In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 253.
It’s been remarked that lines in many of my poems are unusually long and rolling, but no one’s really asked me how I came to compose this way. The short answer is that it “evolved” as I kept writing, perhaps influenced by my writing the prose poetry book Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (Knopf, 1995). Sonny Mehta, my editor on the book, after reading the first complete draft (which was over four hundred pages), remarked, “Garrett, now I know why it took you so long to write this book. It’s not prose is it?”
I think I heard a long, loping syntactic structure that harked back to nineteenth-century American English in writing by Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne. But I’d also heard the classical Japanese of Yoshida Kenkō and Kamo no Chōmei, a swirling, dreamlike syntax. This esoteric rhythm is what I was chasing in terms of lushness for a book set in a tropical rainforest next to a living volcano.
Perhaps more directly, though, my long lines grew out of more recent American models—the margin-to-margin, stretched lines of C. K. Williams and the jewel-like stanzas of Charles Wright, lazy rivers of language that give way to brilliant cataracts of syntactic compression. Both of these poets were my teachers during the first year of my MFA and both were writing astonishing books, full of stylistic breakthroughs in lines as long as Whitman’s, though dissimilar from each other in tone, diction, and antecedents. While Williams in Tar (Random House, 1983) was colloquial and offhand, unfailingly urban, full of a wan humor and scathing political critique, Wright in The Southern Cross (Random House, 1981) was descriptive and pastoral, his lyric arc poised on the transcendental, his imagery incandescent. Here is Williams in his poem “Hog Heaven”:
It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.
It stinks in the mansions and it stinks in the shacks and the carpeted offices,
In the beds and the classrooms and out in the fields where there’s no one.
It just stinks. Sniff and feel it come up: it’s like death coming up.
Take one foot, ignore it long enough, leave it on the ground long enough
because you’re afraid to stop, even to love, even to be loved,
it’ll stink worse than you can imagine, as though the whole air was meat
pressing on your eyelids […]
And Wright in “Hawaii Dantesca”:
White-sided flowers are thrusting up on the hillside,
blank love letters from the dead.
It’s autumn, and nobody seems to mind.
Or the broken shadows of those missing for hundreds of years
Moving over the sugar cane
like storks, which nobody marks or mends.
This is the story line.
You can tell how both Williams and Wright “hear” an extended line, yet nothing sounds extraneous or loses impetus and flow. There is a sustained muscularity in each of their styles. The sentence rolls even over enjambments, the rhythm assured, even graceful. While C. K. is resolute, hectoring, determined as a long-distance runner, C. W. is deft, goat-footed, as though dancing a baroque gigue. They both inspired my own ear, as I began to hear my own extensions of sound over a sinuous line, fitted to my own subjects, my elegiac themes and ancestral losses:
The T’ang Chinese did it best, a poet’s solo
in progressions gathered from wilderness,
while he stood beside the long, vertical scroll of a cataract
hung by a natural god,
its script the Heraclitean flow of the Way.
Or sitting on mats at tea with a friend and fellow bureaucrat
posted on borderlands far from the capital of their educations,
the two of them engaged in brisk repartee,
citing amiably from “The Book of Songs,”
their light banter a fellowship of otium,
the lyric axis of contemplation,
while the world persists awhirl in famine, regional war,
or harvests of plenty.
The long line inspires an extended throw of thought, I think, digs deeper into the character of one’s own mind and quiets the chattering, social personality. It asks for that voice of calm or resolve closest to the heart. I encourage you to try it, to hear your voice reach over a long, humane meditation without pause for breath until you have uttered at least eight or ten words. Then another ten. And another. Say ten lines this way. And then ten more. Pick a topic of mystery, or a problem that demands you treat it with a powerful patience. Ask yourself, what is the sound of crystalline snow falling into a silver bowl? Why does my daughter not write me letters while away at college? Hear yourself try to speak in consolation to a child burned by fire set by bombings in Birmingham, in Gaza…. And fail. And then speak to that.
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.
This excerpt of “On Emptiness” is reprinted from Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025) with permission from Knopf.
image credit: Paul Blessington