Coral Road: Poems

Garrett Hongo's long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a.
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Coral Road: Poems

Skip to content Skip to search. Physical Description xi, p. Language English View all editions Prev Next edition 2 of 2. Check copyright status Cite this Title Coral road: Author Hongo, Garrett Kaoru, Edition 1st ed. Subjects American poetry -- 21st century.

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Poetry -- 21st century. Contents Machine generated contents note: I had no trouble from the Bamboo Ridge group until I published with Knopf. I also wrote against nationalist unisonance as a reactionary myth in the Intro to The Open Boat , an anthology of Asian American poetry, in which I tried to argue against a qualifying politics and for diversity—political, aesthetic, cultural, and even ethnic—within the category of AA poetry. Moreover, there are also at least three other ways to respond to assumptions about authenticity vs.

These condemnations and vilifications are almost ritual, marking intruders and interlopers, branding them, excluding them on the order of Oedipus being cast out of Thebes as a poisonous presence. Nationalisms identify a narrative that there is both a history and an imaginary contemporaneity that are held in common by a group, that those not holding to this narration or bearing its marks are outside the nation.

Whether one shares the history is nearly meaningless as one must also dwell in the imaginary contemporaneity as well—in other words, be in sympathy and communication with those who identify themselves as that nation. Deviations, particularly those that advance any competing or more complex narrations, are suspect, threatening, and potentially invalidating of the narrative of the nation.


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In crafting the poetic representations of history that constitute the poems of Coral Road , how did you take the historical source material you gathered to an imaginative poetic space? They were a tough, stoical lot, marrying themselves to hard lives on land they occupied for three generations, rootlessly, as the land was never theirs and could never be.

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What I have of our time there are fragments of stories, songs my grandparents sang washing dishes, a meager handful of documents and a few phrases in Hawaiian and Japanese, and the sparkle of the sea or on the tassels of sugar cane as I drive by whenever I take a survey of those old seaside lands along what is now Kamehameha Highway. I am not a native son nor prodigal one, consequently, but a kind of swallow who has lost his mud home on an island thought by so many to be a paradise. And I am there too—a fourth-generation American hankering for these lives to be known and celebrated, for the music of my language to sing of them.

The historical source material?

A Conversation with Garrett Hongo

Just that—as grout and stone for the imaginative seawall I was building to protect my house of histories and mementos from being eroded by time. You have spoken of your unwavering poetic interest in origin, descent, cultural specificity, and the notion of the imaginary homeland. Where do you think this interest comes from and what techniques have you employed to represent it in your poetry? They all helped me, encouraged me, released my imagination into the scraps and shards of stories about the plantation past so that I could occupy the interstices between them with my own lyricism and make of them a continuous feeling of loyalty, love, and homage.

As far as technique goes. I think about things a great, long time before I compose.

I tell myself these stories each time I pass a stand of ironwood trees in Kahuku, every time I pilgrimage to the Japanese graveyard in Kahuku. I try to live in them, you see. Why you see the Nisei G. But, the big thing is to have what to write in terms of subject and feeling and sweep of imagination.

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Technique is always there. Written in the voices of Americans whose loyalty to the flag is in question due to their ethnic origin, these poems also consider how subsequent generations are touched and shaped by the emotional fallout of war. It is difficult to read these meditations on WWII without drawing contemporary parallels to the War on Terror and its effects on Muslim American citizens.

Deep Deep Deep

Can you talk a bit about how you see the relationship between past and present in Coral Road? I was just on the phone with my old and dear friend, the poet Edward Hirsch , and we were talking about just this sort of thing—how history and its devastations, its trials of the human soul, have given us great lessons that survive in the poetry from these times as repositories of human wisdom.

In one of his tragedies, Aeschylus writes: He invokes their spirit to both console and counsel him through his own travail and isolation, a detainee in a Justice Department camp. He reaches out and conjures their spirits to lend him their wisdom, their patience, and their resolve to continue—to prevail, as Faulkner said.

Coral road : poems / Garrett Hongo. - Version details - Trove

I write so much about the past because I wish to be its child. I look upon the lives and spirits of my grandfather, Hideo Kubota, and father, Albert Hongo, as exemplary.


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    • To me, they were Titans who walked the earth, who fought through an elemental history in order that I could be their mortal son. I want to pay them homage, I want to live up to them, I want them to welcome me in heaven when my time comes. Do you have a specific routine that you like to follow when you sit down to write? If so, could you describe it for us? I had these facts, these situations, and I simply wrote. Jeremy marked it as to-read Aug 31, Francisco marked it as to-read Nov 18, Jonina-Lee added it Jan 14, Emily added it Feb 08, Emily added it Apr 07, Norman Sinel added it Apr 12, Meg Eden added it Dec 01, David marked it as to-read Jan 24, Anna marked it as to-read Jul 15, UTK in the Library marked it as to-read Jul 18, Terry Everett marked it as to-read Oct 19, Cari marked it as to-read Apr 08, John Takami added it Jul 14, Caitlin Etherton marked it as to-read Jul 25, Akemi marked it as to-read May 21, Richard Downey is currently reading it May 25, Parag marked it as to-read Oct 05, Sophie marked it as to-read Oct 16, Rebecca marked it as to-read Dec 28, Shashank Singh marked it as to-read Dec 11, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

    Books by Garrett Hongo.