In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 251.
In his 1920 book Instigations, Ezra Pound describes Yeats’s creative process, noting that Yeats was always writing with “a chune in his ‘ead.” Pound quotes Yeats as saying that he would get a “chune” in his head and that the words would then “go into it,” or if they didn’t, they would “stick out and worry him.”
I have long referenced this quick account by one master about the method of another, thinking it sounded much like recommendations of the T’ang Dynasty Chinese poets, who wrote to ancient melodies, setting their words to the rhythm, cadence, and sequence of notes they’d inherited from the long Chinese tradition of poetic composition. Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976), also said she wrote her first two books adhering to the cadence of Chinese poetry—specifically, a Chinese translation of Virgil’s Aeneid from which she took her strophic measure, her poetic style of narration, and even the very structure of her linguistic imagination.
I myself found my first genuine poem, or it found me while in college, after a night of language study when I was practicing writing ideograms in vertical columns on a sheet of notebook paper. I filled pages and pages with Japanese characters—sometimes a single character for an entire page—finding a rhythm to the numerous strokes I made in pen or pencil, and then reproducing each one according to a kind of song. Sometimes, while doing this calligraphy practice, I found it helpful to drink a cup of cheap rosé wine—Mateus from Portugal was one early choice, Almaden from the California coast another. Ever pretentious or in search for some cultural connection, I used a Japanese bizenyaki teacup to make a bit of ceremony out of it.
When it was almost midnight, an image floated into my imagination: my maternal grandfather poring over some kind of text in Japanese, cupping his hand around a single character on its open page. It was about my Japanese name, given to me at birth, yet never uttered in my lifetime by anyone. My grandfather was saying it, where it came from, circling the sixteen strokes of its ideogram in the cradle his hand made over the Japanese text. He was turning toward me, silently beckoning, and it was clear he was imparting a dreamlike message, something essential to my being. There were no words in this mental travel of mine, but I quickly put words to it in my imagination. I hurried to move away from the kanji I’d been writing and turned toward capturing the vision. It came to me in the cadence of the calligraphy I’d been writing, in the varied and musically organized strokes I’d been scoring onto paper.
Issei:
First-Generation Japanese American
An old man turning pages of books
Left to right. He reads backwards,
Up and down, kanji and kana script,
Over and over again. He does not see
The old words any more. The meanings
Lost, he pauses on a page and curls
His fingers, surrounding one lone
Character in the cradle of his hand.
He turns, knowing that I watch him
And pity the sleep in his eyes.
This is your name, he says,
We take it from son of prince.
Kaoru is your name.
I ran from my dorm room across the hall to my classmate’s door, pounded on it, asking to come in. I knew he’d be studying late—a Religion major, he was my best friend, and he, too, wanted to become a poet. I showed him what I’d written and he fell into reading it without question, then turned to me and said it was the best poem I’d written, that no one else could’ve written it. I knew it was true. I’d fumbled into other things—imitations of John Berryman’s Dream Songs, mostly, and other stray attempts—but nothing of emotion, of that spell I felt, that legacy of feeling passed along to me by my grandfather. “Issei” set the tone for all of my work to come.
What I’d done was fallen into a kind of dream, a state between sleep and waking where the imagination dwelled and a normally unheard spirit-music roamed. It was in this liminal space where I discovered the ordered, rhythmic sequence that we call the poetic line.
But how can this method be applied to every writer’s distinct imagination and practice? How can one poet tell another how to capture their own “chune”?
I believe writers must tap into the rhythmic silence of their own imagination. It is the emergence of spirit. That music comes only through a kind of pure, even disciplined listening to one’s soul. It is the pulse of the heart speaking to the stilled mind, unconfused by the multitudinous distractions of material existence. You have to quiet yourself to hear it. It has to call to you. And you have to listen.
Garrett Hongo was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up there and in Los Angeles. His new book is Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025). Other collections are Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982), The River of Heaven (Knopf, 1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (Knopf, 2011). In 2022, he was given the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.
“Issei: First Generation Japanese American” is reprinted from Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982) with permission from Wesleyan University Press.
image credit: María Cosmen