Staff reader Eric James Cruz speaks with NER 46.1 poet Derrick Austin about Sei Shonagon, illumination as clarity, and trusting music.
Eric James Cruz: Your poem “Gig Economy” is striking for so many reasons, but I would love to focus on the tension between the mundane, everyday tasks one has to do to survive and the real emotional and spiritual tension one must face in order to live. Could you talk a bit more about this tension and why you’re drawn to it?
Derrick Austin: Thank you for your kind words about the poem. Balancing our inner lives with our obligations, duties, and the nonnegotiable functions of being alive (like eating), is one of the central tensions of being a person. This poem emerged from an exercise I gave in an ekphrastic poetry workshop. I had my students write a self-portrait poem using Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait” as a model. I participated in the exercise too and liked what emerged. As a poet who supports himself by freelancing or the odd teaching job or a grant/fellowship, my life has been a series of boom and bust years. I’ve been profoundly fortunate to orient my life around writing and art and travel, but as I get older I find myself yearning for stability. That tension also informs the poem.
EJC: Branching off the idea of tension, one aspect of “Gig Economy” that I most loved was the use of shorter declarative sentences in the first two stanzas followed by this gorgeous momentum that opens up between stanzas three and six in one prolonged sentence. Could you discuss the energy difference that exists between these two distinct parts of the poem and why you chose to give each section this syntactical structure?
DA: I’m glad you noticed the sentence structure! I love thinking about syntax. It’s so important. I like the punchiness of those declarative sentences, how the poem seems to start and stop with each new sentence until the final sentence unspools. While I’m drafting I’m not necessarily consciously thinking about each sentence—in early drafts, the sentence about the cat was always long and the sentences in the preceding stanzas were always shorter—but when I saw that this poem was a sonnet I knew that those variations in syntax would serve as a useful volta. I love seeing the ghosts of metered sonnets within free verse sonnets. Petrarchan sonnets tend to haunt my free verse efforts, which is funny since I tend to read more Shakespearean sonnets.
EJC: Moving on to “Things that Remind Me of the Closeness of God,” I was delighted to see a poem with a spiritual title rooted in such a concrete landscape. After some research, I discovered that Sei Shonagon, the poet you acknowledge as a source of inspiration before the poem begins, blended vivid descriptions of nature and everyday life to arrive at especially brilliant observations. Could you trace for the reader how the concrete objects within this poem—all of them interesting in and of themselves—play off one another to lead the speaker closer to their God-source?
DA: Sei Shonagon’s writing is extraordinary. I had heard of her and The Pillow Book for years but only read it in 2020 so I could impress a gorgeous man I was talking to online. She’s so catty, snobby, biting, and hilarious. So much personality emerges in her catalogues. Among “Elegant Things” she lists “A pretty child eating strawberries” (pretty!) and “Duck eggs.” Duck eggs! The surprise took my breath away. Her keen observations of the physical world and artful offhandedness inspired this poem. I hope the difference between each listed thing—not only in the matter of its content but how each thing is described—conjures the excitement I feel reading The Pillow Book.
EJC: One thematic aspect that “Gig Economy” and “Things that Remind Me of the Closeness of God” seem to share is the speaker’s movement towards ambiguity. What I mean to say is that your poems do not offer me answers but rather space to inwardly breathe and dwell in the possibilities of multiple outcomes or even an answerless world. How would you describe your your poetic sensibility? From your perspective, what role does poetry play in illuminating our lives?
DA: It means a great deal to me that you feel that way when you read my poems. I like how you used the word “illuminate” in your question. Maybe that’s what I believe a poem can do. Not illumination in the figurative that implies explanation but literal illumination. When you turn on the lights in a space you see better but you don’t necessarily understand everything you see. Illumination as a kind of clarity. I like poetry that asks of a reader: Can you abide with me here for as long as my song lasts? I don’t turn to poetry or art writ large for counsel or guidance. I seek transport. When I encounter a poem, I wish to be moved through language. To keep the travel metaphor going, I’m interested in the journey and not the destination. I love art where all its mysteries aren’t exhausted in the first few encounters. If poems illuminate anything about my life, it’s through rereading, through engagement over the course of a life. Emily Dickinson was one of my first loves when I started writing poems in high school. Mind you, I had no idea what those poems were saying half the time but I loved her metaphors, the particular way she phrased things, and the music! Her poems sing and I trust that music.
EJC: I’d like to use the poem “Madrid” to further explore my previous question. I found myself thinking quite a bit about these lines: “This is what I love about the great picture on the ground floor. Juan de Pareja’s / stockings are sheer around his calves. He invented a world for his inwardness with / jewel tones . . .” That sentiment about “inventing a world for his inwardness,” could you elaborate more on what this idea means to you as an artist?
DA: On the one hand, it’s a formal concern in the sense of finding the right form for a poem. On the other hand, it speaks to how poetry is the finest means I have at expressing my inner life. That private self. That self comprised of biography and flesh and dream.
EJC: There is a great spirit in your work, one that suggests to me that poetry sustains you in a way that is both personal and profoundly communal. I’d like for you to indulge a hypothetical for me because I think your voice and artistic vision would adapt under this scenario: If poetry suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, how would you channel that spirit within you? What other forms of art might you partake in to nurture this spark you so clearly possess?
DA: At this point in my life, I don’t know that anything would replace poetry as my ideal mode but your fun scenario would force me to finally write my art essays. My actual answer for your question is music though. I’d love to play an instrument. I’d love to make house music. What a dream to create something people can groove to.
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His next collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026.
Eric James Cruz is a poet and teacher living in San Antonio, Texas. Cruz is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. His most recent poems have appeared in Leon Literary Review, Zócalo Magazine, and Gulf Coast. He is at work on his first full length collection of poems.