Hi, you're listening to The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker

magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to pick a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

Then, they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Garrett Hongo, the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, including

Ocean of Clouds and The Perfect Sound, a Memoir and Stereo.

He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts,

and he's a distinguished professor

at the University of Oregon. Welcome, Garrett. Thank you so much for joining me.

Hey, thanks for having me, Kevin. A long time. Yeah, it's great seeing you. So the first poem you've

chosen to read is Tang Notebook by Charles Wright. What drew you to this particular poem while you're looking over the archive?

Well, there were so many poems of Charles's to choose from as he's contributed so regularly and often to the New Yorker.

But this one was particularly compelling for me because it was part of my own making, I feel.

Charles was my teacher, as so many people know, and an inspiration to me. I deliberately went to

Irvine to study with him because I recognized from having read China Trace, an earlier volume,

that he knew Chinese poetry of the Tong Dynasty in his bones and blood. And so did I

admired it, not only from some English translations, but having studied a bit of it

at the University of Michigan when I studied Chinese and Japanese. It just was the most

amazing experience being Charles's student and then witnessing his poetry as it was coming out

while I was his student. He wrote the Southern Cross, which is a magnificent volume of great poetry.

And then he followed it with the other side of the river from which Tang Notebook comes.

And in it, he just expands the canvas, as it were, in homage to the Chinese poets, but to poetry and the activity of poetry, the exercise of the

imagination, the expansiveness of poetic mind to capture landscape and feeling from the landscape,

...