A CONVERSATION WITH DERRICK AUSTIN
by JIM WHITESIDE
Derrick Austin is the author of This Elegance, forthcoming from Boa Editions in May. His other poetry collections include Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016), which was selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. His other honors include the 2026 AICA-USA Art Critics Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and the Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. He lives in Chicago.
Jim Whiteside: I feel so fortunate to have been sent an advance copy of This Elegance, but even more fortunate to have previously seen many of these poems out in the world in literary journals and in our workshop at Stanford. I’m always taken by the charm and ease of the speaker in your poems, the imagistic landscape you create, and the attention your speaker has for the world—visual, artistic, social, political—that surrounds him. Could you speak a little to how the poems in this book came together, how it might have been similar or different to previous books like Tenderness and Trouble the Water?
Derrick Austin: Thank you for taking the time to sit with these poems. Even though each book took roughly five years to complete, they were vastly different experiences. I wrote Trouble the Water during my MFA program, so I had the consistency of school to buoy me. Tenderness arrived in fits and starts over six years. A slog of a process exacerbated by where I was in life: newly out of school, depressed, and struggling to make ends meet. This Elegance emerged out of two sustained periods of writing, each reacting to two related upheavals: the calamity of 2020 and, later, living abroad as an Amy Lowell scholar in 2023. The first period coincided with our Stegner Fellowship, and since writing a poem a week was my only obligation, that’s all I did (when I wasn’t staring at my ceiling). From April to August 2020, I wrote a great deal in response to COVID-19—the isolation, the protests, the wildfires. I spent the next few years revising all that material, trying to make sense of 2020. I was still a hermit even after lockdowns ended, so my Amy Lowell year felt like my reintroduction to the outside world. I had never traveled outside the US alone before. It revived me. Despite the upheaval that generated these poems, I’ve never felt happier writing than when I wrote them.
JW: I can absolutely sense that upheaval, or at least that tension between spaces and places, the speaker moving between stasis and mobility. It must have been amazing, but also surreal, coming out of such intense lockdown into total freedom. What was the Amy Lowell scholarship like for you? Where did you go and how did you see it shaping these poems?
DA: It was one of the best years of my life. Planning all that travel overwhelmed me, but then I asked myself: What paintings have you always dreamed of seeing? So I organized my travels around art: Madrid, Florence, London, Istanbul, Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam with as many stops along the way as I could make. For three months, I could just walk to The Prado! I never imagined I’d be able to afford to visit one of these places let alone all of them. Living in art for such an intense and sustained way primed me to write the poems about Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Margarita Azurdia. Maybe the freedom I felt encouraged me to keep up with my formal experiments and play. I wanted to write poems that looked and moved differently than my previous work. The fellowship year also emphasized a preoccupation with travel and movement that had already taken shape: the port city poems, the Bay Area poems, the references to Florida and the Midwest. It’s a reaction to the restrictions of lockdown, of course, but my books have always wandered far afield—even my debut, which is so distinctly Floridian. Relocating has been one of the constants of my life.
JW: I’m also interested in how capacious these poems are, the ways in which they engage with external figures from arts and culture—Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Ru Paul’s Drag Race season 13 winner Symone. How do you see this cast of influences coming into the work?
DA: It wasn’t until my year abroad that I realized all these artists were speaking to each other. My poems for André Leon Talley and Symone were two of the earliest poems. Talley’s passing really affected me, and I knew I had to write about it. I immediately knew what form it would take, the anagram elegy, which I first encountered in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium. When I was a closeted teenager, I watched Talley on red carpets and talk shows. His presence in mainstream popular culture as a flamboyant Black gay man was so important to me. I was awed by his high style and erudition. A queen’s queen. Symone’s season of Drag Race aired deep in the pandemic, and I remember being so moved by her do-rag runway. It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in months. Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground blew my mind the first time I watched it in 2022. A gem from 1982 about a Black woman philosophy professor studying religious ecstasy while renegotiating her relationship with desire, anger, and art. It’s one of my all-time favorite films. I wish I had seen it when I was younger. Despite not knowing of Collins, my poems had been in conversation with her film this entire time—the same way I’ve been in conversation with Phyllis Hyman’s songs, Lyle Ashton Harris’s photographs, and Richmond Barthé’s sculptures. Collins, like the other Black artists who appear in this collection, explores the importance of art, pleasure, and beauty in Black life. They locate ecstasy and the sublime within quietness and intimacy, within queerness and solitude. They are attentive to the world and their imaginations.
JW: I always find that travel helps me write—something about new sights and smells, adapting to a new sense of pace, that helps me find new pacing and new images for my poems. I’m glad to hear that the year abroad was so productive for you! I feel like there’s a bit of an ekphrastic movement happening in poetry right now—your work, for sure, but I’m also thinking of books by Joshua Garcia, Richie Hofmann, Natalie Shapero, Adam Vines, poems I’ve seen and heard by jason b. crawford and sam sax and Noah Baldino. Beyond how you see it working in your own poems, what do you make of our ekphrastic moment? Why do you think people are turning to ekphrasis right now?
DA: I’ve noticed this movement too: a lot of engagement with the form on the page and in classes. And it’s not as if ekphrasis ever went away or was unpopular (I immediately think of books by Ama Codjoe, Robin Coste Lewis, Morgan Parker, and Natasha Trethewey) but I think our visually saturated culture is a motivating factor. From social media to the news to dating apps to pop culture, image and video are embedded in our daily lives, which demands a certain level of visual literacy. We’re all doing ekphrasis now. And our culture of self-consciousness and surveillance is so fraught—as well as the distorting and enervating presence of AI. Writers are trying to reckon with this, I think. We’ve also been in a publishing moment that’s much more amenable to hybrid, multimodal, or purely digital work. More writers are navigating the intersections of text and image. Lastly, I think the form’s expansiveness keeps it vital: there are now ekphrastic poems about cinema, video games, fashion, live performance, and digital art. Ekphrasis encourages capacious and rigorous attention. It is a kind of critical thinking as well as a creative process, and it enables us to have dynamic, complex, and real conversations about visual media.
JW: We have a shared love and interest in ekphrasis. You’ve mentioned several artists who made their way into conversation with your work—how do you see the ekphrastic as providing opportunity for new and interesting work, how does it help you explore issues of identity but also of, as you say, quietness and intimacy and solitude? Ekphrasis always seems, to me, to be an opportunity for solitary consideration of how one is not alone, that one’s art and thinking is connected to those of others. What doors does it open for you?
DA: I agree with you that part of the pleasure of ekphrasis is the reminder of a constant bond between myself and the world. It reminds me of the weave of human life and history, our inextricable interconnectedness. And because I spend a lot of time with art from outside the US, I feel that bond not through easy identification. I don’t think Morisot or Watteau or El Greco or Fra Angelico were thinking of anyone like me. Their worlds are not my worlds, yet I’m drawn to the particularity with which they’ve depicted them. I’ve said before that the ekphrastic poem exists in the unseen space between the artwork and myself. It’s the associations, memories, and feelings a painting draws out of me. It’s my studying a painting and saying, Let’s consider this image another way and locate gaps, silences, and possibilities. Ekphrasis is a kind of critical thinking as well as a creative process. I think ekphrastic poetry, or at least the ekphrastic impulse, is not dissimilar from more traditional or scholarly art writing. And to return to your original point: considering art helps me reflect on myself and my relationship to the world. I simply love looking at and thinking about art. It gives me great pleasure. It gives me something to do when I’m alone. It’s as much a part of my life as my loved ones or my neighborhood or the news.
JW: You also mentioned to me previously that you’re working on some nonfiction about art as part of a young art critics fellowship. Tell me more about this fellowship, because that sounds like a dream!
DA: I’m a 2026 AICA-USA Art Critics Fellow. It’s a program that supports emerging arts writers and is organized by the US chapter of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art. It’s a virtual fellowship, and, over several weeks, we attend lectures by critics who discuss topics in craft and publishing. We’re paired with a mentor in the field to assist in the completion of an essay on contemporary art that will be published in AICA-USA Magazine in the spring. We also get paid! I’ve been fortunate to work with Daria Simone Harper on a piece about a suite of Patric McCoy’s photographs featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibit City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago. My essay examines how McCoy’s photographs navigate questions of intimacy and privacy among his Black, queer, male subjects. I wasn’t familiar with McCoy’s work until l visited the MCA after moving to Chicago last summer. Even though the photos are part of a large group show, I was immediately drawn to their intensity and liveliness. The fellowship has been helpful as someone who isn’t formally trained in art history or art criticism. It’s also been encouraging as I work on a hybrid nonfiction book about ekphrasis. I was terrified by the prospect of writing prose, of going on at length, but I’ve actually found essay writing tremendously thrilling.
JW: I do love this newly expansive ekphrastic moment. I wrote a poem a while back about an Alexander McQueen show, we have poets like DeeSoul Carson writing about a Pantone color, poems about pornography and musical performance. Your poems allow Symone’s do-rag and Bjork’s Vespertine to sit on the same plane as Lyle Ashton Harris’s fine art photographs or paintings in San Francisco’s De Young Museum. There are also moments in the book when the speaker takes up a camera and begins taking photographs. “Unsatisfied with a diary’s rigorous privacy,” you write in “Port City,” and later in “Leviathan,” “My camera forces me to be direct.” Photography, like poetry or like any artistic practice, is a curatorial act, but one that feels both more momentary and more permanent. What happens when the ekphrastic poet, the art critic, takes on the role of maker? How did these poems come about?
DA: Those poems form a suite set in an imagined port city with a black-sand beach. I began most of them in spring 2020 and continued working on them throughout the year. Around the same time, Foundlings Press invited me to participate in their chapbook series, which is where some of This Elegance first appeared, including these port city poems. The seed was planted in fall 2019 when the two of us and some of the other fellows in our Stegner cohort went to a black-sand beach in Marin. I had never seen a coastal landscape like that before. I’m used to the hyper-saturated colors of the Florida panhandle: the bright, white sand, the outrageous blues and greens of the Gulf of Mexico. The beach we went to had such different textures: the black sand, of course, the foggy horizon, and the steep, rocky path we descended to reach the shore and all those ragged rock formations nearby. The Pacific Ocean feels so old—or maybe just that stretch of the Pacific. I felt such a sense of geological time. I felt my smallness as a human being. I knew I would draw from that landscape in poems, so when lockdown happened it felt like the right moment to tap into that space. I missed travel and art, so I returned to imagination. I longed to write about pleasure and sensuality again. These poems were also a response to the work I had just finished with Tenderness. I was glad to be done with the painful emotional landscape of that book. To bring it back to your initial question: I made this speaker into an amateur photographer partially because there’s something freeing about being an amateur. It’s less about the product and more about discovery. A lot of my friends were interested in photography at the time. I liked hearing them talk about their processes and how taking pictures reoriented their relationships to things like the body, perception, and communication.
JW: I’m also interested in intimacy in this collection. Any time we write a poem, we’re allowing the reader in and creating an intimacy between speaker and reader—and in the post-Dickinsonian American tradition, we’re expected to confess something or share a secret. But there’s also, in This Elegance, physical and romantic intimacy, queer intimacy, and the intimacy of close friendship. What’s more, there’s the intimacy of the ekphrastic, the conversation between art and artist and writer that comes from close looking, an intellectual and artistic intimacy. How do you see intimacy in its various forms taking hold and taking form in your poems?
DA: I’m so happy you mentioned Dickinson. She’s been on my mind. Lately I’ve been roaming used bookstores in town trying to find a nice secondhand copy of her collected work. Her poems are as electrifying to me now as they were when I was in high school. They’re so deeply intimate yet disclose basically nothing about the facts of her life. But I get such a profound sense of her inner world where biography, fact, and the very real conditions of her material life intersect with fantasy, supposition, and imagination. I don’t find disclosing in poetry the biographical reality of my life to be necessarily intimate or even interesting. Intimacy is created through how something is revealed and the context out of which it emerges. Sometimes the most intimate thing is the struggle or inability to communicate something. I love when poems keep some things under the surface. I love when poems trust readers and their intelligence and their ability to be challenged. I only recognize this in retrospect but Dickinson also taught me that intimacy in poetry is as much about form as it is about content. If I didn’t know exactly what her poems meant, I could trust the meter and rhyme. Each of my books explores different intimate written forms. The sonnet as a container for love poems. The prayer poems in Trouble the Water. The letter poems in Tenderness. The diary poems in This Elegance. These containers help me think through the changing intimacies of my life. My first book is full of poems about erotic and romantic longing because that was the kind of intimacy that felt most urgent in my early twenties. Then friendship took hold as the subject of attention in Tenderness. My most lasting and sustaining relationships are friendships, and friendship feels so underwritten in poetry compared to romantic or familial bonds. This Elegance is haunted by isolation. The isolation of living through COVID-19, of traveling, of trying to connect in an anti-Black and homophobic world. How does one preserve intimacy in a country that seeks to estrange us from our bodies and each other?
JW: I think there’s a real beauty to the intimacies you create in your poems. They depict such wonderful, close friendships, and you’re right—the intimacy is offset by such isolation. I’m curious to know what’s next for you. We discussed your newfound love for critical prose, but what else is on the horizon; do you have a sense of where your poems are headed next?
DA: Not really. I just want to keep challenging myself. Let go of certain forms and subjects and try writing into new ones. Maybe I’ll finally learn how to write long poems. I’m hoping that writing prose might help me figure out how to go on at length.
JW: I always like to end these conversations by asking what excites you about the poetic conversation right now. There’s so much happening all over the world to get bogged down with, but there’s also such a vibrant poetic community I always find comfort in when I’m feeling overwhelmed. What’s exciting for you about poetry right now? Who are you reading and loving—any recommendations?
DA: The book I keep recommending lately is Rickey Laurentiis’s Death of the First Idea. I’m really in awe of it. Erudite and rigorous. Playful and sensual. Poems of moral and intellectual inquiry organized around an undeniable musicality. Her poem “Toward a Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, Scratching the Harder Thinking)” is such an achievement. I need to get a copy of francine j. harris’s new chapbook the lord and barn. Kameryn Alexa Carter’s Antediluvian is an extraordinary debut, and I’m looking forward to Acie Clark’s Small Talk to debut later in the year. I’m also excited for Kyle Carrero Lopez’s Party Line and Phillip B. Williams’s Lift Every Voice. Shangyang Fang’s translations of Song dynasty poets in Study of Sorrow are electrifying. I’ve also loved Mary Helen Callier’s When the Horses, Moira Egan’s The Furies, Jzl Jmz’s Local Woman, and Yuki Tanaka’s Chronicle of Drifting.
JW: Wonderful! I always love when I can come away from these conversations with some recommendations from folks I admire. Thank you for spending some time with me to chat!
DA: There’s so much great writing being done, and I love to share what’s been exciting me lately. Thanks again for these great questions. It’s been a delight talking with you!
