by Joshua Robbins

From the beginning, Garrett Hongo stressed lineage with statements like, “Donald Justice taught Charles, Charles taught me, and now I’m trying to teach you the same shit, ya dig?”, and in his recent collection of essays, The Mirror Diary, Garrett writes about his admission to the MFA program at Irvine in 1979: “When I got a call from Charles [Wright], inviting me, I could hardly believe my luck. It was early spring in Seattle and the cherries were just starting to bloom. Charles on the phone sounded like Southern Comfort tasted—smooth, slow, and sweet. I hadn’t expected him to sound so . . . Tennessee! But I loved it.”

Reading this, I couldn’t help but remember my own admission call: When I got the call from Garrett, inviting me, I could hardly believe my luck. It was early spring in Spokane and the crocuses were just poking up through snow slush. Garrett on the phone sounded like a preacher and a gangster, like he could jump through the phone and bless me or cut me or both: “Listen,” he said, “No one wants you here but me. I can hear something in your music. So, you think you can cut it?” “Yes,” I replied, feigning confidence. “Good,” he said. “Don’t fuck it up.” And he hung up. But I loved it, and him.

I was fortunate to be Garrett’s assistant upon my arrival at the University of Oregon and I recall walking into his office for the first time. He immediately took me to a picture of the poet Bert Meyers, his undergraduate poetry teacher, which hung on the wall to the right of the open window behind his desk, and he spoke at length about Meyers’s generosity and warmth and his belief in Garrett’s potential. This was, I think, the first lesson Garrett instilled in me: you must honor your teachers for they are your poetic lineage.

My education in terms of the poetic tradition was conducted outside the classroom as much, if not more, as it was inside. I’d anxiously show up to Garrett’s office, ready to present what extracurricular reading he’d assigned. Sitting across from Garrett, who leaned back in a chair which probably cost as much as my yearly graduate stipend, his desk between us piled high with Keats biographies, books on Italian Renaissance painters, notes corresponding to his innumerable projects, I would do my best to explicate the texts assigned without sounding like a total asshole, which is really a testament to how much Garrett, in his way, cares about and respects his students. He gives you an opportunity. It’s up to you to take it. And if you do, you’re either successful and the lessons continue, or they don’t. But at the very least, you always know where you stand.

My first lesson in the tradition began with a phone call at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, the first week of the semester: “Yes, this is Garrett Hongo. Read Dante’s letter to Can Grande della Scalla. Got that? See me Monday.” And that was it. No time for questions or reply. Was this a prank call? Some kind of hazing? Other Saturday night calls would follow: “Yeah, this is Garrett Hongo. Read ‘The Wrack of the Deutschland’ and talk to me about Hopkins’ metric tension on Monday.” “Yeah, this is Garrett Hongo. Read the Pisan Cantos and talk to me about Pound’s use of light and also Charles Wright’s.” And there were also the afternoons where I stood in his office as he read or recited poems and then quizzed me on their measure. “You gotta hear it,” he’d say. “Many are chosen, few are called,” which was something Charles Wright had told him. The lesson, again: respect for lineage and for the tradition, knowing your place. Garrett never offered an invitation nor an explicit reason for these outside assignments. Like all great teachers, he recognized a hunger and he fed it. Quite simply, Garrett showed me how to take my learning seriously, that there were benchmarks to be met, or, as he said during one of our meetings, staring at me with his eyes open wide in extreme seriousness, “There’s just shit you gotta know, you know? And you better know it, ya dig?”

In workshop, Garrett was very much like his teacher, Charles Wright, who Garrett describes in his essay “In the Charles Wright Museum,” as “taciturn, sitting with us in the workshop circle, presiding while others held forth. Ever gentle, he’d make a small suggestion here and there.” The essay continues with a brief anecdote of time when one of Garrett’s poems was up for workshop. He writes, “In it, I’d described pears ripening on the kitchen windowsill as having ‘smooth, wide hips / freckled like a woman’s or some such extravagance. [One student] ended his rant by saying, ‘C’mon! Pears don’t have hips!’ Charles roared back, ‘Oh, YES they do!’ His vehemence, completely uncharacteristic, ended the critique, and the group moved on. I’ve loved him ever since.”

Garrett’s workshop commenting style was also to be fairly reserved until all had their say and then he would coolly step in with one of three responses: his piercing and brilliant summative notes, an inscrutable “Hmmpphh”, or, perhaps worst of all, his dreaded silence. You could judge the success of your poem based on the duration of his comments which often coincided with how “befuddled” he was by some aspect of your poem or by how ambitious he saw the poem to be. You knew you’d done something especially well—even though you may not have known what it was—if he got up from the table and went to the board, without transition, and discussed an entirely different poem, “Miracle for Breakfast,” for example, or a poem by Walcott or Pound, Williams or Hopkins. He never explained the connection. He expected you to find it yourself. And, if you wanted it badly enough, that you would.

I can only think of one workshop meeting where Garrett ever broke his steady cool. Assigned to read Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura” and tasked with writing a poem that demonstrated our comprehension of it, the workshop shared critiques of a student’s elegy for her father. The poem’s first move was a brief scene of the speaker, bedside, watching her father die (umbra). The poem then leapt to a memory of watching a coyote devour roadkill (imago). Finally, the poem turned again to end on an image of a train veiled in winter snow (veritas). Garrett asked us to diagnose the poem, to locate the problem with the closing veritas and to identify the only possibility for the poem’s final move. We quickly ran out of answers. Garrett calmly shook his head, then slammed his hands on the table: “You gotta eat the fucking body!! You know?!” It was, in every possible way, the only fitting conclusion for that figural move, and also, in every possible way, an exceptional metaphor for the poetic practice Garrett taught me: respect poetic lineage, know the tradition, and pursue your writing with a self-consuming religiosity.

In the years since, I’ve carried Garrett’s lessons about lineage and the tradition into my own classroom, trying to be as fiercely generous with my students as Garrett was with so many of us, while of course also kicking their ass, as need be. In short, I tell them, if you want to write, if you want to be a poet, you’ve got to know your shit, and you’ve gotta eat the fucking body.

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