Interview by Natalie Solmer
NS: Congrats on the publication of your third book of poetry, When The Earth Flies into The Sun, which I have been enjoying since it came out last fall! The eye-catching cover of your book is the centerpiece of Francis Bacon’s triptych painting, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” which is a reference to a long poem your book centers around, “A Poem for the Scoundrel Lucian Freud.”
In a wonderful essay on ekphrasis for Lit Hub, you state how you “saw in Bacon’s violent portraits the violence that made our family. “[R]ed of rare steak, gray like smudged lace,” You state in the poem that you know Stendhal’s disease is “bunk,” yet viewing this painting in the museum, you enter into a trance-like state of associating the image with your wife’s C-section and son’s birth, which gives way to poetic reflection on parenthood, art, and the scandalous life of Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund). After reading your long poem, I had to do some research on Lucian Freud, just out of curiosity!
As you stated in your essay, ekphrastic writing is exciting not only because you can directly address the artist (as you do), but you can also explore art criticism, history, and what the art means to you in a unique, personal way. I also centered my recent book of poems (published days after yours!) around an ekphrastic series of poems (which used to be one long poem) responding to Gustav Klimt’s series of “Water Castle” (or “Shloss Kammer”) paintings. This series explored my long and strange connection I’ve had to Klimt and his work and wove it into my familial and personal history.
I am curious about your relationship to Lucian Freud’s work and what the process was like for you in shaping and revising this long poem. I feel that you managed a good balance between describing the art, the artist’s life, and your own life. How did you achieve this?
DM: First off, Natalie, thank you for the kind words about the book, which—from this detailed question—you’ve read generously and carefully. And congratulations on your own! What was circulating in this shared Hoosier air of ours that we’d publish books about family, ancestry, and art at the same time? Your own “Water Castle” poems, which I’ve so enjoyed, sent me researching Klimt’s work as well. I’d no idea he worked in landscapes.
And I suppose research is part of my answer to your question. Research and patience. As I write in that poem’s note, Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” was “on view at Portland Art Museum from December 2013 to March 2014.” That’s where I saw it, over a decade ago, in circumstances described in the poem. (Fun fact: Oregon’s lack of sales tax makes it a haven for auctioned painting.) But the epiphany of that moment, about art and parenting, would’ve evaporated if I hadn’t started reading about Freud in the Reed College library.
Geordie Greig’s Breakfast with Lucian (2013) became my Bible for a while. I festooned it with Post-it notes. I kept files with gossipy anecdotes that I could splice into the poem. I stacked my shelves with coffee table collections of Freud’s paintings, of Bacon’s, dipping into them whenever I could. I was writing my dissertation at the time, and these dreamy forays into the erotic and grotesque sustained me. They were a kind of scholastic adultery, a release.
Then I worked—slowly and patiently—over the next two to three years. I never learned to “like” Freud, though he taught me how not to be a parent and artist. For that I’m grateful.
NS: Another long poem which your book revolves around, “Midnight Arrhythmia,” is a gorgeous meditation on the speaker’s (your?) A-fib, imagined death, and how this will affect their (your) wife and son. The poem is made up of 18 sections which reflect on the impossible questions around how we should go about the business of living and what we should leave behind when we die.
One of my favorite lines is, “let the knife remind me of life’s real crime: / you can only record scant bits of it before you die.” This is one of the many gems embedded throughout this long poem. You are also the Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor of At Length, an established journal which publishes long form creative works. I’m grateful for the existence of At Length because many journals shy away from publishing longer pieces.
What are some of the reasons we should be reading (and writing!) long poems? What advantages were there in writing “Midnight Arrhythmia” in its long form?
DM: Oh, that speaker’s me alright, but with the fear of his mortality turned up to 11. I’m so glad you like the poem, which I think of as a lullaby and a letter and a self-elegy. One of my favorite examples of the latter genre is a lot shorter than “Midnight Arrhythmia.” I’m thinking of W.S. Merwin’s “Elegy,” a one-liner that reads, in its entirety, “Who would I show it to.”
Merwin’s poem is pithy, an elbow to the ribs, but it’s decidedly abrupt. Long poems let us ruminate and wander. They offer opportunities for rhetorical digressions and narrative cul-de-sacs. A good one builds its own engine, like those elaborate board games so many of us discovered during the pandemic—Wingspan comes to mind—and then releases itself into play. And it does this without sacrificing, as you describe my line above, the “gems” of imagery or epiphany that we associate with the lyric.
I hope that “Midnight Arrhythmia” draws on some of these advantages. In writing it, I knew that the poem’s climax or catharsis—the “answer,” in other words, to the “impossible questions” that you refer you—would require space. Twenty-four lines of it, apparently, or three sections, as an improvisational theater class at Wabash taught me that “imagination is all / we can control.” It was that same semester, I think, that I developed a creative writing seminar called “How to Write a Long Poem.”
As for why we ought to read (and occasionally write) long poems: well, they’re an essential part of American poetry, aren’t they? From Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Eliot’s The Waste Land to Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, long poems define poetic movements and eras. And for all the flabby “project” books appearing today—MFA theses prematurely published—there are loads of good long poems itching to be read. I hope At Length captures a few of them.
NS: In this book, I’m also fascinated by the forms your poems are written in. You employ a lot of gorgeous soundwork, including quite a bit of alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme. You also have interesting double spacing of the lines and lots of caesuras, allowing your reader a lot of white space. We can see this in another example from “Midnight Arrhythmia,” in section 6 below:
How do you decide what forms your poems will be written in? Can you expound a bit on your stylistic choices?
I recently chatted with Jesse Nathan about my forms during one of his “Short Conversations with Poets” over at McSweeney’s. (He even quotes these same lines!) So, I’ll direct your readers to that conversation while answering a slightly different question that I get from students and readers alike: what’s up with those caesuras?
Since my earliest days reading poetry, I’ve been a sucker for enjambment, i.e. line breaks without punctuation. One of my first favorite poets, Carl Phillips, is a master of them. He even describes syntax as a kind of foreplay. I love the tugs, delays, and misdirection that he weaves into his sentences. I love how he carries his sentences across lines. And I love how enjambment, a pre-requisite for most multi-line sentences, helps him equate semantic meaning and erotic fulfillment. This all fits: Phillips is a poet of eros and longing.
My own poetry is less consistently erotic, but I still want sentences that delay gratification. These caesuras—or, less fancifully, mid-line gaps—provide more opportunities for delay. They function, I hope, like extra enjambments, putting distance between a subject and its verb (as in line 3) or between a command and its prepositional qualifier (see line 7). They help me to orchestra the silences around language, those moments of uncertainty within which a reader makes meaning from some clause or phrase, only to have that meaning expanded or contradicted by the language that follows the pause.
In class, I illustrate this concept with an advertisement from Target. That retailer recently ran a two-line promo, visually rendered like so: “Target has got your back / to school.” The wordplay’s clever, right? The word “back” doubles its meaning across the—what else to call it?—enjambment. Target is your friend, dear shopper; they’ve “got your back.” But they’ve also got your (back to) school supplies. When corporate America co-opts the enjambment, then poetry must be doing something right.
NS: Writing poetry at this very point in history in the United States can seem daunting. Do we write about what is happening politically? How can we not? But also, how can we (without being didactic and boring)? And if we write about other things (as we all do, too), is there a point to it at all? As I said before, I really enjoyed your essay on ekphrasis in Lithub, and in it you mentioned Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which alludes to people turning away from suffering and impending disaster and just going about their business (and the impending second World War). Auden achieves this largely by invoking Brueghel’s Icarus, wherein the people are going about their work, ignoring Icarus’s fall from the sky.
The first section of your book contains several references to political or topical subjects, such as the chilling last line, “[O]ne day you’ll vote me your new king[.]” in your poem, “The Reality Television Star.” This poem is written in the voice of the reality star. Conversely, your poem, “To a Future Mass Shooter,” addresses the subject of the poem. Do you have any advice for poets taking on political topics, and how did you feel about incorporating these into your book?
DM: This is the question of the hour, isn’t it? And of that phase of Auden’s career. When Yeats died just a month after Auden finished “Musée des Beaux Arts,” he’d write that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” I’ve been thinking about those lines lately, but your question returns me to the suffering in “Musée des Beaux Arts.” How “it takes place / while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Far too often I feel like that person, dully walking. I know others are suffering. And I want, like so many other writers—and musicians and artists—to do anything I can to help.
I don’t pretend to know how art best responds to injustice, and I’m hesitant to offer advice to other poets, but I’ll say this: we poets can still be the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” to quote Percy Shelley, but we’re slow legislators. Poetry’s readership is small, roughly 12% of the population, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, an institution now under siege. That’s a readership that tops out at 40 million. Its language tends to last—clipped from magazines and tucked into wallets—but it affects change gradually. Like the statistic that disproves the seductive propaganda. Like the tree root that splits the sidewalk in two.
All of this leads me to two points: 1) if you want to save the democracy, put your body in the street and protest. Call your congressperson. Vote. Don’t presume that your latest poem is a substitute for those patriotic acts. We just don’t have the time. 2) Nobody should feel “required” to write political poetry because of their era’s injustice. (Most eras are unjust, often more so than our own.) I didn’t read your question as presuming an ought, Natalie, but poetry—or at least poets on social media—evoke the “ought” and the “why aren’t you” very quickly right now. About subject matters and causes. About the poetry that’s called for in a crisis. Almost all this is well-intentioned; much of it overstates poetry’s cultural power.
What am I trying to say here? That there is a point to writing poems “about other things” in 2025. That there’s music to make among the ruins, as an old friend said to me after the election. That the worst political poetry is often the easiest to compose: strident, self-assured, sloganeering. That such poetry often won’t last.
NS: Lastly, I always ask my featured poets a question about Indiana. I know that you have a complicated relationship to the state, as evidenced by your “Hoosier Love Poems,” published in our journal a few years back. As I read your new book, I primarily thought of you as a Pacific Northwestern poet, due to the rich PNW imagery in poems such as, “The Fog At Leadbetter Point State Park” and “Gegenschein.” According to your bio, you were born in Portland, Oregon and return there as often as possible. However, you have lived in many places throughout the US, including the Midwest. In what ways do you think that place has impacted your poetry, and are there any surprising things about Indiana or the literary scene here that you would like to expound on?
DM: Complicated relationship is spot-on, though I found my peace here when we relocated from Crawfordsville—a post-industrial Trump town of 15,000—to West Lafayette. We’ve got bookstores again, like Von’s and Second Flight Books, and bicycle lanes and international neighbors. We’ve got Purdue, with its events and its PrintBay, a letterpress studio run by my friend, Peter Moore. We occasionally find ourselves—at festivals, protests, or markets—“one of a living crowd” (Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). These are small, satisfying pleasures.
And between the Greater Lafayette area and my forays into Indianapolis, I’ve a greater appreciation for the Hoosier literary scene. You and I will join Katy Didden at Dream Palace Books on June 6 in Indianapolis. I’ll read for the Nightjar Series at the Tube Factory on May 21 (Indy again). Last November, a friend and Wabash alumnus, Jake Budler, brought me to Tomorrow Bookstore, a beautiful little shop over on Mass Ave. Opportunities abound, in other words, if one commits to driving. I’ve lived all over the U.S., but it was Indiana that finally converted me to Audible. That’s fitting for the Crossroads of America, I suppose.
Still, it’s what Indiana lacks, through no fault of its own, that spurs me toward poetry lately: the ocean. “The Fog at Leadbetter Point State Park” is the newest poem in WTEFITS. Other ocean poems—on the coast, rising sea levels, and abyssal depths—followed. Poems inspired by Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us or afternoons spent in my wet suit. Poems that yearn for the tides after nearly a decade in a (mostly) landlocked state. My old teacher, David Baker, once said that he wrote winter poems in the summer and summer poems in the winter. I started “The Fog” when that precipitation still clung to on my clothes, but the ocean followed me home.
Natalie, thank you so much for your insights into the poems and your thoughtful questions! I’m very grateful for the opportunity to discuss When the Earth Flies into the Sun with you. And poetry more generally.
Derek Mong is the author of When the Earth Flies into the Sun (October 2024), The Identity Thief (2018) and Other Romes (2011)—all from Saturnalia Books. A chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Contest. His collaborative translation, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin—completed with his wife, Anne O. Fisher—received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Prize.
A poet, essayist, and translator, Derek’s work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, At Length, Pleiades, Verse Daily, the Missouri Review, Two Lines, Poetry Northwest, and in the anthology, Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (2017). He has blogged for Kenyon Review Online, where he wrote a series of Leaves of Grass beer reviews, and written essay-reviews for Gettysburg Review. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Zócalo Public Square and, along with his wife, edits At Length, a literary journal devoted to long work.
New poems and essays have appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the LA Times, Zócalo Public Square, Free Inquiry, Always Crashing, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and the Boston Globe. His latest long poem, “Midnight Arrhythmia,” was published in Action, Spectacle.
An Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, Ind.), Derek holds degrees from Stanford University (M.A. Ph.D.), the University of Michigan (M.F.A.), and Denison University (B.A.). Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he currently lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with his wife and son.
@derekmong.bsky.social