In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Garrett Hongo discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for May, Garrett Hongo. Garrett is the author, most recently, of Ocean of Clouds.

Garrett, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Garrett Hongo: Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.

Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for May?

Hongo: Well, I have to say, first of all, I was very excited to be asked, and I started dreaming up a list of my favorite poets. It was kind of long, and I went around rereading a lot of their books, the poets on the list that I most admired that are sort of in my mind and my heart. And I shared the list with a couple of former students, MFA students of mine, and got a little bit of feedback, just to get a different perspective and then I narrowed it down. It took a lot of time, I think maybe a month, not sure exactly.

There wasn’t any kind of concerted agenda on my part, except that I wanted to pick strong work. And though I tried not to ignore things like diversity, gender, and all that, it really kind of just worked out that I had eleven men and eleven women at the end; I had a lot of poets of color. I had generational differences and all that. I think I included African Americans, Asian Americans, an Arab American, an Hispanic, and an Indigenous Hawaiian, and several others that might be considered white, though, you know, I don’t really think like that, I got to tell you. It’s probably too long to explain. Anyway, that’s how it ended up being what it did. And then I guess I had to then try to solicit these people to get me poems, which sometimes was difficult because these are, some of these people are very well known, and having a slate of three or four poems unpublished is a little tough to get.

Poets.org: If you could direct readers to one poem, or more than one poem in our extant curation on Poets.org, what would you choose and why?

Hongo: Okay, now that I can’t do; I got [sic] to choose two. I’ve thought about this and I just can’t ignore both sides of my love or both sides of my heart. I would choose one poem by my teacher, Charles Wright, “Body and Soul II,” which is oddly truncated on your website, but the audio has the full poem on it. It’s a great poem of peace and contemplation. And the other poem I would choose is by a hero of mine, Derek Walcott. It is “The Sea is History,” and that’s fully there on the website.

Poets.org: Speaking of teachers, some in our audience might not know that the esteemed poet Robert Hayden was also one of your teachers and a mentor of yours.

Hongo: Yeah.

Poets.org: You wrote about this in your 2022 memoir, The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo. Would you like to talk a little bit about Robert Hayden and your relationship with him as well as his influence on your work?

Hongo: He was a very gentle influence. When I arrived at the University of Michigan, I was a student in Japanese language and literature, a PhD program, but they allowed you to have electives, and I chose to take poetry electives in the English department. I chose a workshop, or something like that, and I had room to take an independent study and I asked Robert Hayden, whom I need to be there, I mean, the great Robert Hayden, if he would accept me as an independent study student. And I proposed several things and he just nodded. I remember he asked me to his office, he just nodded and said, “We shall read Keats.” And I went, “Okay.” If he said, “We should study penguins,” I would have done that too.

And then he said we’d meet at his house on the porch every Monday afternoon. And it was a ways away from where my rooming house was, so I borrowed a bike, and I would ride over to his place with my little basket of Keats, and I would also read criticism. That was on my own, he hadn’t assigned any criticism, but I would read it; and then I’d sit on his porch and we’d sit down and his wife would come out and bring us tea and crackers and little cookies and things like that. And as it got colder, I noticed she’d put a little sweater on the teapot, which I’d never seen before, it’s called a tea cozy, but, you know, I didn’t know anything like that coming from L.A. and Hawaii.

He would have me read the Keats aloud and that would be the bulk of what we did actually, is before we discussed any of the poems, he had me read them aloud. But he wouldn’t just let me read them, he would actually stop me and say things like, “Not so fast. Savor the words. Feel the tone, hear the undertone of its meaning.” And then gradually, he slowed me down so that my mind would match the utterance in that it neither [sic] raced ahead. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, swimming underwater and allowing the pulse of your body to determine the movement. He taught me about what the poet, what the critic, what Keats called the better nature and he always tried to encourage me to come from that. So there were like lessons in elocution, I suppose; recitation, I suppose. But more than all those things was living in the syntax and the metaphors and the beauty of the Keatsian language. That’s what it was like.

And then, you know, he was so starkly beautiful—big, tall man wearing a yellow bow tie [and] dress shirt and sort of wavy hair, which he put pomade or Brilliantine in. And this was the image always in my memory of Mr. Hayden. I always kind of thought of him as sort of a sunflower, a benign sunflower, rising over me as I lived in poetry. That’s what it was like for me. I can't say enough, you know. I just can’t. So I’ll stop here.

Poets.org: That’s such a lovely image, a sunflower rising over you. Who or what are you reading right now?

Hongo: Well, I’m rereading Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi in a version, a translation, written by Nobuyuki Yuasa, which is, I think, the Penguin version. It’s the version I [have] had since 1972 frankly when I actually walked the Narrow Road myself or half of it. And also, I’m rereading The Bounty by Derek Walcott and Charles Wright’s Bye-and-Bye: Selected [Late] Poems. Those are the three books I brought with me. I’m here on a retreat at Villa Montalvo in California trying to write a section of a new book, and that’s all I brought with me, and that’s been enough.

Poets.org: Can we perhaps talk a little bit about that new book and other things that you might be working on in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Hongo: Well, I’m working on a book of travel poems, but they’re not just travel, they’re not just landscape travel; although of course I depend on those images, they’re cultural travel, they’re spiritual travel, movement across landscapes, but also, just like Bashō, Oku no Hosomichi, a movement towards the interior, you know, the clichés of the self and all that. I’m trying to settle within my soul at the point of life that I am now, having had numerous experiences and lived a while, and trying to sort of make a collection of consciousness over the travel that I’ve made culturally, which is to say from Hawaii to Los Angeles to what might be considered an elite education and a consideration of literature throughout all my adult life. Many people don’t know, but I’m very traditional as a teacher. I teach a seminar in poetic genres and I begin with Theocritus and Ovid and Virgil and Horace, and then I jump to the Renaissance and through the Romanticism and Victorianism and then ultimately the modern and contemporary.

I see the production of poetry as an effort of human culture that’s persistent, that’s been uninterrupted, that has had a great repository of human care—not only in the Western tradition, but in the Eastern as well, as I know Chinese poetry and Japanese as well. And I go to that as a kind of … literary wellspring and I feel affinities, from Frost to Theocritus, from Walcott to Virgil, from Charles Wright to Du Fu. And that’s where I live in my poetic soul, and I try to bring my students along in that. I’ll make one comment: My graduate students are always more than willing to follow me. The undergraduate students are unbelieving; this seems like a completely foreign culture to them and possibly useless. And so I won’t say they’re intractable, but they are certainly resistant. And it’s a contrast I feel, between what I would call general education and the specificities of people who want to become poets.

Poets.org: That disinterest, unfortunately, is not surprising to me. Do you think that there has been a de-emphasis on the importance of the classics, not just in the Western tradition, but in general in contemporary education?

Hongo: Well, there’s been a … foreclosure of depth. Like in photography, you can have depth of field, and you can have something with close focus with an obscured background, a bokeh, as they say. I think because of media, particularly digital media, the immediate has become so powerful and immersive that human consciousness now, let’s just even say among the young, has become so occupied with what's in front of us and them that the background of human history has blurred and lost significance or lost their attention.

But in terms of literature, you know, you just can’t do it that way, I don’t think. I do think there’s a disconnect in the sense that some younger people think of poetry as not a connection with the tradition of human culture, but an idea of sort of specific self-expression, and that self is highly individuated, and you might even call narcissistic, as it were, and not participating in a general reach of consistent awareness of timeless emotion, let’s say. That’s the biggest difference I think. The other thing that sort of comes through is, oddly people think of poetry, or many people, particularly among undergraduates that I teach, as a means towards becoming a star with slam poetry and all kinds of things; that a lot of it is about compelling attention, and that aesthetic is sort of antithetical to the tradition that I think I try to come from.

Poets.org: Well, we can only hold out hope, right? [laughs]

Hongo: I don’t know that I’m completely right. Yeah, you know, but I’m stuck with myself. [laughs]

Poets.org: Yes. Well, we are very happy again to have you as Guest Editor for May, and thank you for taking this time with me and especially sharing those memories about Mr. Hayden.

Hongo: Well, it’s a pleasure to remember. I still feel like I’m twenty-two years old when I talk about him. I feel like an ephebe. I feel very humble.

Poets.org: Thank you so much, Garrett.

Hongo: Thank you, Mary.