Garrett Hongo, Hawaiian-born poet of Japanese descent and raised in Los Angeles, came to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts as part of this month’s Third Thursday poetry event, the last of the Fall season.
“When Garrett was featured in the acclaimed PBS television series by Bill Moyers, The Power of the Word, that episode was entitled “Ancestral Voices and the Voices of Memory,” said Third Thursday event coordinator Ken Autrey. “I can hardly think of a better way to characterize his work as a whole.”
Much of Hongo’s poetry dealt with his family’s checkered past and the struggles they had faced as Japanese Americans in the wake of World War II.
“I was raised by my grandparents, blessed because my parents worked, and after supper he’d have his little cup of Four Roses and tell me his stories," Hongo said."He was arrested on Dec. 8 [1941] by the FBI and taken away for questioning in Honolulu Harbor, and then sent to the mainland to a train station, and then to a place where they had cattle, and then to an army barracks, where it was very cold, and then to the Navajo nation in Arizona, where he was imprisoned for three years."
Hongo said his relatives told him his grandfather embellishes stories.
“After those times I remember my mother and my aunts and my uncles would always say ‘Your grandfather doesn’t really remember things right. He never was arrested. He was never taken away. He just made all that up,'" Hongo said.
Hongo said much of his poetry deals with music, partially because his brother is a blues musician.
The event was the last Third Thursday this year. The series will return in January with Georgia poet James Davis May.
Do you like this story? The Plainsman doesn't accept money from tuition or student fees, and we don't charge a subscription fee. But you can donate to support The Plainsman.
