimes months long. And I had to learn that waiting was part of the practice as well, that you couldnʻt always live “in the fire,” as it were. The silent gaps in productivity are perhaps as necessary as any writing, I think, as this is when you’re refilling the cisterns, both resting and reviving the imagination, working out aesthetic and ethical issues that can’t as easily be solved by approaches you’ve practiced in the past. The silences may just be prefaces and prolegomena to a new breadth of understanding. I’ve pretty much followed this alternating silence and singing cycle for all my books.
FP: Tell us about your latest published collection of poetry. Could you briefly map out its evolution from a starting point to the final draft?
GH:
Ocean of Clouds, a full-length collection, just came out in June. I got copies when I was in France last month and it came out looking even more beautiful than I expected. It was a rush receiving it and opening the package while on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean in exactly the place where I wrote the closing sequence of the book.
There were many starting points as I wrote fitfully for a couple of years before really getting a sense I was writing a book. The first poems that came were from memories of how I started out wanting to write poems as a kind of apprentice to my great teachers—poets like Bert Meyers, a wondrously fine imagist and defender of immigrants and the poor, and Robert Hayden, a great poet—one of tenderness and African American history and the most gentlemanly individual I’ve ever met. Then I consciously began writing to themes of whatʻs called “intersectionality” these days, but, to me, it all was about speaking from my Japanese American background and addressing my African American inspirations, teachers, and classmates in high school. I wrote about dancing to the Temps and the Tops, going to a jazz club to hear Sonny Stitt, about how the movement for desegregation and civl rights inspired me, Sam Cookeʻs song “A Change Is Going to Come,” Jesse Jacksonʻs Rainbow Coalition and his run for the presidency, and early teachers of mine like Quincy Troupe, Stanley Crouch, and Robert Hayden.
This got me thinking about the creeping nativism and authoritarianism in our society, the MAGA movement and its attempt to suppress our multicultural identities, so I wrote pointedly about Japanese American history—the evacuation and internment during WW II, the arrest and imprisonment of my maternal grandfather subsequent to the attack on Pearl Harbor, our early history as plantation laborers in Hawai’i—and the awakened culture of integration we had started to enjoy and flourish within these past seventy-five years, composing an extended ode to a Fourth of July fireworks show in Laguna Beach where throngs of Americans of varied ethnicities and national origins came together in celebration.
Alongside these, I wrote poems of travel with my daughter from her childhood through her teenage years. We went together to Hawaiʻi, Florence and Venice and Greve in Italy, to Japan and Prague, and I had so much joy introducing her to the wider world that I myself felt introduced and given permission to revel in new cultural and geographic experiences, too. The book, therefore, started gathering its momentum toward celebration and joy, toward my own late life acceptance of quieter glories and the consolation of poetry.
I was rediscovering more meditative, reflective, and quietistic impulses of mine after that, reconnecting with themes of retreat and Eremeticism and recalling my studies in Buddhist philosophy. I wrote numerous contemplative poems set in Cassis on the shore of the Mediterranean in the South of France. Yet, while set over that seascape, in that landscape, I kept recalling my childhood in Hawaiʻi also on the seashore, and made connections back-and-forth between them, not so much in material likeness but in a likeness of ease, of pleasurable contemplation as though the earth, sea, and sky were the palpable sponsors of a glorious peace of mind.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
GH:Itʻs funny, but I seem to anticipate this question in my answer to the last one! To be clear, I think I’ve constantly espoused poetic meditation and reflection as central—“emotion recollected in tranquility,” as Wordsworth said. But beyond this, Iʻd say “legacy” is a theme—not only the inheritance of material things, wealth, or property, but the ache of hope and wishes for its fulfillment throughout the generations, especially that of the first generation of my family in Hawai’i—the immigrants who got a foothold for us here and suffered unfulfilled hopes that we’ve inherited if we live to honor them. For me, my greatest ambition has been to fulfill the karma of Kubota, my maternal grandfather, whose hope it was to establish a school in the cane fields for the children of Japanese American plantation workers. This was cut short by his imprisonment during World War II, his ambitions dashed. But heʻd told me his story most every night of my childhood since I turned twelve, enjoined me in a way to complete his task and create educational opportunity for others. He valued learning. He valued opportunity. He valued effortfulness. It is his unfulfilled karma that I have lived by as an educator.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
GH: When I was in France last month, a friend took me to the replica of the Paleolithic cave paintings near Pont-d’Arc in Ardèche. Somewhat like Lascaux, this Chauvet Cave (as it’s known) was once inhabited by Cro-Magnon people 36,000 years ago but only recently discovered by amateur explorers. On its walls were magnificent paintings and charcoal drawings of horses, reindeer, rhinoceroses, mammoths, leopards, bear, and lions. To protect it, the French government spent millions erecting a replica, complete with cave bear bones, stalagmites and stalactites, and of course the wondrous paintings. I was in rapture gazing at them. In awe not only for the sense of their being so ancient, but for the rhythm of the images as I drew my eyes across the cave walls, taking in their chiaroscuro, their mimesis of animal movements, their feeling of a music inherent in the flow of their images.
And I heard a “chune,” as Yeats once said about poetry. But it wasn’t the nascent instigation of a poem. It was a specific piece of music from the American jazz composer Charles Mingus. “Remember Rockefeller/Attica” from Changes One started playing in my mind—the harmonies of trombone, trumpet, and saxophones; the jump of his measures; the funk of bebop notes twirling in air. Bleau-ta-bleau-ta-wheee, ta-bleau-ta-wheee, dop. His thumb-thumping bassline all under it. Whood-whooda-whood, whap-whoooda-whood, whap-whood-dah-dop.
Mingus was the soundtrack I heard!
I’ve said too much already as I’ve not yet been able to capture the poem about all this. It’s still to come, I hope.
