In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 252.
Many writers approach composing poems in traditional forms the same way jazz musicians might approach an improvisational solo based on the chord changes of a set tune. For example, in “So What” by the Miles Davis Quintet, the musicians first go through a few repetitions of the melody, stating the “head” of the tune, then quickly open it up for a succession of soloists to create on-the-spot improvisations based on the tune’s harmonic implications—thus “taking off” from the head melody. In much the same manner, a sonneteer might take the standard stanzaic meter and rhyme scheme of the form and compose accordingly, making up the language of the poem as they go along.
But I have a different method, one I derived from studying how Elizabeth Bishop developed her scheme for writing the sestina and how W. B. Yeats composed many of his poems in stanzaic rhymes. Rather than making things up on the fly, I “plot” my rhymes ahead of time, choose specific words that, together, imply a kind of ghost narrative among them. Bishop chose a three/two/one end-word scheme for her poem “A Miracle for Breakfast”—three words for intimate items before her, two words for faraway landscape items, and one metaphysical “joker,” or variable word. Her three words were: coffee, crumb, and balcony; her two words were sun and river; and her one word was miracle. One can easily discern that there is a story implied by the relationship among these words. Someone on a balcony having a continental breakfast looks out to the sun rising over a river and feels it’s a miracle revealing itself before her.
Likewise, from reading in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, I speculate that Yeats plotted the rhyme words of his stanzas in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” ahead of composing the complete poem. Perhaps he chose Innisfree, made, honey-bee, and glade before he wrote the full stanza. Then, he may have chosen slow, sings, glow, and wings for his second stanza. For the third, I suspect he plotted out day, shore, grey, and core. Or did he come up with “core” only after going through the rest and genuinely “improvising” it as the most fitting to close his poem? In my own practice, this blend of planning and improvisation often leads to poems that please me best.
For example, in composing the title poem of my last collection, Ocean of Clouds, I had a vague idea for a poem about my childhood on the windward side of Oʻahu. To start, I simply generated a chain of three to five rhyme-words jotted in pencil on Post-its and hoped I’d find a way to combine them into formal quatrains: chorus-know us-enormous-husk-dusk, flowers-hours-showers-fathers; store-chore-more-door, near-clear-hear-father-year; arms-farms-alarms-cairns, travel-level-revel-hassle-castle; root-shoot-dissolute-barefoot-suits, moss-rocks-loss-tossed; sift-quick-drift-lift-cliffs, dreaming-weaving-steering-swimming-heaving; seawrack-black-shacks-stacks, rain-disdain-main-campaign-elation-celebration; here-sphere, praise-days. Then I wove them, improvising lines and syntactic clauses into a poem with my language skills. I admit that I chose them already half-hearing how I might weave them into the quatrains and sentences I eventually came up with. It’s part of training the imagination to “hear” narrative, syntactical, and song-rhyme potentials before uttering or writing them. After all, a poem is a linguistic and chimeric being that finds its associative and sequential chain within the abstract capabilities of the poetic mind.
An Ocean of Clouds
I sing for clouds, constant rains, a fern chorus
of things forgotten, ginger flowers
of sadness my mother bore, enormous
hollows of the family’s past, my father
the dutiful son come to run the store
by the volcano, called by his father
promising a new life, its open door
that swung shut after barely a year.
They left, me still a newborn in their arms,
wailing in complaint for the swift travel,
headed to Kahuku, the new truck farms,
old plantation, and its steel sugar castle.
I grew to six there, a boy barefoot
on dirt and gravel roads, green temple moss
by the graveyard. There were shorebirds in suits
of slanting rain, a gray-brown surf pebble-tossed,
not fit for swimming, a tired sandspit’s drift
that marked the margin of all our dreaming.
And what was that? The green folds of cliffs
chanted our imagined names, caught winds heaving
an ocean of clouds that piled like seawrack
muffling the mill’s whistle, windrows of rain
gathered upon the mountain’s emerald stacks,
the black crown of the day’s celebration.
Hidden within the sighing sugarcane, here
I first raised my voice in harmless praise.
I lifted my eyes to the moon’s white sphere
And sang a song I hoped would bless all my days.
Plotting out formal elements can help ease and make for more fun in composing a poem—the chimeric being finding its footing and realizing its ghostly potential in the sounds you make.
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.
“An Ocean of Clouds” is reprinted from Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) with permission from Knopf.
image credit: Timur Garifov