Garrett Hongo: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Garrett Hongo

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Garrett Hongo

Three Poems

A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

The bent disc of a three-quarter’s moon

shines through a black wrap of clouds,

      silver-edged,

casting its pearly road over the sea,

and I gaze back seventeen years

under the long stream of stars from Cassis

to my daughter’s birth, fortune of my late life.

Each of her days, I have heard the bawl of sea-wind,

have recalled every hour we spent on every shore

since Kawela was her making—the drapery of ironwoods

and funiculars of coconut trees at the top of the beach.

I have imagined all curling waves to come,

all their dancing under a sponsoring sun.

Sea turtles in a brimming lagoon attended her there.

Mullets finned above striated sands on the bay’s bottom.

Egrets stalked the tideline and sharks in iridescent exile

Made lazy, looping patrols just outside the reef. 

In Venice, when she turned four, she asked to cross

the Bridge of Sighs so she could picture Casanova’s escape,

measure the dive to the murk in the canal below.

Her eyes gleamed, delight rising over the epicanthic drape. 

At San Zaccaria, under a light rain, she struck a kabuki pose,

one foot forward on the slick stones, her torso compact,

a souvenir umbrella on her shoulder, leaning back,

its muted colors a sepiaed bloom as it twirled. 

By thirteen, hands thrust through tadpoles in a pond

had faded in fascination, and Harajuku’s street of thrift-boutiques

was her new Mecca—a throng of teen fashionistas

shuffling counter-clockwise like Tik-Tok penitents,

while I swam, father without drip, against that stream,

exiting the déluge fantastique like a cormorant.

She marveled at cheap dresses, pink Afros of cotton candy

spun on a dream of paper cones, 

and the café where a hedgehog pulsed in her hand. 

I can still see her moon-face rising from a dandelion’s spray,

feathers of seed blown across a vineyard by Tuscan winds,

and I find myself I hoping the world will be her proving field

where the vague cosmologies of her heart might find their truth,

the halo at her head gladdened and made a gentle shield.

For her, I’d like the days to come to be a spreading coral tree,

a splendor of petals red and upturned to the sky,

that may she live a flower of the sea, a yellow hau

growing to a sunburst of orange in the day’s last hour,

a cloister of reunion that is a fluid memory

under what will have become its own eternity.

MEDITATIONS NEAR THE WILLAMETTE RIVER

1.       My House

I came to this house at the south edge of town

Just three years ago, having lived here over thirty,

Moved from Volcano, its mists, ferns, and ʻōʻhia forests.

I’d thought the climates similar—rain forever,

The constant chill and dampness driving one indoors,

Taming the soul’s tumult, sequestering for contemplation.

Yet for years I refused joy and took to griping instead,

A discontent raging in the supermarket aisles

Too unsettled to resist the samsara of the world as Unreal,

Failing to meditate on the earth’s glorious shadows,

The obscure that would transform what is brazen into gold,

The plain re-envisioned as prefigurements of the mind’s light.

But the new place swam in my sight with a pure abundance:

Purple crocuses and yellow dandles of daffodils in the spring,

The laughing violet lips of irises bloomed in the sideyard,

And a dogwood tree adorned itself with quartets of white fans.

Out back there were mats of creeping thyme and ajuga by the rock wall,

And, under twin redwood trees, great with a green shade,

A hydrangea bush with pale bouquets turned to lavender

And rhododendrons put up elaborate candelabras of lipstick red.

Wherever I looked, I’d a calypso show of flamboyant blooms.

These daily bucolics changed the core of my moods.

I’d never cared for fancy living quarters much,

Had functional houses without gardens most of my life,

But here I noticed sycamores, oaks, and Douglas fir

On the terraced hillside rising at the back of my property,

That a mottled morning light fell on all fours on the lawn.

I bathed in the cicatrix of shadows under the russet leaves of momiji

And heard the churrs and pipings of a thrush, a crow’s caw,

And the murmurous chant of waters in the creek bed. 

I dressed my floors with spendy Turkish carpets,

lined a dining room wall with a friend’s huge photographs

That looked like Chinese landscapes in subtle washes of ink,

Black and amber, black and sienna, black and russet brown.

Instead of a living room, I built a library

And put up bookshelves filled with poetry,

A phalanx of family photographs across their tops.

In a corner, I placed the family shrine dedicated to Kubota,

his soroban alongside a mokugyō wooden bell,

And, on a shelf below them, an image of the Buddha,

A collection of stones, a Hopi rattle, and pottery shards,

From the high desert around Leuppe, his prison of three years.

Something healed, and I felt retired to satisfactions,

An Horatian place of refuge that was my own Sabine farm

Where I might write epistles, contended and advisory, to the young,

Celebrating my own leisure, the consolations of my late life.

2.      My Desk

I chose a thick slab of smoked glass,

Had it beveled on the edges,

Laid it upon a welded steel frame

Of an old dining table—

Thick, squared struts and a trestle underfoot—

And made of them a writing desk

I felt near as elegant as one

Lucky for me once in the Maranese at Bellagio.

Above it, on the left, I hung a small painting,

A Zen ensō done in a circling cloud of brushed ink

Done by an old friend who’d studied in Kyoto.

Across from it, I placed a photograph,

Taken by his wife, of a great poet,

Slim and lanky, dressed in work clothes,

A milk pail of ashes swung in one hand,

An impassive expression on his face.

Modest man, lyricist of earth’s splendor

And heaven’s promise, I call you maestro.

Your words are my guide to the mysteries,

The sweet dazzlements of nothingness,

The zero’s emanations, the rose that is the prism

Of all invisible lights come from the Everlasting.

In the photo, your eyes squint across the silent dust,

Gleaming motes in orbit over my desk,

And I think to envision fiery mandalas

That are the aching heart’s yearning,

Seven Immortals joined by the silken string of our reckoning,

All souls’ changes in the cosmos an embroidery of imagination.

3.       Kubota’s House

I’ve a curling black and white of Kubota

Kneeling on the crest of an unfinished roof,

Bossing his two sons and my father

Hammering shingles on crossbeams below him.

He was building his own home in Hauʻula,

On Kamehameha Highway near Hawaiian Homelands.

Half would be a residence, half my grandmother’s diner.

His house before belonged to the sugar plantation.

It was a sprawling bungalow of many rooms

Next door to the general store he ran for Castle & Cooke. 

It sat for years alongside a dirt road lined with palms

Before they widened and paved it, making an asphalt promenade

So cars could drive directly to the Mormon Temple,

The white central building and its wings

A constant image filling every windshield.

My parents rented, a former luna’s place in Walkerville,

Once the area of Kahuku for whites only--

Japanese caneworkers not allowed.

My great-grandmother’s place was a shotgun

Across a sandy, humped car-lane from the Bestu-In,

Her front-yard garden planted with rows of melons,

Cukes, bean stalks, tomatoes, and papaya trees.

She grew more than half her food.

She paid for only rice, meat, and miso.

Inside were a bed with an army blanket,

A table and benches as for a cafeteria,

Two bamboo easy chairs and a lacquered shrine,

Curls of incense laddering to the ceiling.

We started from plantation shacks,

Structures of bare wood silvered by weather.

But I ended up here, my house of refuge

Carefully contrived with exotic furnishings,

A sixties manse surrounded by mature plantings.

A hummingbird copters by the rose outside my study’s window

And a dazzle of sunlight escapes through the redwood’s lowest bough.

IN MY OWN TEARS

Back only a week, still antic, a raincloud

Pin-cushioned like Saint Sebastian by arrowing winds,

The solace I pursued elusive as the morning dun

That emerges, imago released from its disguise,

Prefiguration to the brilliant, momentary flight.

A launchboat buffs the rough turquoise of the sea

And a misericordia of scurf glistens in its wake

As the long day discards its body of clay.

Interview

April 23rd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Garrett Hongo, Poet, Memoirist, Academic

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start in a somewhat unconventional way and contrast your experiences with those of Robert Hayden, a poet under whom you studied. You’ve touched upon the artistic and personal struggles he encountered within academic debates situated on battlegrounds of identity. In your life, also, you’ve lived in different environments where identity has been embraced, contested, championed, adopted, and all in between, so I wanted to ask how the passage of time has informed your own experiences about what it means to be who you are, along with the extent to which this has influenced not only the subject matter you’ve chosen but also the genre?

GH: I started out wanting to embrace my Asian American, Mainland urban, and Hawaiʻi-born identities.  But at first, I wrote “dividedly,” strict separations between a lyric and literary style and a “street” style I picked up that was more current in Asian American movement and, surprisingly, academic circles as well.  I wrote poems that tried to reproduce the tone and sequence of Chinese poetry in translation—Tʻang Dynasty ones by Tu Fu, Li Po, Tʻao Chʻien translated by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, Kenneth Rexroth, William Hung, Shigeyoshi Obata, Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu, and James Robert Hightower.  I wrote poems imitating my first teacher Bert Meyers and his beautiful imagistic style.  But I also wrote poems imitating Asian American movement poets like Lawson Fusao Inada, African American poets Ishmael Reed and Al Young, and the indigenous poet Simon Ortiz. I was trying to find my way.  Then, when I came to Michigan, things began to fall together in workshops with Donald Hall and my tutorials with Robert Hayden.  Hayden especially cultivated an eloquent lyricism in his work and gently pointed to those kinds of moments in mine, findling splinters of feeling and language that “could become a spike hammered by emotion,” he said, breaking through the humdrum, the conventional, even the aspirational.  He identified the poetic feeling behind my stumbling language and I chased it, tried to tune my ear to it, listen to the quieter voice of calm and inner spirit. 

I found that emphasized and congratulated by my later teachers C.K. Williams, Charles, Wright, and Howard Moss while I was in the MFA program at UC Irvine.  I kind of found myself as a poet there and itʻs stayed the magnetic north of my practice.  That poetic identity has not always been embraced by poets, activists, and identarian-oriented writers and I was criticized, even vilified at times, even though, like Hayden did of African American history and culture, I wrote from Asian American history, from a consciousness I myself called Asian American.  At other times, Iʻve been vilified for being “fake local” or “fake Hawaiian” by my own generation of writers in Honolulu.  So, the ostracism from African Americans that Robert Hayden had to endure and suffer was a kind of precursor to my own experiences like that. Iʻd always felt it a shame Hayden had to suffer unjust ostracism and for years.  But I found a like injustice in my own family as well—my grandfather being shunned by his community for having been arrested and imprisoned by the DOJ as a suspected spy for Japan during WW II.  Of course that was false, but the injustice was twofold—by the government and then by his own home society.  It all sobered me, prepared me for some travail of my own. 

Yet, at the same time, I became embraced by many senior African American poets and peers—Michael Harper, Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Colleen McElroy, June Jordan, and lucille clifton among the elders and Yusef Komunyakaa, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Tretheway among those closer to my own age.  And elder white poets too—my teachers, of course, but Philip Levine, William Matthews, Carolyn Kizer, and Robert Pinsky are a few.  I was making my way in Americaʻs multi-cultural literary world.  I also have to say that memoirist and novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, playwright Wakako Yamauchi, and Leon Edel (biographer of Henry James) also gave me great encouragement early on. 

The world out there can be tumultuous insofar as seeing poetry in terms of only the socio-political, identarian, or regional axes.  These don't always value what I would call the literary or lyric values in poetry, the subjective response to oppressive and coercive forces.  The subjective lyric itself, arising most strenuously during the late 18th century and early 19th century in England and called the Romantic movement, was the literary response and resistance to the onset of industrialization that saw the individual in economic terms, in terms of capital, as opposed to an isolate soul in search of solace.  The lyric poem is an expression of protest, resistance, and alterity to that kind of co-optation, usurpation of the soul's search and transformation into surplus labor.  This is partly what I learned from Robert Hayden and partly what I learned studying critical theory.  So poetic lyricism is to me the ultimate expression of pure resistance, allegiant to itself above all other political, social, economic, and geographic identites. 

DG: In Seattle, in the mid-seventies, you revived a theater group called The Asian Exclusion Act in. These are experiences you’ve described as the “training ground” for your “commitment to Asian American themes” and a “watershed moment” for your artistic confidence. Your efforts led to the production of notable work and your own play even got the attention of Derek Walcott. Could you speak a bit about the relationship that theater has to poetry, to what extent you’re involved in these activities today, and, if possible, what, indeed, has happened to the play that Walcott never received

GH: How did you know all that?  It's not something I've talked about in interviews that I know of ….  But I was the one who gave the Seattle theater group its provocative name back then—a reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the numerous anti-alien Land laws of the early 20th century excluding East Asian immigrants from owning real property.  We staged plays by Frank Chin, Wakako Yamauchi, Momoko Iko, Mel Escueta, and myself.  It was fun, inspiring and empowering, but terribly disappointing as well, as, like a successful rock band, there came extreme tensions and clashes of personalities, agendas, and we couldnʻt stay together for more than three years.  But it was the launching pad for many of us as actors, writers, a set designer, a costumer, academics, and activists. 

It was C.K.Williams who relayed Walcottʻs interest in my play, “Nisei Bar & Grill,” back in 1978 two years after it had been staged by the Asian Exclusion Act in Seattle. Much of it was written in Hawaiian pidgin English.  Walcottʻs invitation scared me to death!  I thought the play completely unworthy to show a master like him, who was an early inspiration, not only in poetry but in plays, as Iʻd seen a production of his “Dream on Monkey Mountain” as a kid and it knocked me out and sent me back to my own childhood, the language of it, the lustiness of expression in Hawaiʻiʻs own patois.  I basically ran from the opportunity of showing it to him and never took it back up even though others were interested in it—back then, the actor and comedian Pat Morita for one, and nowadays Frank Abe, the community activist and graphic novelist who was one of the stars in its first production.

But plays are different beasts from lyric poetry.  The “meaning” comes as much from the exchange among the players, a powerful subtext, the movement of bodies, the paint of gestures and silence, tones and styles of dialogue, and the emotional momentum all these build together like a symphony.  Poetry for me is a monody—a single voice.  Plays are a convocation, a colloquy, a parliament of voices and bodies all together.  Yet, what I took from experience in plays was the relationship of the body to voice, the inner consciousness to the gymnastic of creating linguistic movement, the flow of voice from the body.  Thus, I write many dramatic monologues. 

“Nisei Bar & Grill” exists in an unfinished manuscript to this day, by the way.  Frank Abe has been encouraging me to return to it and get it finished but it's such a youthful work, it's hard returning to the feeling, the inspiration, the homage to the generations of my father and grandfather, upon whose hopes the play was composed.  It's still rattling around in my mind, though, and I may somehow resurrect it yet.  Stay tuned!

DG: After theater, you entered the MFA program at UC Irvine where you did everything from sitting in on seminars by Paul de Man and Edward Said to having your poems called “shit” by C.K. Williams, all the while having, in addition to Williams, also Charles Wright as a teacher, and to top it all off, being classmates with Yusef Komunyakaa. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any MFA that can entice students like that. Yet it’s also hard to deny that criticism of writing programs seems to be more abundant than pasta in Italy. Indeed, there’s only one institution in mainland Europe where writers can be trained, and it’s at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. All this to ask a quite simple question: How do you see those years in relation to the work that you’re doing now and would your style/aesthetic really have been very different without the privilege of formal training?

GH: It was absolutely crucial to have been a student under Charlie Williams, who was my “terrible angel,” as Rilke says in the Duino Elegies, allowing me no b.s. and no quarter, hectoring, castigating, and upholding a standard of emotion he knew I could meet.  Once I gave it in a poem (“Stay With Me” from Yellow Light), he gave me back a moment of approval, endorsement, and support I have never forgotten.  I wrote about it in my memoir Volcano.  It made me.  Charles Wright, by contrast, was the gentle angel, his wings at my back holding me aloft in my own lyric flights, teaching me an ear for the tradition, an eye for the startling image, and inspiring me to find my own strophic music, as his was so gorgeous, I needed to try to match it in accomplishment and individuality.  Howard Moss gave me lessons too—on the prosody of Robert Lowell, the usefulness of metric requirements to the compositional process, the grandiosity and violence of the Oresteia as Lowell worked on translating it under Howardʻs editorship at the New Yorker. 

Yusef and I brought new poems in every week.  He was like my workout partner.  And he and I knew the same “underground” traditions in African American poetry and loved them.  His presence beside me in workshop was a powerful and approving one, crucial to my confidence. 

De Man and Said were flat-out brilliant and inspiring.  There is too much to say about them, but de Man understood poetic metaphor in a way that brought the entirety of 20th century Romantic poetic practice and its psychological shadows into a sharpness of focus I cannot explain quickly here.  Said taught Marxist aesthetics and the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci that, to this day, explain my existence, my ambitions, and my loyalties.  He, along with Charles Wright and Maxine Hong Kingston, was among the first to acknowledge the relevance of my long poem “Stepchild” about the Japanese American “internment,” as it's called, the incarceration of 120,000 of us during WW II.  He found its dittoed manuscript in a file that Charles Wright kept for each of us grad students and then called me into to his office to tell me it mattered. 

But you're not quite right about Leipzig being the only place in Europe one can pursue creative writing academically—universities like St. Andrews and Edinburgh in Scotland and Cambridge in England have undergraduate and advanced degree programs now.  Two of my former MFA students have graduated with Ph.D.s from St. Andrews, one from Edinburgh, and she's now leading the M.A. program in creative writing at Cambridge!

DG: In 2023, you released The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo where, among discussions of class, identity, and history, you detail your wide-ranging love for music—everything from arias performed at Teatro alla Scala, to Coltrane, Joni Mitchell, Hawaiian steel guitar, and everything in between. Which is the music that today you feel is closest to poetry, what instrument, personally would you play if you could, and do you listen to music while working?

GH: Oh, but I listen to my own, inner music while I write.  Nothing on the stereo or headphones.  I need it to be quiet.  However, Debussy's Nocturnes to me are closest to poetry, especially as performed by Ivan Moravec.  For Charles Wright, it was Glenn Gould's performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, paired with Doc Watson's flat-picking on guitar playing old-time American music.  Maybe I'd throw in a little Hawaiian kihoʻalu too—slack-key guitar, especially as played by Gabby Pahinui or Ray Kane, old-timers.  The Bridge by Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall in jazz.  John Coltrane's Ballads album. Chʻe gelida manina, Rodolfo's aria in the first act of Puccini's La Boheme.  I love them all.  I hear them all in my head, in my heart, frankly.  And “So What” by the Miles Davis sextet from Kind of Blue.

I was studying Hawaiian steel guitar when I was 12, playing an acoustic across my lap, when my mother discovered I'd tested well and took me out of everything artistic as a waste of time—stopping music lessons, shooing me out of Boy's Glee, and locking me in my room with books throughout my teens.  It backfired.  I wanted music and art like nobody's business after that and went away to Pomona, a liberal arts college that saved my life. 

Oh, I don't know what I'd play even if I could.  I went to college with kids who were real musicians—jazz saxophonist David Murray was a couple years behind me and the avant garde pianist Kathleen Supove is my classmate.  Even Native Hawaiian geophysicist James Kauʻahikaua, another college classmate, sang Bach cantatas in our school choir.  I think I'd love to be a rhythm and blues ballad singer and pianist, actually—a Japanese American Roberta Flack!

DG: You have edited two anthologies of Asian American literature in order to redefine, somewhat, the aesthetic that had been synthetically created by a group of close-knit, gatekeeping editors, which playwright David Henry Hwang called “The Gang of Four,” acting and functioning as you’ve described like a “literary Mafia.” In many ways, things have turned for the better when it comes to greater opportunities for Asian-American writers, but to what extent are you seeing new forms of literary gatekeeping emerging in today’s literary environment?

GH: Itʻs now pretty nigh impossible to keep a lid on literary production and dissemination, frankly, in our age of digital transmission, both for text and video.  Cancel culture can function a bit like gatekeeping, of course, in an inverse way, but there are just too many points of view, a diversity of voices, to effectively police the sector categorized as “Asian American.”  Folks now readily recognize diversity within the category and exercise free choice rather than submit to any form of literary policing. 

Of course, there are those who have put themselves into institutional, academic, and media positions that elevate and exclude, but these have been fairly ephemeral, tangential, and “exposed” as gate-keeping strategies and their mechanisms by the broader audience of reception and the breadth of production and free interchange.  I love the breakout from arbitration by a few and the more open field that exists these days. 

DG: How much harder would it have been to attain the same success you’ve achieved if you’d been born in 1991 instead of 1951? On the one hand, technology makes it so easy to write, edit, submit, and market your work; on the other hand, that very same technology has turned everyone into a writer which makes it (nearly) impossible to cut through the mix.

GH: I don't really know the answer to that.  It was very hard for me to get traction and, once I did, there were strenuous “takedown” efforts from many quarters, literary and non-literary.  I think it's just as hard to ward things off than to get a career going, frankly. 

As for cutting through the mix, there are so many mechanisms and platforms now—Instagram, Tik-tok, Facebook reels and bookstore readings, group readings, Zoom readings. 

I think a poet just has to find their “niche,” as it were, their little rock to hold onto like an opihi at the tideline, cling to it and grow slowly out of the hole. Find a platform that works, an audience that follows, and tend to it with more poems.  For me, I found a publisher that's been loyal to me, a handful of literary magazine editors, a battered but resolute university that employs me, and a small following that appreciates my poems. Those are what have sustained me.  A good word from a magazine editor, a twenty-something person who comes up from the audience at a book fair and tells me that they've followed my work since they were in college—stuffs ladat. 

DG: In 2019, AWP took place in Portland, about a two-hour drive from Eugene, where the University of Oregon is located and where you’ve worked for the past thirty-seven years. At a panel, former students of yours got together to share memories of your teaching. So much of what it means to be a poet is about sharing the knowledge—in one form or another­—yet academy’s demands can never be understated. Can you talk about the challenges and rewards that come with choosing the educational path, how these have changed over time, and how they have shaped you personally and creatively?

GH: Universities and poetry have an arranged marriage built, not from mutual passion, but from economics and social acknowledgment. 

The University wants the credentials poets bring in terms of publication and sometimes notoriety, but love is absent.  It's an economic relationship.  Schools love it that poets attract enrollments and accreditation but seem to hate us, do everything they can to keep us so busy with evaluative, data-driven surveillance and digital, committee, and irrelevant minutiae that there is hardly TIME to meditate and write in its environment of constant bedevilment.  Don't get me started!

What I've tried to do is leave the University behind in my classes now—approach them as my own private salons, though not for my own aggrandizement, but for civilized encouragement of the art, a kind of club for regular meetings to foster the growth of young souls and aspirants.  What's been hard, though, is the false academic posturing of poets in MFA Programs—that's been hard for me to take, and my prior method of knocking that back hasn't worked very well.  So I've decided not to be so curmudgeonly about it, or to try not to be.  Both Yusef and Charles Wright used to tell me to “watch yourself” about trying to teach too much, investing emotions and intellectual energy there instead of in my own poems.  They've both been quite laissez faire in their approaches to workshops.  I need to try to be more like that.  But ass why haahd! as my grandfather used to say, as I've got a notion of esoteric transmission that I haven't been able to shake.

DG: Whether it be playwriting, poetry, memoir, or essays, your work has never shied away from the political, but the pieces always have a greater interpretative scope. Given what’s happening today, do you think it’s possible to separate politics from art, and if not, is that necessarily a good thing? For instance, both Jeffers and Frost have written about nature. The former’s work is more direct and with greater political overtness, while the latter’s seems more subtle and doesn’t always have to be read that way. I’d like to ask if, in your view, poetry is losing some of its essence as a consequence of nature’s destruction or is it merely the political landscape that makes us read certain things in a certain way?

GH: That's a very complicated question in the guise of a caring sincerity!  Hah!  The work of poetry is always political in the sense that I've already spoken to—it's a gesture of resistance against the political, economic, and, now, military obliteration of the individual subject, the consciousness we each possess.  Poetry is an act of resistance, itself a protest.  However, there are other forms of poetry rather than the subjective lyric that are more normatively considered political—the documentary poem, a lot of slam and spoken word poetry, hip hop, etc.  I teach and admire the documentary poem, especially as practiced by Robin Coste Lewis, Salmaz Sharif, Layli Longsolidier, and Philip Metres, but the other “political” practices strike me as assaultive and strident, alienating.  Not my jam. 

As for natureʻs destruction, I don't see that as threatening poetry's essence.  Itʻs even more essential today as we lose species, environments and biomes, as we violate the earth in pursuit of the concentration of capital.  Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, Rachel Carson, Scott Momaday, Lewis Thomas, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and hundreds more among all sorts of writers have been pushing back against the destruction of nature. 

DG: What are recent book or poems you’ve read that have really affected you?

GH: The Southern Cross and The Other Side of the River by Charles Wright.  The Star-Apple Kindgom and The Bounty by Derek Walcott.

Oh, recent, you said?  Hmmmm …. Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis.  Look by Salmaz Sharif.  A Modern Herbal by Amy Glynn.  Machete by Tomás Morin.  Couplets by Maggie Millner.  One Sky to the Next by Christopher Buckley.

DG: What are you working on at the moment?

GH: Nowadays, especially since finishing Ocean of Clouds, my last book of poems, I've been returning to my studies in Buddhist philosophy and my feeling for quietude and retreat from the world. 

I was in India traveling there for a month this winter and my companion mentioned something about a Chinese monk as we drove by an embankment of cliffrock.  Suddenly, a lightning bolt of thought and recollection reached out to me and I remembered Hsüan-tsang, the 7th century monk who brought the sutras from India to China, an early but faint inspiration.  Children in China, Japan, and Hawaiʻi grow up with the story that a magical monkey accompanied and protected him during his sojourn, but the monk himself left behind some profound teaching.  I am returning to that as a new vortex of thought and inspiration. 

Author Bio:

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, on May 30, 1951. He attended Pomona College and the University of Michigan. He received his MFA in English from the University of California, Irvine.

Hongo’s collections of poetry include Ocean of Clouds (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025); Coral Road: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); The River of Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982). He is also the author of The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), winner of the Oregon Book Award for Nonfiction.

Hongo’s other honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2022, he received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review.