Derek Mong, poet, essayist, and translator, featured in the new Ocean State Review

The Ghost Ship

The sea surrounding them they barely knew;
the fog was constant. Sirens trailed the violence
through the hills but taught them silence.
Their son would learn to walk along these avenues.
Date night downtown: they slipped into a fugue
of cocktailed youth they hoped to hold against
the rising tide of parenthood, the rents.
They parked a car where once there’d just been dunes.
Earthquakes whispered up their trees.
They read of ships left crewless in the harbor
whose wreckage stretched the nation’s western bounds.
Once their child ran heedless into the sea.
Their front porch shrugged and split its mortar.
Occasionally they dreamt the other drowned.

Derek Mong’s poetry invites the reader while eluding easy summation. He is an expert practitioner of the lyric, tonally and spatially haunting the page with startling image and attention to detail. His is a poetry of proliferating voices, one eye gazing upon art, history, and society while the other focuses on the day-to-day minutiae of life. These topics intertwine and overlap, becoming inseparable in order to form a singular aesthetic and way of looking at our contemporary milieu. I had the pleasure of close reading and talking with Derek about “The Ghost Ship,” one of two new poems featured in the latest issue of the Ocean State Review.

Charles Kell: There is something about “The Ghost Ship” that has been haunting me since the first time I read it, many months ago. Specters of sound, silence, and image, which I want to get to in a moment, hover over the couple throughout. How does the “ghostly,” the “haunted” the “spectral” manifest for you in this poem and in poetry as a whole?

Derek Mong: First off, thanks for your kind words about—and your publishing of—these poems. They’re in great company in Ocean State Review. When I think about poetry and the spectral, I approach the topic from two points of view: as professor and as poet. My professor brain goes to Hamlet’s ghost and to Pound: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” I want to connect lost fathers with lost generations. I want to say that any new reading of a poem is like a ghost sighting; it doesn’t count unless you can prove—to a skeptical audience—that it’s true. Henry James’s ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), taught me that. The Governess is just a reader peddling a thesis no one buys.

My poet brain heads elsewhere. I’d like to think of my images like ghosts. They pass before a reader, momentary and—if I’ve done my job—memorable. They flit and disappear and maybe even shock. Isn’t that the goal of a good metaphor or simile? To deliver some flash, spectral and luminous, that you’ll accept but can’t quite explain?

CK: The first line is so arresting—“The sea surrounding them they barely knew;”—in that it invokes a type of known unfamiliarity, a disquieting effect, in a sense. The couple are surrounded by the sea. Is the sea closing in? Are they simply floating, adrift? The couple “barely” knows this sea—I like the “barely”—the only just, the almost not, the simple and sparse, the transience of the word. Can you talk a little about this moment, the first line, and the impetus for the poem?

DM: I show drafts of “The Ghost Ship” to my upper-level poets at Wabash College—to teach revision, to prove how long poems take to finish—so I’ve a prepared answer for this one. The first line was inspired by Donald Justice’s “The Wall” (1960), which begins: “The wall surrounding them they never saw; / The angels, often.” Justice wrote the poem while still a young man, just a graduate student, in John Berryman’s workshop at Iowa. I first read it in Philip Levine’s essay, “Mine Own John Berryman” (1994); I spotted it again years later in Justice’s Collected Poems, dedicated to “J.B.” (Levine and Justice were in the same workshop in Iowa.) So Justice lurks behind it all, the justification, excuse the pun, for the poem itself.

This follows right into to the transposition of “sea” for “wall.” “The Wall” is about the garden of Eden; the “they” is Adam and Eve. “The Ghost Ship” is about San Francisco, a latter-day Eden, surrounding not by a wall, but the Pacific Ocean on three sides. The “they” in my poem, let’s be honest, is my wife and I, new parents for whom everything—whether the sea or a daily routine—feels closed in, claustrophobic. In other word, we didn’t “enjoy” our stint in Eden so much as endure it. Leaving it was like a release.

CK: Continuing, line two notes the “fog was constant.” This “fog” seems omnipresent, ubiquitous, both cloaking the couple and acting as a web they must sift through, a never-ending sheet of sorts. Also, that the couple must learn to live with the fog, to acknowledge the fog as a part of life. That there are always negotiations, movements back and forth, that life—despite our wishes, perhaps—does not move in a constant line.

One of the many things that initially drew me into the poem, and one of the things that I love about it is the paradox of movement and stasis that is enacted throughout. Much of this movement and paradox is brought about by the supreme musicality and structure of the poem. Can you talk about this movement, in both content and form, the stopping and starting throughout?

DM: Fog’s a funny thing: it makes a mess of the morning commute while simultaneously diffusing the stoplights and streetlamps into a peaceful, hazy glow. It’s both welcome—aesthetically it’s a symbol of San Francisco—and warned against. Three foghorns, each blasting at 149 decibels, still guide the ships that pass blindly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The poem’s form too guides the reader. Or at least it helped to guide me. It’s a sonnet, of course, and like Justice’s “The Wall” it turns on just a few rhymes. In the octet, there’s two; in the sestet, three. Phillis Levin’s wonderful anthology, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001), tells me it’s a Petrarchan sonnet, but let’s call it a foghorn sonnet, just for kicks! Whatever the case, I wanted to vary the line breaks and syntax. I didn’t want it to fall into easy, ABBA quatrains. Thus the many single-sentence lines. Ditto the end-stopped line to start it off.

CK: The next moment that jumps out is the “in-betweenness” of time that is experienced simultaneously as old, new, repetitive and circuitous throughout the poem. I am thinking, at the moment, of lines four through seven:

Their son would learn to walk along these avenues.
Date night downtown: they slipped into a fugue
of cocktailed youth they hoped to hold against
the rising tide of parenthood, the rents.

Their son is still young, but there is the acknowledgement that he will learn to walk the avenues; there is the dreaded appellation—“date night”—that couples who have been together for some time and/or couples with children designate in the attempt to carve out slivers of time for themselves (a few hours…); there is the “fugue / of cocktailed youth” the couple hopes and wants to hold onto, knowing it is impossible. I love both the word “fugue” and what it connotes. Similar to the previous question, how does the musicality of fugue work with both the exacting form of this sonnet and also how does fugue relate to the lives lived, the multiple iterations of life the couple and all of us act on a day-to-day basis?

DM: Oh, the word “fugue”! I resisted using it in this poem, if only because—at least when I first started taking poetry seriously in graduate school—it seemed to be everywhere. But it fits the poems mood, and it fits the rhyme scheme. I can’t speak to its musical definition as much as its psychological one: a fugue state involves the loss of identity, awareness, or environment. As I’ve written elsewhere, kids are the identity thieves we welcome with open arms. (My most recent book is called The Identity Thief.) New parents fall easily into fugues, not because they’re sleep-deprived but because they’re forced to find new selves.

In this particular line, the parents flee back to an earlier identity: parties, clubbing, and “cocktailed youth.” They fail. And, as you note, any “date night” has failure sort of written into it. It is a “dreaded appellation”—I love that description—that implies the futility of reliving a life that’s long gone. It felt that much stranger to have “date nights” in San Francisco, a city that caters to tech bros and to youth culture. Still, we tried.

CK: In line eight, halfway through the sonnet, I note a momentary stop of sorts: “They parked a car where once there’d just been dunes.” Here, again, is the wish to slow down juxtaposed with the acknowledgement of time moving: there is now a parking lot/space where sand used to be. And for me, this moment in the poem pushes outward to include not only the couple’s anxiety about personal time and their lives, but also the encroaching environmental concerns. This practice is accomplished so subtly, so masterfully—how do you do this?—and is continued with the next line: “Earthquakes whispered up their trees.” Do earthquakes whisper? Yes and no, I imagine—they are registered by us if we are directly affected, but if not, we dismiss them—is this how it is with most environmental concerns? Is this a concern in the poem? And if so, how does the poem work at balancing these concerns in such a delicate manner?

DM: Again: your response here is generous and too kind. Thanks so much, Charles, for your eagle-eyed reading of this poem. I love how you take the whispered earthquakes and parking lot made from dunes as environmental critique. That element hadn’t occurred to me while writing, but—like the climate crisis itself—its silent attrition lingers beneath so much that we do. So: environmentalism wasn’t a conscious concern with “The Ghost Ship,” but it is a concern throughout my poetry more widely. I recently did an interview with Sarah Davis, an intern at my publisher, Saturnalia Books, and eco-poetry was our very first topic.

The municipal history that informs those lines isn’t nearly as creative as your reading. Earthquakes, of course, affect the Bay Area monthly. My cousin Zack, a Berkeley native, told us, sweetly and protectively, that we could live in anywhere in the city except the Marina. The dunes are those beneath Golden Gate Park. Frederick Law Olmstead thought that the park couldn’t be built. Newspapers mocked it as “The Great Sand Park.” But when William Hammond Hall, the park’s eventual designer, mixed barley and lupin seeds with sand, green shoots sprouted. The soil started to stabilize. Pavement soon followed.

CK: In lines ten and eleven the couple “read” together “of ships left crewless in the harbor / whose wreckage stretched the nation’s western bounds.” Here, we have one of the ghost ships haunting the couple, leaving its “wreckage” strewn across the land, and hovering over the latter part of the poem. These two lines and then the next—“Once their child ran heedless into the sea.”—makes me think of the couple and their son, as a ship unto themselves, another “ghost ship” that wants to hold onto the impermanence that is both time and life. Are the “crewless” ships “left” in the harbor analogous to the family being “left” by the son who once “ran heedless into the sea.”? Line twelve, as well, notes the past, that this action already happened; I imagine their child no longer runs “heedless.” The use of “[o]nce” jumps out, as in the opening of a fairy tale (Once upon a time…). How does “story,” how does “narrative” in any shape or form work as a ballast against time? Are these tricks at work here? Yet are they not always tricks we know are only delaying the inevitable?

DM: What’s that great line from Joan Didion—whose California essays are always her best—“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”? I agree completely. We give our lives narrative to make sense of our choices. We discern arc and intention where there’s no more than an intuitive leap. Ballast is a great word for it—and so appropriate for a nautical poem that never really leaves the shore. Again, I appreciate your sharp reading, which gives me more credit than I’m due. If “once” recalls “once upon a time,” then the twelfth line is a truncated fairy tale. So yes, story matters. Without story, we don’t have a self.

Meanwhile, the poem’s titular image works in a different way: as metaphor or symbol. I came across it while reading (again) about the history of San Francisco. In 1849, at the height of the gold rush, San Francisco’s harbors and coves filled up with abandoned ships. They became pontoons and landfill. They would stretch—when California achieved statehood in 1850—“the nation’s western bounds.” That image haunted me as we thought about moving out of the city. Those ships were somewhere beneath us. If our three-person crew didn’t leave soon, we’d be sucked in too.

CK: The final two lines locate again the personal, initially in the decline of the couples’ house and subsequently in the dream each has of losing the other.

Their front porch shrugged and split its mortar.
Occasionally they dreamt the other drowned.

There is the splitting in two of the house, the inevitable breakage and decay that structures go through. I love the use of “shrugged” and how it indicates both a physical movement and the fact that the house feels nothing or doesn’t care (I think of Rigoberto González’s stunning poem, “Casa”). I am also struck, intensely, by the final line. Instead of the inevitable decay—the sickness, the slow wasting away—that couples fear for each other, this couple “dreamt the other drowned.” There is the accidental suddenness, the shock of one tragically ceasing to exist, the fear that at any moment of any day an accident can take place that would irrevocably change lives forever. And like the wonderful placement of the adverb in the first line, “[o]ccasionally,” here in the last line the adverb is doing so much work. The fact that the couple occasionally dreams of the drowning connotes that it is not an obsessive dread, that each does not worry on a day-to-day basis of the other perishing; however, it’s a low dread, just below the surface, something that will always be there. Can you talk a little about these moments?

DM: I’ll say this about the poem’s end: I struggled to find an image that felt natural. Much of this poem represented new ground for me: a third-person speaker, a tight rhyme scheme, and the pleasure of scene building, diffused over time. The last line couldn’t be rhetorical—a lot of my poems rise toward a statement that I hope I’ve earned—so much as mutually haunting. I like how you describe it: a “low dread,” subterranean, constant. That feels right to me. In this case, though, the dread needed a partner. Thus my trespassing, in the last line, into my wife’s unconscious. I liked the idea of shared, marital nightmare. I liked imagining it happen in tandem, first in the left pillow, then the right.

CK: One of the main reasons I wanted to look closely at “The Ghost Ship” is that it works, formally, in different ways from a lot of your poems. That even though you work in forms you also practice different kinds of structures and engagement with space on the page. One of the things that jumps out to me in your work is how the poem looks and acts on the page, the way the poem is structured. In Other Romes (2011), the structure, the length and shape of lines are juxtaposed, inverted, and indented. I am thinking of “Recoil,” where there will be a couplet followed by an indented line. Also, you have formal poems that offset some of the poems using a more diffuse structure; I am thinking of the sestina, “Fellini’s Cabiria” and the villanelle, “Vitruvian Man.” In The Identity Thief (2018), the lines are even more fractured, snaking along down the page. This practice fascinates me to no end. Can you talk about your structural composition a bit, formally speaking, and what precipitates the structure and shape of the poem? Is it subject matter? Feel? A combinations of these things?

DM: First off, thanks for noticing the forms, even where they’re less showy than, say, sestinas about Fellini movies. (This year is Fellini’s 100th birthday, by the way; I’m sure these poems will be reprinted widely!) But yes, it’s all deliberate, even as I wish I could improvise, dabble, or—to quote Frank O’Hara—“go on nerve.” Other Romes mixes fixed forms with a form of my own making. Throughout the book you’ll find a Latinate hendecasyllabic with mid-line enjambments. That’s what you’re seeing in “Recoil.” This broken, 11-syllable line echoes one of the book’s principle themes: America is showing its Late Republic cracks.

That all seemed appropriate during the 2000s, when I wrote Other Romes. I’m afraid it’s more topical now, as Senate Republicans genuflect before an authoritarian (and racist) President. It’s 2020, and this villain proclaims l’etat, c’est moi. (I write this as impeachment nears its depressing end.) Since then, I’ve developed another form, the one you spotted in The Identity Thief, that’s more open. It developed out of my work with Jesuit, Medieval, and Neo-Latin poetry. (You can find those poems in my chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist.) In any case, that snaking form is usually quatrains or quintets, with spaces between the lines and gaps inside them. This maximizes enjambments. It teases the poem down the page.

CK: It has been such a pleasure spending this time with your work and I hope we can talk much more in the future. What’s next? What are some things you are working on?

DM: Charles, the pleasure’s entirely mine. It’s incredibly flattering to find my poem read with such attention and care. I’ve enjoyed reading your debut, Cage of Lit Glass, but now I’ll have to look up your criticism too. You mull every nuance and connotation.

As for new projects, I’ve a variety that are “on the cusp.” Over the holiday break, I built a table of contents for a collection of belletristic essays, tentatively titled Nude Dude Poets. I’ve got pieces in there on translation; Ronald Johnson’s erasure poem, Radi os; and reading “Rip Van Winkle” after the 2016 election. I’m working on the fifth of seven short essays—they’ll be in the book too—for a series I’m calling “The Distillation Would Intoxicate Me Also.” Each considers a new beer in Bell’s Brewery’s Leaves of Grass series. (They started brewing them for Whitman’s 200th birthday.) The latest essay, and perhaps my favorite, “‘To a Locomotive in Winter,’ the Beer,” is up now at Kenyon Review Online.

And then there are poems, always poems, on the back burner or moved temporarily to the front. I finished a batch last summer that got started in Greece. I’ve my wonderful colleague in Classics, Bronwen Wickkiser, to thank for those. She invited me to be her second on a Wabash College immersion trip to Athens. I saw Byron’s big graffitied name on a column at Sounion. I swam in the Aegean with our students. Those are forthcoming in Arion. A long poem—on parenting, ego, and the casualties of imagination—came out last year in At Length. It’s called “For the Scoundrel Lucian Freud,” and it’ll anchor a third book.

Derek Mong is a poet, essayist, and translator whose books include Other Romes (2011), The Identity Thief (2018), The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), and The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (with his wife, Anne O. Fisher, 2018). The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he holds degrees from Denison University, the University of Michigan, and Stanford, and has held poetry fellowships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Louisville. His work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Two Lines, Poetry Northwest, and in the recent anthology, Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite. A new long poem can be found online in At Length.

Derek is currently the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College where he teaches American literature, poetry, and creative writing. He blogs at the Kenyon Review Online and reviews new poetry. Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he now makes his home in Crawfordsville, Indiana with his wife and son. www.derekmong.com

Derek at Kenyon Review Online blog

The Identity Thief from Saturnalia Books (distributed by IPG books)

Derek’s profile at Wabash College