Garrett Hongo (photo by Steven Varni)
By: David Mura for JSTOR
I Hear America Singing
Japanese American poet Garrett Hongo is a guiding spirit to a glorious cacophony, an exuberant collective thrum made of different tongues and peoples.
I’ve admired Garrett Hongo, the great Japanese American poet since I first read “Yellow Light” in The New Yorker in 1980.
One arm hooked around the frayed strap
Of a tar-black patent-leather purse,
The other cradling something for dinner:
Fresh bunches of spinach from a J-Town yaoya,
Sides of split Spanish mackerel from Alviso’s,
Maybe a loaf of Langendorf; she steps
Off the hissing bus at Olympic and Fig,
Set amid Los Angeles’s dazzling array of cultures and peoples, in a dense, working-class neighborhood near what is known today as Koreatown, Hongo’s poem offers many of the themes and first fledglings of what have become enduring linguistic gifts. Though it doesn’t indicate this outright, the woman described in “Yellow Light” is Hongo’s mother, who appears again in “Her Makeup Face,” a poem included in his forthcoming fourth book of poetry, The Ocean of Clouds.
Please visit JSTOR Daily for the rest of the profile of Oregon poet Garrett Hongo.
Poet, memoirist, and audio writer Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai’i and grew up there and in Los Angeles. He earned his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from the University of California-Irvine, where he studied with the poets C.K. Williams, Howard Moss, and Charles Wright. His poetry collections are Yellow Light (1982), The River of Heaven (1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (2011). In non-fiction, he has published The Mirror Diary (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995), perhaps his best known work. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a frequent contributor of audio articles to Soundstage! Ultra and lives in Eugene, where he is Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon.
