Garrett Hongo in conversation with Brenda Hillman
City Lights and Alfred Knopf celebrate the publication of
Ocean of Clouds: Poems
by Garrett Hongo
published by Alfred Knopf
In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Garrett Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach.
In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“An oil slick from a yacht . . . / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai‘ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book— / . . . it is love’s body on which you write a page of kisses . . .”
These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.
Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi, and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. His most recent books are The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo, The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays, and Coral Road: Poems. He has been the recipient of several awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hongo lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Brenda Hillman, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2016 to 2022, has written, edited, and cotranslated more than two dozen books, most recently, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality. She is a Professor Emerita at St. Mary’s College of California and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation