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- [00:00]
Tyler Foggatt
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Kevin Young
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Tyler Foggatt
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Kevin Young
Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to pick a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine. My guest today is Garrett Hongo, the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, including Ocean of Clouds and the Perfect A Memoir in Stereo. He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he's a distinguished professor at the University of Oregon. Welcome, Garrett. Thank you so much for joining me.
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Garrett Hongo
Hey, thanks for having me, Kevin. Long time.
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Kevin Young
Yeah, it's great seeing you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is Tang Notebook by Charles Wright. What drew you to this particular poem while you were looking over the archive?
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Garrett Hongo
Well, there were so many poems of Charles to choose from as he's contributed so regularly and often to the New Yorker. But this one was particularly compelling for me because it was part of my own making, I feel. Charles was my teacher, as so many people know, and an inspiration to me. I deliberately went to Irvine vine to study with him because I recognized from having read China Trace, an earlier volume that he knew Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty in his bones and blood. And so did I admired it, not only from some English translations, but having studied a bit of it at the University of Michigan when I studied Chinese and Japanese. It just was the most amazing experience, being Charles's student and then witnessing his poetry as it was coming out. While I was his student, he wrote the Southern Cross, which is a magnificent volume of great poetry, and then he followed it with the Other side of the river, from which Tang Notebook comes, and in it he just expands the canvas, as it were, in homage to the Chinese poets, but to poetry and the activity of Poetry, the exercise of the imagination, the expansiveness of poetic mind to capture landscape and feeling from the landscape, which is really part and parcel of that early Chinese poetry of the, let's say, 4th through 8th centuries. This particular poem was significant also because I had a personal relationship with it, in a way. One winter, after I finished the mfa, I was in Chinatown in Los Angeles, and I got into a store, a kind of knickknack store that had some books there, you know, Lucky Fortune. And then there were these books of poems. And I picked them up and I saw that the translations were magnificent, you know, knowing what the originals, a little bit of what the originals were like. And I bought two copies of it, one for myself, and then I thought I should buy one for Charles. So I bought it and then gave it to him. And then, I think a few months later, out comes this poem in the New Yorker, much to my, in some ways delight, but also chagrin because he beat me to the punch. But this one had tremendous grace, tremendous music, extraordinary expansiveness, and this lavish description of landscape that was an inspiration and a kind of. Not only benchmark, but a kind of pole star to guide me to where I wanted to go as a young poet. And it's remained so, and it sort of stays with me, not so much in terms of, let's say, the actual script of its words, but the poetic feeling, the memory, the sort of the flame of thought that stayed with me all these years.
- [04:25]
Kevin Young
Well, why don't we hear the poem that's such a wonderful story? Here's Garret Hongo reading. Tong notebook by Charles Wright.
- [04:35]
Garrett Hongo
Tong notebook by Charles Wright. Fine clouds open their outfits and show us their buttons moonlight widens the waves Step on your own song and listen to mine not bitter like yours not flicked raw by lashes of dust. Already over Italy the cold sun rises. How I would like a mountain if I had means enough to live as a recluse I would like to renounce it all and turn toward the ash gold of flame Mullion between the palm fronds that constellation with its seven high stars Is lifting its sword in the midnight I love you, dog, I love you. Remain here and lengthen your days. Pilgrimage Fame is a mist of grief on the river waves the low wet clouds move faster than you do Snowed moon, your jade hair sleet and grown thin all night I ask what time it is. Stories of passion make sweet dust Sunset like a girl's robe falling away Long ago an old song handles my heart Outside the side door a luck spider huge in the flashlight's lamp rappels down the air to single a stitch and make her starred bed in the dark past the hemlock something with small bright wings has come from a great distance and is tired and wants to lie down. Night spreads its handful of star clusters and one eclipse above the palm tree there are shuddering birds and dead grasses. Wherever I turn my face, the 10,000 starfish caught in the net of heaven Flash at the sky's end. Gulls settle like grains of dust on the black sand. Lady of Light, Donna Dolorosa. You drift like a skeleton through the night clouds. The surf comes in and goes out like smoke. Give me a sign, show me the blessing pierced in my side. The wind that comes in off the Pacific, where the color of mountains both is and is not ripples the distant marsh grass and the gray doors of the sea. The evening begins to close like a morning glory. Like fear in a little boat, the light slips under the sky. When the mind is loosened and borne up, the body is lightened and feels it too could float in the wind. A bell sound between here and sleep. A water egret plains down like a page of blank paper toward the edge of the noon sky. Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds to settle down on under the wind. Forgetting words.
- [08:02]
Kevin Young
That was tong Notebook by Charles Wright, which was originally published in the March 21, 1983 issue of the New Yorker. It was so great to hear that poem and your beautiful reading of it. I love the movement of the poem and you gave such grace to those pauses and the ways it really enacts what the poem describes. I love how intuitive it is, how deliberate, how, as you say, landscape and specific it is, but also expansive. What do you think about that structure of the poem? Those sort of little moments, almost jewels, almost haiku like, but I think even bigger than that as the poem progresses.
- [08:44]
Garrett Hongo
Well, you know, Charles's music is great American music. He once said that he wanted to write a poem with the length of line like Walt Whitman and the jewel like imagery and spiritual focus of Emily Dickinson. Now that is a great literary clue into Charles imagination. But even more than that to me is what he said to me privately. He said that he wanted to write a poetry that was like the guitar playing of Doc Watson matched to the piano of Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations. And for many, many years I thought, what does that mean? What is that? Now I knew Doc Watson and his music, having listened to different recordings. And of course at that time I didn't know anything about Glenn Gould, although I knew the name, or the Goldberg Variations. But when I began to enjoy music more, study it more, and in fact, writing my book, the Perfect Sound, I listened very, very intently to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations and understood the counterpoint that Bach created from a basic, very simple lament like melody. And I could see the kind of internal musculature of Charles's stanzas, which you call his haiku, like jewels, but they're more like Heraclitian versions of Father Hopkins. They're so condensed, so powerful and so muscular, you know, and yet there's this loping easy music still behind it all that's like Doc Watson and his guitar playing. And I thought, aha, I got it now. I understand that there's this doubled music, the muscularity and precision of the contrapuntal Bach, but with the background of this loping easy American old time music of Doc. Old time country music of Doc Watson. And I felt it, you know, I felt it. So when I look at the poem now, and I hear the poem now, those musics are involved. Those musics are a guide. Those musics are sort of the pattern that I hear.
- [11:10]
Kevin Young
Well, and you mentioned a double music, which I think is a wonderful way to put it. And I hear it both thematically and tonally in the poem. I think he often is toggling between a kind of eternal sense and also a very mortal, immediate sense. And you know, you see it in every part of the poem. But I think these two sections especially that constellation with its seven high stars is lifting its sword in the midnight. I love you, dog, I love you. And then right after. Remain here and lengthen your days, pilgrim. Fame is a mist of grief on the river waves. I mean, stop me right there. I mean, most of us would be happy riding three of those lines, much less the whole of the poem. And I think it's a way that he gets that notebook quality. But also this notebook, which I want to return to the title in a minute, is a way of kind of having it feel both offhanded and elevated. Fame is a mist of grief isn't like. At least to me, I couldn't just jot that down. It feels kind of earned and etched, but it also has that misty kind of disappearing quality that's so powerful. Remain here and lengthen your days on the one hand and the. On the other, Fame is a mist of grief on the river waves. How do you hear that doubleness in either tone or theme?
- [12:34]
Garrett Hongo
You know, Charles is so complicated in many ways, but he's layered rather than confused. So when you progress through Charles poem, as you do, as I did in the relationship with Charles, you feel that it's slowly revealing itself, unraveling, as it were, displaying in segments and sections. And his music is like that. He never rushes. And he also questions let's, in some ways, the ancient, even the Christian homilies and the wisdom. It's backgrounded by his love for the progress and the consideration, in some ways, the procedure of poetic questioning as formulated by those Chinese in the Tang Dynasty, where, for example, Lipo would say, how shall goodwill persevere? I gaze at the long river of stars. So that you have these mortal questions, these ethical, moral issues, and then you look to transcendence for the answer. And the answer is ambiguous, it's not clear, and yet it's consoling somehow, because it's unclear, because it's a mystery, because it's some way an unraveling of cares. And when you look at Charles's poetry, you see a person that's unraveling from cares and arriving at, as you say, a transcendence, you know, an incandescence in a way. I remember one of my other early teachers, Stanley Crouch, the great jazz critic and controversial cultural critic, he said, you sing the blues because you have the blues, so that you won't have the blues no more. Right. And that's sort of what Charles is doing, you know.
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Kevin Young
Well, and I love that connection you've made to Doc Watson, to country music, but also classical music. There is always that other double music between the country and the classical. And in fact, what I think he does, that I think Langston Hughes did for me, but also I think, for American and world poetry, is to say that this music of the everyday, this blues music, is noble. And in fact, we would do well to model our poetry on that, not the other way around. We don't have to give the nobility of poetry to blues music. It is noble. And I feel that happens here. You've done us a service by outlining and illuminating his many influences. And I'm curious how you feel that those Chinese influences specifically appear here. You've said some of it, but I'd love to hear more about that.
- [15:12]
Garrett Hongo
Like I say, you know that you have these moral, ethical, even existential questions, and you ask them of the stars, which shine back, a kind of transcendence, but not really an answer. And so the feeling you get is that you must go there rather than to dwell in cares, concern in the blues. But as mortals, we also have to acknowledge that the blues is what inspires us to give care, to give a damn, to actually aspire to the transcendental. And I think that's all involved in Charles's work. He would like to arrive back at the wisdoms that he utters, but he won't get there in a hurry. He won't get there by rote. He'll only get there by contemplation, meditation, aspiring and looking at the river of heaven, you know?
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Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah.
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Garrett Hongo
He's an amazing poet. I mean, yes, Langston Hughes, you know, Sterling Brown, all those great poets of the blues are also involved.
- [16:22]
Kevin Young
Well, I want to ask you just a couple more things about the poem. That notebook quality and how you see it. And then, you know, this quality that I think is part of that, which at the end, we kind of return to writing. A water egret planes down like a page of blank paper toward the edge of the noon sky. Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds to settle down on under the wind, forgetting words. So it's sort of this writer, the egret, is a poet in a way, settling down on this blank paper. But then the poet also is giving up poetry. You know, what's happening there at the end.
- [17:06]
Garrett Hongo
It's a blessed kind of forgetfulness that he wishes for, in a way, but it's a forgetfulness of. That's eschatological, that is finito, you know, it's a decrescendo ending. It's part of Charles music. Of course, he loves words. Of course he's involved with words. Of course, words bring him to all the feels of the poem, the images of the poem, the grand gestures of the poem. You know, there's the Back Bay lagoon of Newport beach in there. I mean, that's where the egrets are in Southern California, in Hawaii. They're there, too, in Kahuku, where I grew up. Derrick Walcott's St. Lucia also has those egrets. They have those egrets in Camargue in France.
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Kevin Young
They have them in Louisiana, where my family's from.
- [17:51]
Garrett Hongo
Oh, well, there you go. There's something I learned now. I mean, but it's an image that embeds itself in the heart of your vision. You dig? And then the white reeds is a little page from Dante, you know, at the beginning of Purgatorio, where he lands on that great island.
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Kevin Young
Yes.
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Garrett Hongo
And the rushes there are the beginning of ascension, as it were.
- [18:13]
Kevin Young
Yes, yes.
- [18:14]
Garrett Hongo
I think there's always so many layers in Charles, and it always comes to you through this great music. The notebook aspect that you ask about is also interesting and curious because he's used that titling in two or three different iterations here and there throughout his work. But also, as in a way, a work unto itself. It's complicated for me. It's not an easy correspondent definition. On the one hand, it speaks to the casual and the everyday, as you have said of daily practice of writing poems. And Charles kept that notebook. He always wrote by hand, in the beautiful, elegant hand of Charles writes. But it's also the idea of commemoration. You know, I think of Kahie by Aime Cesaire, Notebook of the return to my native land, where the notebook resonates as a kind of repatriation, a re inscription of a wayward self, a prodigal self, back to a homeland. And I don't think Charles ignored that. I think that's part of it too. But the homeland here is no one fixed place. He goes from Italy to Laguna beach to China, to all these different landscapes in the poem. And I think that the home becomes the notebook itself.
- [19:36]
Kevin Young
That's so well said. I'm tempted just to leave there. But I did want to maybe ask you about his largest project, or life's project, the sort of trilogy of trilogies, this large scale set of books that he's thought of as a huge, not just American epic, but as you point out, international colossal epic. How do you think about that in relation to this poem? How does that poem figure in. Or maybe it's the other way around. If we want to look at the telescope the other way, how do we think of the bigness of that in these lines?
- [20:12]
Garrett Hongo
Aha. Well, I'm going to give a kind of, forgive me, sophisticated literary answer.
- [20:19]
Kevin Young
Okay.
- [20:20]
Garrett Hongo
It's the resonance of figura, which is to say the image or the trace of experience and enlightenment that attaches itself to the larger radiance of an epic experience, which you could say is disenio. And the disenio here comes from Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri. Charles's great inspiration, of course, is Dante, where we have the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. And all of his work in some ways is after Dante. And it's about that journey through incarnation and mortality, through the purgatory of making amends and then reaching the Paradiso, transcendence and the great stars. Charles Figura imparts different shards of that experience, or that design, that grand design of Dante, Divine Comedy. So when he invokes the white reeds, he's talking about the first step onto Purgatorio in the first canto of Purgatorio. And how do I integrate it? I always read this sort of double participation, which is the image, the figura, with the grander design of the commedia. So any moment in Charles work radiates to the larger design. And as a great poet, he never falters. Every small shard of language or stanza or image is going to gesture towards that larger design. And it's his great achievement that he stays within that larger scope, what you call his trilogy. But there's a grand canvas that's always involved in Charles's work. He had the blessing of a great vision like La Vita Nuova al Dante early on in his career and designed himself as a poet, dedicated himself as a poet to chase those higher stars and all that he uttered. And he never wavered in a way you can say. Very few poets have achieved that. My friend Youssef Komagnaka has. But you can look at the layout of their entire work, and you feel this is the body of great vision, the body and the blood, as it were. And you look at him, Charles's work, it's like looking at Monet. You know, you have different iterations of the Water Lilies on huge canvases, on small little details. Every detail, every imago, every figura reflects that larger canvas.
- [22:50]
Kevin Young
More from my conversation with Garrett Honko after the break.
- [23:00]
Tyler Foggatt
Hi, I'm Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast. A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the Political Scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment by having these really deep conversations with writers where we actually get into the weeds of what is going on right now and about the damage that is being done. It's not resistance in the activist sense, but I think it is resistance in the sense that we are resisting the feeling of being overwhelmed by chaos. Join me and my colleagues David Remnick, Evan Osnos, James Jane Mayer and Susan Glaser on the Political Scene podcast from the New Yorker. New episodes drop three times a week, available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:56]
Kevin Young
Garrett, welcome back.
- [23:57]
Garrett Hongo
Hey, man, I need a break after Savvy said all that stuff.
- [24:02]
Kevin Young
Well, we're back to talk about your poem now. In our August 26, 2024 issue, the new Yorker published your poem on Emptiness, which we'll hear you read in a moment. Is there anything you want to tell us about the poem beforehand that you think listeners should know?
- [24:16]
Garrett Hongo
You know, in a way, I wrote this after Charles Wright in my new book. There's a long sequence I composed in Cassis on the shore of the Mediterranean in France. And there was a large canvas I was working towards as well. It's a six section poem. This unemptiness, I think, is the last, the culminating section. And in the poem I try to consider in some ways my own wishes for myself after having been at poetry for a while and their touchstones throughout. Of course, the grand one would be Charles himself, but also in some ways all my teachers, from Quincy Troup to Burt Myers to Robert Hayden, my own grandfather, and the effort they made to create life, you dig? And I just needed to set down my own thoughts about the effort I had made and then ultimately, in a way, how the inspiration of Chinese poetry, particularly Tang dynasty Chinese poetry, had entered my heart from a very young age. So even in the first sentence of first line of the poem, I invoked the Tang Chinese. And I think Charles is part of that as well. I let it be a mystery, though. I wasn't literally copying things down. I just wrote from feeling and remembrance and meditation.
- [25:38]
Kevin Young
Well, here's Garret Hongo reading his poem on emptiness.
- [25:43]
Garrett Hongo
On emptiness. The Tang Chinese did it best. A poet solo in progressions gathered from wilderness while he stood beside the long vertical scroll of a cataract hung by a natural God. It script the Heraclitean flow of the way. Or sitting on mats at tea with a friend and fellow bureaucrat posted on borderlands far from the capital of their educations. The two of them engaged in brisk repartee, siding amiably from the Book of Songs, their light banter of fellowship, of otium, the lyric axis of contemplation, while the world persists a whirl in famine, regional war or harvests of plenty. What they took from one another, gazing at the festival moon as it rose over crags of mountains, the slithers and fountains of rivers surrounding their hut 10 foot square, was a joyous loyalty to reflection, a stilling of the mind that invites the soft thoughts of. Of an unknotted wind, caravels of contentment with the grand. Whatever let it be was not to them a credo but daily practice, a hermeneutics of calm retreat. Like those aquamarine waters below my window to day only ripples and whirls like sapphire fingerprints and ephemeral wings of Bleu de France upon the sea in mash the colonel in command fly fished a trickle of stream the middle of the Korean War, checked out and privileged to pull a wine glass and bottle of chardonnay from his creel. Did he have it right? A fire crest chitters, cicadas klaxon in waves, clicking their thoracic chambers of amplification, and an excursion boat's engine drones on through the harbor, trailing a long wake of immaculate lace over the channel's Persian blue table. The slate sea fills my window and I can see the horizon line from here, the white palette knife of a sail just below it, and I wonder if the pale flamingoes of Camarg might present themselves to me some day. Why has this lesson been so hard to relearn all these years? Why have I allowed the settled law of my soul to be disrupted by tyrannous magistrates of the everyday? A ground swell of incessant woe flushing a salty tincture of gentian through my mouth, my head constantly hung like a sea bird hunched before its dive instead of lifted to meet the new day's yellow light. I've strong espresso in the morning and some kind of warbler makes its melodic cry outside my window. I can't see Africa from here, but I can feel its continental drift, a steady tumulus of soul making arising from perigee and about to cross the expansive idols of ocean. If only I could stand the infinite measures, wait long enough and not waste their buoyant resolve. If only I might dwell in emptiness the rest of my days.
- [29:28]
Kevin Young
That was on Emptiness by Gerrit Hongo what a beautiful poem, and I love how the pace of the poem, it progresses in a different way from the Charles Wright poem we were talking about. But I think it has its own internal logic, which I see more in this self that's speaking who's seeing all these things, including the past, and also things that the self can't quite see, like Africa from here. And then suddenly we have mash and chardonnay and the grand whatever. How do you see all those knitting together? And why go from grand whatever to mash? What happens there?
- [30:09]
Garrett Hongo
Well, again, it's the lessons from Chinese poetry. You look at the river of heaven and you think of your own care worn woe, you know, your feet in the mud, as it were, and the lesson from them, Wang Wei Dufu, Lipo, Tao Chen, is that it's all together, it's all part of the grand design deseno, that this mortality which we suffer, which we enjoy in some ways is part of the progress of the soul towards the stars. They're all involved. We're interconnected. So just the stupid and the mundane even worry is a step towards the flight of a flamingo, the course of a star across the sky. And it's very hard to believe that, you know, as we live, you know, checking our hot water heater and dusting the floor and picking up the detritus off the carpet, you know, but really it's the case. And again, the lesson also, in some ways, is from Dante, although he's not the great presence here, but Charles, in some ways is as well, another great polestar of a poet who can lead the way. I invoke the Book of Songs as well as I invoke mash, you know, Chardonnay. And that's the great first collection of Chinese poetry before it had been sort of codified into strict forms, formats, codicils of aesthetic creation, where there's more of the primitive, the song, like the agrarian, the Paleolithic, you know, involved. So, you know, I'm not always there, man.
- [31:50]
Kevin Young
I mean, well, you mentioned the magistrate. How do you put it? The tyrannous magistrates of the everyday. Is that the opposite of the grand whatever, or is that part of it?
- [32:02]
Garrett Hongo
One thinks of it as the opposite. But if you're in the transcendental, it's all the same, right? But when you're in it, you suffer, you rage, you rebel. And I'm under the heel of the tyrannous magistrates of the everyday most of the time. And I shake my head at my own folly and my own anger and my rage and my fallibility. But what I was about to say is I'm hardly ever in a better place except when I write poems. And that's why I like to do it. The poetry brings me that connection, that desenio, the participation in the grand design. And I need to do it in order to fuel that, you know, I need to sing the blues, because I had the blues. So I won't have the blues no more, you know? Exactly. If you're not. If I'm not writing poetry, I'm not worth a damn, you know, it's tough.
- [32:56]
Kevin Young
Well, there's a cathartic quality, both to the act, but also this poem feels special because it's about that catharsis, or however you want to call it, that process of emptiness. So it's both on emptiness about it, but also as something to wish on or wish for or attempt. And I love that, you know, its own double music there. I had a question about mash, as one might having Grown up watching that with my dad. And still the finale of that is one of the great moments in tv, but also for me, of my childhood. But I seem to remember that the colonel who fly fished also dies in the series. Is that right? Do I have it right?
- [33:43]
Garrett Hongo
You know, I don't remember that so much the TV show as I remember the film.
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Kevin Young
Ah, the film, yes, yes.
- [33:51]
Garrett Hongo
And I don't remember that he died in the film.
- [33:53]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:54]
Garrett Hongo
I just remember that he was so cavalier and focused on his own transcension of the horrible materiality in which he was living as a mass unit. Dr. And, you know, that's the sort of denial that he lived in. And I wonder if denial is the way, you know, and in the poem that I write, it's ambiguous what, what I think about that.
- [34:19]
Kevin Young
Right.
- [34:20]
Garrett Hongo
But I also think that part of why I invoke it is to say that's not the way that you have to accept the tyrannous magistrates at the same time as you try to raise your head to the river of heaven, you know, the long river of stars, as Lipo called it. So he's a swing state, as it were. Yeah, he's a keystone. He's a change. He's a.
- [34:42]
Kevin Young
A fulcrum. A fulcrum. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear that.
- [34:45]
Garrett Hongo
He'S a tornado, you know.
- [34:47]
Kevin Young
So what about the espresso and the seeing of Africa toward the end of the poem? Is the espresso part of the mundane, the everyday, or is it actually part of the enjoying the moment, the pleasure?
- [34:59]
Garrett Hongo
You know, I really look forward to getting up and having my coffee in the morning, and I have to have my coffee.
- [35:08]
Kevin Young
I understand.
- [35:08]
Garrett Hongo
I used to travel with a little aeropress to make my own kind of fake espresso. And I've now figured out how to sort of approximate it in different ways with different kinds of coffee makers.
- [35:19]
Kevin Young
Wow.
- [35:20]
Garrett Hongo
But I. I love to have two cups of coffee in the morning and I have to have it espresso or Americano or something like that. And then I can face the day and I, I feel the day is right. When I was in Kasi, when I am in Cassi, I was just there last month, too. You always look out across, across the Mediterranean, and then you can see that horizon line. And I always knew that Africa was beyond that horizon. And then the waves were coming from there. You know, I think of that Joni Mitchell song, the Wind is in from Africa. Last night I couldn't sleep. It's from Blue. I think the song is called Carrie and That's sort of in there, too. And then you can feel those different winds, you know, when you're on the sea, as I did in Hawaii when I was a child, you can feel the. The mistral, you. You know, the shirako, the different kinds of one. And it. It's privileged to be able to live in that kind of connection with another land mass across an ocean mass, as it were. You know, it's the. The closest thing I can find, like being a kid in Hawaii, where I had that feeling looking and feeling the sea right next to me all the time and the mountains behind me. So it's odd, but I'm always feeling. Every time I'm in France, I feel Hawaii. Every time in Hawaii, I feel France. I don't know, it's just the way it goes.
- [36:33]
Kevin Young
I notice in the poem this moment, which delighted me to no end, where you say my head constantly hung like a seabird hunched before its dive instead of lifted to meet the new day's yellow light. It's a question, but that yellow light there brings me back to is it your first book or your first big book, which was called Yellow Light? Tell us about that. How conscious was that reference to the past, which you've mentioned a lot? And, you know, I seem to remember that poem Yellow Light is in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025. And it really, for me, kicks off a section and your work, you know, tell us about yellow Light.
- [37:16]
Garrett Hongo
Well, you know, you can see these birds when you're in Hawaii or on the Mediterranean, and the way they move their heads as they're lofting in the wind like kites. And you can see them turning and moving that head, depending on their own orientation. Now, there are many theories about why and how birds do this. For me, it's just an image that I had of a bird leaning down over the ocean looking for prey, but then another image of a bird looking towards the sunrise, you know, or the sunset. And I just wanted to capture that both in terms of deliberateness. Yes, it was. It was an invocation of that first poem of mine in my first book called Yellow Light. It was also, in a way, the first published poem I ever had when Howard Moss asked for it for the New Yorker way back when I was a MFA student at Irvine. So, yeah, it's a little bit of a self reference, I guess, a little bit of a quotation of my own music. It's a. It's a little thing you do once in a while. You Know, Mississippi John Hurt would do it for me. It. It was a conjunction of two different images, but also the image from Yellow Light, the first poem in my first book. And it also is a invocation of the great poet, Miguel Hernandez, who talked about the light from Onions, you know, in Nana de la Sadoya, his great poem of imprisonment and hope during the Spanish Civil War. There's a lot of things in. There's a radiance, you know, I mean, when you write poems, when one writes poetry, you always step into that radiance. And when you. Well, one might step into that radiance, and when you do, it's just such a feeling, you know, you feel like you're doing right, you're in the. You're living right. And when I hit those two words, that's what I felt, that all these things were in the music, all these things were in the invocation. Not just my own life, but the life of poetry. So again, it's. It's Shigura. It's an implication of the design of a larger canvas.
- [39:17]
Kevin Young
Well, I want to ask you about that larger canvas. And, you know, it seems from all you're saying, it's so clear, the breadth of your thought, the breadth, you know, that it feels like comes from your comfort and more than comfort, you're showing us all the connectedness between these influences. And I love hearing about midtown LA and how it's, in some ways, I would think, born there and in Hawaii and all these places that you've mentioned. Do you think it comes full circle with this new book of yours? How do you see this new book in that grand design or the grand whatever, as you put it? How does Ocean of Clouds, this book, tell us about this idea of the sublime?
- [40:04]
Garrett Hongo
You know, it's a late life book, right. I'm in my 70s now, and there's a lot of looking back to my early days growing up in not just Hawaii, but la. The first poem in the book talks about Bono Dori festival in Gardena and hearing the temptation saying, my girl coming from a transistor radio in the middle of this Japanese festival. And it's about this blend of cultures, this sort of aggregation of cultural migrations, not only in one place like Gardena or LA or Hawaii or France, but in terms of my own life. I mean, I've had all these wonderful influences and experiences which some people might think of as confining, you know, that I grew up in an island culture in Hawaii, that I grew up in the ghetto in la, but I've had All these great teachers like Quincy Troup, Stanley Crouch, Burt Myers, Charles Wright, Peggy Dornish, Stanley Jones, all from different segments of learning. You know, blues, poetry, Buddhism, Japanese literature, Chinese literature. And a lot of times, you know, when I was growing up, all these were segregated. You were always told, if you're doing this, you can't do that. If you're dancing to Motown, you can't like Buffalo Springfield. You know, segregation was so much what I rebelled against as a kid. And also in college and graduate school where, you know, people questioned the idea of even a Japanese American poet. I mean, back in the day. And. And then also they always put you in a so alternate position if you were different. Right. Coming through my twenties, until I met somebody like Charles Wright, until I met somebody like Howard Moss, until I met somebody like C.K. williams, who live all liberated me, until I met somebody like Pat Morita, one of my first bosses. You know, people don't know that I wrote comedy for Pat when I was 23. And all these influences, I don't reject them. I take them all in. You know, the roughness of Stanley Crouch, the gentleness of Robert Hayden. I mean, it's all part of how I was taught to love. And I wanted to be able to give testimony to all those things. And this is what this book is about, is to pay homage to the differences, to the desegregated experience that I had, to the sort of porphyry of abundance that the world has to offer. You know, I'm still trying to desegregate the mind, if you know what I mean.
- [42:33]
Kevin Young
Well, Garrett, thank you so much for talking with me, and it's so beautiful to hear you talk about poetry and to talk about your work.
- [42:41]
Garrett Hongo
Well, thanks for having me and for publishing the poems you have. It's a great privilege to appear in those pages and even greater privilege to have this conversation.
- [42:51]
Kevin Young
Likewise, On Emptiness by Garrett Hongo, as well as Charles Wright's Tong notebook can be found on new yorker.com Charles Wright's most recent book is Oblivion Baby Banjo. Garrett Hongo's latest collection is Ocean of Clouds.
- [43:09]
Tyler Foggatt
You may subscribe to this podcast, the fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by Searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app, you can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Attunde Ajuwa, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Prosinos with help from Hannah Eisenman. Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson Whitehead.
- [43:59]
Garrett Hongo
Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look.
- [44:01]
Kevin Young
Of horror on his face.
- [44:03]
Garrett Hongo
They saw it. Griff wasn't going down. He was going to go for it, no matter what happened after. Or Joy Williams, her father, was silent. Slowly he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch.
- [44:30]
Tyler Foggatt
Listen to news stories or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow the Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.
- [44:49]
Kevin Young
From PRX.