Derek Mong writes a poetry that’s part of a growing canon of fatherhood verse. Work made in the light of little children. Geffrey Davis, Benjamin Gucciardi, Niall Campbell, Dan Chelotti, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matthew Dickman—work that springs in part from the root offered decades ago by such books as Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, or Robert Hass’s “Songs to Survive the Summer.” It’s still surprising enough to see a dad doing full-time parenting work—and to see that unfolding still constitutes a refashioning of what it means to be a man-identifying person. And probably will for quite some time. In Mong’s newest, When the Earth Flies into the Sun, part of what’s at stake is the kind of vulnerability—the sense that a father’s fears are eternal and bottomless:
There’s a music, too, to Mong’s lines, a music that sticks with you. The poet, for instance, imagines his child’s life if he were to die suddenly of the heart condition he’s just discovered he suffers from:
Those spaces have many meanings, but one is the game of hide-and-seek the new father plays with his child: “There is so much to write / about this scene […] if I just had time to.”
A different kind of father figure—and the quarrel is within the self, always—would take the time, at a cost to the child. At the heart of the book is a long poem meditating on the painter Lucian Freud, a “scoundrel” and an example of the kind of father—and father-artist—the poet wants least to be like. It’s a dazzling move: to create such a contrast, to meditate on the depths of the artist’s maniacal and self-absorbed quest for achievement by way of one of art’s greatest achievers. The poem becomes a reckoning with ambition and parenthood. Part of the inquiry into how those two things can go together. (As I write this, my own baby is beginning to grumble at me, telling me it’s time for me to put him to nap.) It’s an inquiry into how the flame of one’s artistic fire can survive the relentlessness of tending to the needs of the little humans you yourself chose to summon into this world. Freud’s “fourteen (acknowledged) children” stand alongside the poet’s one son, “nearly four.” “Why,” asks the father-voice in the poem, “does the repulsive draw me closer?” What is it about the dastardly that draws humans toward the fire like moths to their incineration? “Enviable talent, absent parent, he made // sex & paint his life’s pursuits, eager // to seed his world with likeness.” Meanwhile, another kind of man “will spend nine months imagining a son / until that son becomes a would-be poem: a name afloat, a nascent obligation.”
And what does a newborn life say? What does the baby ready for his nap say? Maybe simply that art is for living, not the other way around.
JESSE NATHAN: I know that Whitman matters very much to you. And I sense also in your latest work an interest in formal or sculpted shapes. An architecture that reminds me less of Whitman. I’m wondering, how do you think about form? How did these latest poems assume their forms? Do you have a shape in mind in advance? Or is it more instinctual, changing as you work?
DEREK MONG: At this point in my life, my relationship to Whitman is a lot like my relationship to the ocean. However far I stray from him—“I teach straying from me,” he writes, “yet who can stray from me?”—I can usually close my eyes and find he’s still right there. With his capaciousness and his optimism. And the great fathoms of his empathy. And his direct address that feels, in the moment it washes over me, like it’s meant for my ears alone.
But no, his shaggy free verse, as you’ve recognized, was never much of an influence, and my own forms have been more eclectic—or, less generously, peripatetic—across my career. I suppose I could say that I collect forms like Dickinson collected plants in her leatherbound herbarium. Or that each poem already “knows” its form, and I’m simply obliged to discover its shape as I write. But in all honesty, the process is a lot messier than that—an unenviable combination of invention and theft.
You’ve noticed those aerated long-lines that recur throughout the book, the ones I occasionally corral into the numbered sections of my long poems: “A Poem for the Scoundrel Lucian Freud” and “Midnight Arrhythmia.” Those arose organically, across years of playful experimentation, and now they feel like a signature or stride. I like their rhythm and ruptured syntax; I like how they release across the page. You ask if I have a “shape in mind” for certain poems? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes this form provides exactly that.
That’s often because of its inherent tension. Beneath the indentations and mid-line leaps, the enjambments and the additional space between each line, there’s a quatrain—or, less frequently, a quintet or sestet—waiting to be unearthed. And there are those rhymes you’re hearing too. Those lead me forward into the poem’s future. Once I dreamt of following a cat, its collar tied with a bell, through the darkened rooms of an unfamiliar house. Those rhymes are like the bell. The darkened rooms are like, well, stanzas—the Italian word for room.
And isn’t that what poetry writing is like? Navigating a new floor plan without any lights? Or building the house itself as you wander through bare boards and beams? Perhaps it’s neither, but this, I’ve come to learn, is how I understand my world: through metaphors. And my metaphors for poetry’s forms and its making lean architectural. I get that from Whitman, a carpenter and homebuilder, who called Leaves of Grass’s last sections his “annexes.” But I get it from Dickinson too. She’d eventually turned her house into a megaphone, speaking down her stairwell to a future editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. And in poems like “Myself was formed—a Carpenter,” she used carpentry to understand the act of writing poems.
Many of my other forms are thefts. My odes here take their shape from Ronald Johnson’s ARK, specifically that long poem’s “spires.” (Johnson, too, saw poems architecturally; ARK’s other sections are “foundations” and “ramparts.”) The tercets in “The Journal of Glacial Archaeology” owe a lot to my old teacher Linda Gregerson. The book’s one sonnet pays homage to Donald Justice’s lovely poem “The Wall.” I probably Frankensteined other forms from sources now lost.
Mimicry, in other words, is part of my process too—a bodily communion with poets I admire, many of whom are dead. (My previous collection was called The Identity Thief.) To read their poems aloud is to move my lips, tongue, and mouth in sync with their own. To borrow their forms is to take that communion further. I add their bodily movements—a choreography or choral score—to my own evolving repertoire. This, too, I trace back to Whitman, who famously writes, “It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you.” It’s eerie how true—on a literal level—that statement remains 170 years after he wrote it.