Extended Play:An EP for Garrett Hongo Christopher Spaide (bio) Track 1 Once you start, there's no stopping. Three Asian American men, a handful of years apart in age, held together by a common state (California) and a common vocation (poetry), are driving north on Highway 99, that 425-mile lifeline of the Central Valley, as straight a shot as geology allows. Ever since performing as a trio with musicians on backup, they had styled themselves the Buddha Bandits. Now they were on a three-person, zero-audience tour of the West Coast. Like young men since the dawn of automotive time, they've got the radio on, or they're filling the silence with their raucous improvisations: Let's go campingLet's go chantingLet's go cruisingLet's go boozing [End Page 330] Let's go smokeLet's go folkLet's go rockLet's go bop When the youngest of the three calls the car a "heap," his friend corrects him: "Don't worry. This is a dodo-driven, autopiloted, cruise-controlled, Triple-A-mapped, Flying-A-gassed, dual-overhead-cam, Super-Sofistifunktified, Frijole Guacamole, Gardena Guahuanco, Chonk Chalupa Cruiser with Buddha Bandit Bumpers, Jack!" It's only when his motormouthed friends have cut the chitchat and nodded off that our youngest Buddha Bandit, a twentysomething named Garrett Hongo, can drive through the quiet, liminal hours and hear himself think: Distances don't matternor the roll of the road past walnut groves.It's sky that counts,the color of it at dawn or sunset,a match more true to the peachthan a mix of oils by Matisse.Or maybe it's actually weatherwe love most, the way it shiftsand scatters over the statelike radio waves bouncing off the face of the moon. This dialogue of one is titled "On the Road to Paradise," after Paradise, that bright idea, and Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada [End Page 331] foothills, up where the air and the traffic start to thin out. Getting there from Los Angeles takes you nearly the length of Highway 99, past the major turnoffs and urban turn-ons of Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, Sacramento, Yuba City. Hongo's punning title, paving a way between heaven and earth, sets the high-meets-low tone for the lines to follow, which shoot skyward in one line, hug the road in the next. Each of these three sentences begins with a big claim made short-and-sweetly. "Distances don't matter," Hongo starts, sounding like a SoCal Walt Whitman, putting a modern spin on the elder poet's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": "It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not." The next two claims—"It's sky that counts," "maybe it's actually weather"—blend grandeur and chumminess, like the banter of ancient philosophers, bickering at the bar. None of these small syntactical canisters has room enough for Hongo's fizzing imagination, which continually overbrims with fresh thoughts. Take his curatorial appreciation of the sunset's perfectly peachy hue, or the very next sentence, which would rather journey to the moon and back than commit the linguistic sin of making small talk about the weather. As the Banditmobile makes its unvarying way down Highway 99, Hongo's mind floats free, gliding every which way over the Central Valley: "There it goes, down the arroyo, / through manzanita and Mormon tea." "Might as well let it," Hongo shrugs; after all, there's "Nothing but God and Country on the radio now." All in a night's drive, the mind wanders to places and phrases no poem has reached, before or since: the whimsied thought of harvesting the weather to sell it and "do something politically efficacious for a change," or the weary fantasy of Highway 99 taking a sharp turn into plot or artistic prestige, intersecting with "a spy movie, some Spanish galleon, / or maybe a Chinese poem with landscapes / in brocade, mist, wine, and moonlight." After such mental aerobatics, it's all the more surprising [End Page 332] when Hongo ends the poem by admitting some limits to his imagination: This California moon is yellow most...
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May 31, 2023
Mandy H M Lau 
Open Access