Ocean of Clouds : Poems

Reading Ocean of Clouds, Garrett Hongo’s rich fourth collection of poems, it’s evident that Hongo is one of those poets who can engage all our senses with just a few lines. He conjures sublime collisions of sound, texture, movement and emotion, limning multifaceted forms of beauty like the motion of a hand writing kanji, the “prehensile” quality of a Michael Jackson song or the wonder of a longstanding artistic friendship. Hongo, winner of the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry (past recipients of which include Gwendolyn Brooks and W.S. Merwin), has also written a “memoir in stereo,” A Perfect Sound, and several poems in this collection vividly depict listening to jazz or Motown. In “Sonny Stitt at the Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach, 1970,” Hongo describes seeing the great bebop saxophonist play in a club. Part of what’s so memorable about this poem is the way it takes its narrative shape from the evolution of Hongo’s feelings about this show over the course of his life. In 1970, there’s the shock of the incongruity of Stitt’s physical presence, weakened by pneumonia, with his stature in a young Hongo’s mind, which provokes “pity, a strange and intimate residue of awe transubstantiated.” Then, after Stitt is heckled to play songs from a certain record and refuses, saying he regrets having made it, Hongo cuts to himself listening to the record, Mr. Bojangles, observing how its cover portrait of Stitt and melodies are “cartoon” and “falsely agreeable”—belittling instead of honoring the artist. The poem turns further when Hongo continues “I’ve since felt the same, / society preferring my caricature to the real of any being.” Though on that night in 1970, Hongo had only his intuitive response to Stitt’s steely scorn, we, as readers, are given the full arc of how this evening has returned to the poet over the years, which is what makes the ending of the poem, when Stitt wrecks the audience with his singular takes on How High the Moon and ’Round Midnight, so killer. Later in the collection, some of the most remarkable poems are those about Hongo’s grandfather, Hideo Kubota. In 1941, immediately after Pearl Harbor, Kubota was taken from his home in Laʻie, Hawaiʻi, by the FBI, and kept in detention for over three years for no crime other than being the son of Japanese immigrants and having been educated in Japan. Of this undeniable familial and national tragedy, Hongo says “Survivor’s guilt? Not me.” Instead, he resoundingly answers his grandfather’s call to tell his story with these beautiful lines, and with his decades of teaching poetry to students on whose faces he sees “Kubota’s dream for them . . . the tail of the comet that is the human soul / furling in and among them like a banner of stars.” Ocean of Clouds is a book as supernal and reflective as its title suggests.