Hongo, Garrett (Kaoru)
HONGO, Garrett (Kaoru)
Nationality: American. Born: Volcano, Hawaii, 30 May 1951. Education: Pomona College, Claremont, California, l969–73, B.A. (honors) 1973; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1974–75; University of California, Irvine, 1978–82, M.F.A. 1980. Family: Married Cynthia Anne Thiessen in 1982; two sons. Career: Director, Asian Exclusion Act, Seattle, Washington, 1976–78; poet-in-residence, Seattle Arts Commission, 1977–78; teaching assistant, 1980–82, and visiting instructor, 1983–84, University of California, Irvine; visiting assistant professor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1982–83; assistant professor, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1984–89; visiting associate professor, University of Houston, Texas, 1988. Associate professor and director of creative writing, 1989–93, professor of English, 1992–93, and since 1993 professor of creative writing, University of Oregon, Eugene. Poetry editor, The Missouri Review, 1984–89. Jury member, Pulitzer prize poetry committee, 1990, Los Angeles Times Book award poetry committee, 1990, and chair, 1991; National Book award, 1994; Kingsley Tufts Poetry award, 1995. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1982, 1988; Lamont prize, 1987; Guggenheim fellowship, 1990; Rockefeller Foundation Residency fellowship, Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Lake Como, Italy, 1992; Iphigene Ochs Sulzburger Residency fellowship, Yaddo Corporation, 1993. Agent: Liz Darhansoff Literary Agency, 1220 Park Avenue, New York, 10128. Address: Department of Creative Writing, 144 Columbia Hall, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
The Buddha Bandits down Highway 99, with Alan Chong Lau and Lawson Fusao Inada. Mountain View, California, Buddhahead Press, 1978.
Yellow Light. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
The River of Heaven. New York, Knopf, 1988.
Play
Nisei Bar and Grill (produced Seattle, 1976).
Other
Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i. New York, Knopf, 1995.
Editor, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America. New York, Anchor Books, 1993.
Editor, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir by Wakako Yamauchi. New York, The Feminist Press, 1994.
Editor, Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America. New York, Anchor Books, 1995.
*Critical Studies: "A Vicious Kind of Tenderness: An Interview with Garrett Hongo" by Alice Evans, in Poets & Writers Magazine, September/October 1992; "Who You Are: Japanese American Poet Garrett Hongo's Search for Identity Reveals a World to Us All" by Anna Ganahl, in The Pitzer Participant, Summer 1994; by Mark Jarman, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 32 (2), Spring 1996; Garrett Hongo by Laurie Filipelli, Boise, Idaho, Boise State University Press, 1997.
Garrett Hongo comments:
My project as a poet has been motivated by a search for origins of various kinds, quests for ethnic and familial roots, cultural identity, and poetic inspiration, all ultimately somehow connected with my need for an active imaginative and spiritual life. One might get at these through the practice of formal religion or the contemplation of moral and even socioeconomic problems, but for me the way has led to the study and the desire to contact, through the writing of poetry, those places and peoples from which I have been separated either by force of history or of personality. I find the landscapes, folkways, and societies of Japan, Hawaii, and even southern California to continually charm and compel me to write about them and inform myself of their specificities. But this obsession with origin is more than a nostalgia or even a semilearned atavism, though these things certainly play their parts. It is rather a way to isolate and to uphold cultural and moral value in a confusing time and environment, accommodating what I know of tradition and history to contemporary circumstances. Still, it is not ultimately cultural archaeology that I want to undertake, but to produce something of traditional learning, spiritual value, and personal experience out of the cultural whirlwind I live in.
Historically I have been occupying an extremely privileged position that has allowed me the leisure to become somewhat educated and to indulge my instincts in creative writing. Two generations of my family labored as field hands on the Hawaiian sugar plantations and another at absurdly paralyzing occupations in the city in order to buy my way out. The 1960s boom in higher education, liberal federal loan and state scholarship programs, and the enlightened, equal opportunity-minded administration of California's then Governor Pat Brown got me to a fine private college where I learned good humanistic lessons alongside the children of the monied elite. Reagan and harder times ended those programs, but I had gotten my studies in by the time the corporate wolves took power. Had it not been so, I do not think I would have had the confidence and the background to go on to try and develop myself as a writer.
The encouragement of certain teachers was also vital. I owe enormous debts to those who taught me languages, history, oriental religions, and literature. But if I had not met the poets Bert Meyers, Donald Hall, C.K. Williams, and Charles Wright when I did, I am certain no poems would have ever come from me. Likewise, if Philip Levine had not been an example to me as a teacher and a poet, I doubt if I would have tried to become either.
My concerns as a poet have to do not so much with emotional authenticity—a murderer and a terrorist have that—but with emotional nobility of some kind, the idea that poems might help produce and reveal our "better nature," as Sidney once said in his Apology. It is an idea present in oriental philosophy too, the jen of Confucianism that was a notion of the innate moral and spiritual good in people that impressed Ezra Pound as one of the highest poetic values, and the idea of samadhi, or sensate and sentient calm, that we get from Buddhism. I do want things to be better somehow, if not in the world then at least within myself, though not only within myself, so that I might be more like the stillness that smooths the surface of a pond rather than the bullfrog that jumps into it.
And whom do I write for? It changes all the time and stays the same too. I write for the ambition I have for myself—to be a voice that I can listen to, that makes sense and raises my own bereft and mundane consciousness, that speaks to me as if it were the elder I have always wanted. And I write for all the people who might want the same thing, no matter what race, class background, or nation. And yet I write for certain "first" readers as well—my wife Cynthia Thiessen, the Nisei playwright and painter Wakako Yamauchi, the folks who raised me and whom I grew up with, and the company of the fine poets in my generation like Greg Pape, Edward Hirsch, Mark Jarman, and Arthur Smith.
Asians do read my work and I want them to as much as I ever did, as I am trying to write about us, the world we come from and live in, our histories and our spiritual ambitions.
Finally, I think I must say that I write for my father, Albert Kazuyoshi Hongo, in a very personal way. I want to be his witness, to testify to his great and noble life in struggle against anger, in struggle against his own loneliness and isolation for being a Hawaiian Japanese who emigrated to Los Angeles without much family or community. He was a great example to me of a man who refused to hate or, being different himself, to be afraid of difference, who accepted the friendship of all the strange and underprivileged ostracized by the rest of "normal" society—Vietnamese, Mexicans, southern blacks, reservation Indians relocated to the city—and I want my poems to be equal to his heart.
(1995) Volcano is a book of retreat and return, meditation on going home to a home I never knew, which is this volcano. And coming back to it, to the history of my family, coming back to that culture, the biology, the biota (the animal and plant life of a particular region considered as a total ecological entity), the rainforest, the volcano itself. It is nonfiction, not like John McPhee, more like Thoreau. In writing this book, the poetic form needed to expand for me. What I found to be the form was the Japanese nikki. It is a travel diary, poetic prose. We have examples in American literature in Moby Dick and Walden. In that vein I wrote this book.
* * *Garrett Hongo's voice is among a group of Asian-American poets who are increasingly making others in the literary community sit up and take note and to rethink what constitutes American literature. Growing up in Hawaii and Los Angeles as a Japanese-American in a predominately Euro-American culture, Hongo sees his work as a quest for history and an identity that allows him to feel that he belongs in his own country. His unique background, the precision of his perception, and his lyrical gift mark his growing ouevre, which includes the editorship of anthologies as well as the prose work Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (1995). The River of Heaven was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1987.
Hongo's poetry, which is a search for "the strange syllables that healed desire," heard in the Buddhist mantras of his youth, draws upon the rich tapestry of his Japanese-American ancestry as well as the landscapes of Hawaii and California, where he was raised. His poems are an investigation of cultural roots and their meaning for a poet of Japanese heritage in contemporary America. His work, in a plain style punctuated by bursts of lyricism, engages the difficulty of acculturation for urban immigrants—their poverty, boredom, and alienation—as well as such omnipresent features of contemporary American culture as television, movies, and Top 40 radio.
Hongo's tone is often one of supplication, his poems acts of communion with departed ancestors. "I want the dead beside me when I dance, to help me /flesh the notes of my song, to tell me it's all right," he explains in "O-Bon: Dance for the Dead." Hongo's determination to keep the past alive suggests a method for his poems, which often employ family history or the oral history of immigrants to create memorable personal narratives, as in "Cloud Catch":
And that's about all I do,
piecing the lives together,
getting the stories folks will tell me,
dust in the gleam of light
swirled with a cupped hand,
finding a few words.
Our shame, according to the poet, lies in our complicity in the "effacement" of the past, "the rough calligraphy /on rotting wood /Worm smooth and illegible" ("Ancestral Graves, Kahuku"), as in the conspiracy of silence surrounding the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
"Stepchild," in order to preserve and clarify, relates bitter tales of this disgraceful episode in American history, both general and specific. While the speaker observes that "the sun blonds nothing /but the sands outside my window," rage finally gives way to acceptance and determination:
Revenge blisters my tongue
works in these words, says,
"Teach a Blessingway."
Among Hongo's gallery of colorfully drawn personae, two stand out. "Pinoy at the Coming World" presents the testimony of an enterprising shopkeeper, one who has worked his way to a position of prosperity and respect within his community, attempting to cope with a flu epidemic that has devastated his town and threatens his family. After boasting about the esteem in which his customers hold him, the stunned Pinoy admits, "But none of us was ready for the flu that hit, /first the Mainland and all the reports of dead /on newspapers wrapped around the canned meats I stocked …" By the end of the poem, as his daughter nears "her time," Pinoy says, "I wanted to walk completely off plantation grounds /and get all the way out of town to where /sugar cane can't grow and no moon or stars /rose over pineapple fields." It soon becomes clear that Pinoy realizes his own life to be in danger:
I wanted the roar from the sea, from falling water,
and from the wind over mounds and stones
to be the echo of my own grief, keening within,
making pure my heart for the world I know is to come.
"Jigoku: On the Glamour of Self-Hate" is the extended reverie of self-purgation of an older man who, looking back on his life, loathes the trail of scheming and deception he has left behind. He imagines betraying his family identity to a nephew, who would himself imagine his uncle
discovered, finally, by some fishermen,
sliced from my clothes and under six fathoms
in the boat channel of Hilo Bay,
fused in a posture of supplication
and folded, as a fan is folded,
tucked to fit the trunk of my car,
tattoos at last flailed from my skin,
and, cut away from bone, the white threads of flesh
a gossamer I pass through from this world to the next.
Hongo's writing traces his identity not only to his Japanese heritage but also to contemporary American popular culture. "96 Tears" uses a memorable song as the sound track for a rumination upon adolescence that considers B movies and pornographic playing cards before concluding with an impassioned denunciation of prejudice. "The Cadence of Silk" shows a charming and promising side of Hongo, "hooked on the undulant ballet /of the pattern offence," as he applies his lyricism to basketball.
Hongo is at his best in two poems that attempt to understand his father's compulsive gambling. In "Winnings" he remembers that there would sometimes be money beyond the "grocery money and money to fix /the washer," and father and son would find the world bathed "in a brief symphony of candied light." "The Pier," one of his finest poems, sifts the reasons for his father's gambling:
For splendor, for his cheap fun, my father
would go to the track, lose himself in the crowd
milling around the paddock, weighing the odds
against the look of the horse, handicapping,
exchanging tips, rushing the window just before post-time
and rising to his feet for the stretch run,
beating cadence and whipping a gabardine pants leg
in rhythm and chant to the jockey's ride.
In Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i, Hongo presents a different father—silent, morose, a reader of philosophy. He identifies with the elder man's feelings of alienation and dislocation, and like others of his own generation he finds himself through the telling of his father's tortured story. The mature writer now realizes that his father had locked himself behind a psychic prison marked by half-spoken whispers about the "Camps," prejudice, and hostile coworkers—the crime of being Japanese-American. In Volcano Hongo passionately re-creates the Hawaii and California of not just his father but also his grandfather in an attempt to give them voice, to reclaim these lost generations in a new history of America. In the course of doing so Hongo stakes his own claim to the past and the land. He finds his love for the natural life of Hawaii, his creative and personal inspiration in the primal, pulsating force of the living volcano.
Hongo's writing demonstrates a steady progression. The River of Heaven is less self-absorbed than its predecessor, Yellow Light. His poems enact the dramas the poet has envisaged as necessary for the imaginative life of his father, becoming for the reader a "sequence of splendid events." As Maxine Hong Kingston has put it, "To read his poems is to know one's own ordinary secret world worthy of song."
—Robert Gaspar and
Ruth Y. Hsu