There are some conversations that don’t just happen — they unfold. They open like a door you didn’t realize you’d been waiting to walk through. My conversation with Derek Chan was one of them: a quiet, shimmering moment where two poets found themselves circling the same questions about consciousness, becoming, and the impossible work of naming what lives inside the body.
I’ve admired Derek’s writing for years — the way he moves between continents, disciplines, and cosmologies without ever losing the pulse of the interior world. Born in Melbourne and now teaching creative writing at Cornell, Derek carries into the room a mind shaped by psychology, philosophy, and the lyric — an unexpected braid of fields that somehow feels inevitable once you hear him speak. He talks about consciousness and Vedic texts in the same breath, about the failures of empirical language to hold the spirit, about poems as structures that allow us to see ourselves from a necessary distance. Listening to him, I found myself returning to the very reasons I began writing: that hunger to understand what can’t be measured, that tug toward the unseen and the unsayable.
This interview traces Derek’s journey across oceans and through disciplines, but it also lingers in the subtler migrations — the shifts in selfhood, the ruptures between what we inherit and what we choose, the negotiations of being a BIPOC male poet-educator inside institutions that were not built with us in mind. We talk about authority, the myths we carry about what poets are supposed to look like, the anxieties that cling to recognition, and the quiet relief of realizing you no longer have to fight to be visible.
What I love most about Derek’s work — and about this conversation — is the way he holds contradiction without fear. He moves easily between precision and wonder, between the intellectual and the intensely personal. He reminds me that poetry is not just a craft but a site of permeability — a place where the interior life is allowed to bloom without apology, without needing to justify its origin. In these pages, Derek invites us into the spaciousness of his mind. Into the edges of what he calls the “unfinished,” the asymptotic reaching that gives poetry its charge. Into the quiet truth that distance — geographic, emotional, ancestral — is sometimes the very thing that makes art possible.I’m honored to share this conversation with you. May it deepen your own inquiries. May it loosen something inside you. May it remind you, as it reminded me, that becoming a poet is less about certainty and more about giving yourself permission to be porous, to be undone, to be in motion.
Darius Phelps: Your academic path spans literature and psychology. How do these two disciplines inform your poetic practice?
Derek Chan: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s interesting because when I first started undergrad, my aspiration was to be a clinical psychologist. At one point I was really interested in consciousness studies, and the deeper I got into that field, the more I saw this strange horseshoe effect—how scientific inquiry curved back toward the arts. One of my supervisors was doing what people would call cutting-edge research on the mind. And he was grappling with this central conceptual issue of the field, termed the “hard problem of consciousness.” Essentially, even if you could map the entirety of the brain, understand all of its firings and mechanisms down to the last detail, you would still run into the explanatory gap between the biological and the phenomenological: how and why physical matter actually gives rise to that qualitative “immaterial” sense of being—the part we might call mind or soul. David Chalmers illustrates this conundrum through his famous “zombie” thought experiment, where he ultimately arrives at the conclusion that it remains logically conceivable that a being could perfectly mimic conscious behavior without having any inner experience, implying that consciousness isn’t collapsible to—or derivable from—complex physical function, but is in itself a fundamental, irreducible property of reality.
In an attempt to find a different angle to tackle this “hard” problem, there’s been a rising interest in investigating top-down approaches to consciousness as opposed to the predominating bottom-up approaches. In other words, centering subjectivity and consciousness over biology or physicalism. For example, there’s this theory called IIT—Integrated Information Theory—which argues for consciousness as a fundamental property of material things, like the way we might understand an object’s mass or electrical charge. It’s what some would call a “panpsychist” or “idealist” view: consciousness as an ontologically primary and widespread property of matter, rather than something which spontaneously or mysteriously emerges from matter after a certain critical mass or configuration. This panpsychism opposes the more traditional “dualist” stances we are probably more intuitively familiar with—such as Descarte’s famous claims for mind and matter as wholly distinct substances. For the panpsychist, human consciousness doesn’t come from nothing or occupy some other independent realm from ours; it is constituted from simpler forms of conscious elements that already inheres in our world. By treating consciousness as axiomatic, IIT hopes to account for the explanatory gap of the “hard” problem, or at least re-frame the problem. Now the question is how we can use the properties of subjective experience to infer the necessary and sufficient properties of physical systems necessary to sustain such experience, which brings us back to the nature of its top-down approach.
Of course, if you think about it, IIT is proposing quite a radical stance, especially for us, who are living under the Cartesian and Eurocentric influences of “dualism” and the mind-body split. There’s the implication that inanimate objects can possess some degree of consciousness, even if it’s extremely latent. There’s some fascinating resonances here with certain Vedic texts and Buddhist traditions, which gesture to similar insights: that mental elements, or proto-conscious properties, form the basis of reality. What they were describing, thousands of years earlier, were ideas that we are only now being receptive to, perhaps because of its recent formalizations into Western scientific frameworks. So, as radical as these ideas of consciousness might seem, they are also age-old—emerging from so-called “metaphysical,” “meditative,” and literary modes of thought which, though often interwoven with empiricism, nevertheless significantly predate our modern conceptions of “science” and so have often been branded as “esoteric.” Eventually, watching these various schools of thought circle, loop back, and converge into the same ineffable questions and ideas of interiority, made me realize: psychology, philosophy, literature—they’re all just different angles of grappling with the same fundamental confusions about being. That realization changed how I thought about poetry as a “discipline.” Everything has a stake in the truth of everything else, even if not immediately understood how or why. So what might happen when you rub the intimate, erotic registers of the lyric poem against the clinical vernaculars of “scientific” logic? Poetry becomes a space where language can loosen, mutate, talk back. The imagination, our inner world, is the ultimate democracy. That capaciousness feels central to my work. I’m still thinking about it, even now.
DP: I love that. The convergence, the circling back. So here’s the next question. You were born in Melbourne, and now you’re teaching at Cornell. How have place, migration—literal or metaphorical—and cultural geography shaped your poetic identity?
DC: The first thing that comes to mind is that when I got into Cornell, I realized I’d be living in a place called Ithaca. I mean—there’s no more perfect metaphor for an apprentice poet beginning an odyssey. But it also brought a real sense of distance. If you did a reverse Google map search, you’d see that Melbourne to New York is literally on the other side of the world. At the time, it seemed such a vast undertaking; I didn’t know if I’d return home in two years or four, or, if like Odysseus’ unfateful journey, something else during that time would alter the trajectory of my life altogether.
But leaving also created this refracted clarity. When you step outside the “form” of your upbringing, you can finally see it for what it is. It’s like how you need to give shape and structure to a poem so it becomes something like an object you can turn over and over in your hand to see its various dimensions properly. Migration created a spatial form for me to revise and refract my own sense of self: to see how I was formed by the things and people around me; to see what parts of myself I had taken-for-granted or assumed to be essential; and to see what “remained” at the end of it all—what images, memories, and symbols that I couldn’t shed no matter where I went—those residues of self which felt like seeds of meaning that would demand both my attention and the attention of poetry. Distance, in that sense, became mythic. Became part of the myth I could write of myself. And it’s impossible, I think, to properly write about a place until you’re away from it. Otherwise it’s like having your face pressed up against a painting—you’re unable to see anything except the few blots of color consuming your vision. Architects also talk about how smaller—not larger—windows have the paradoxical effect of bringing us closer to the world beyond the window: it’s the sense of compression and alienation from the world that allows for and compels a greater desire towards seeing and becoming-part-of.
I’d always had struggles writing about family—especially grandparental figures—as I constantly felt this insurmountable distance: cultural, linguistic, spatial, temporal. Questions of “authenticity” and “knowledge” often haunted me, and I constantly doubted if I had any right or means to write about such subjects at all. I knew at some cerebral level that these doubts were absurd—afterall, there’s a reason I turned to literature and not history. Being so far away made me more drawn to writing about family, even as it equally eluded me. But what I learned eventually was that distance isn’t simply a failure of attainment, comprehension, or poetic integrity, but something necessary to the subject matter I was tackling—is in fact, the subject matter itself. It was Sartre who said that “Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.” There’s some truth in that, I think. If distance—and the gaps it leaves—engenders the unaccountable, and if what’s unaccountable is infinitely inexhaustible, then in that very fissure lives the wellspring of poiesis. After all, Eurydice had to depart into the underworld so that Orpheus, in his great grief and longing, could become closer to the source of song. It’s distance which compels us to keep writing into and towards what can’t ever be really touched or known, and therefore, it’s also what gives poetry its endless source of urgency, obsession, and hauntedness. Louise Glück talks about this: how poetry must harness the power of the unfinished, how a poem should bear the qualities and resonances of a ruin. The act of migration gave me that: an impossible engine of yearning, invention, and renewal. In that asymptotic reaching, we find poetry over and over again.
DP: So many of your recent recognitions—the Forward Prizes, the Ruth Lilly finalist nod—mark you as a poet to watch. How do you feel about the idea of being labeled an “emerging poet” or “rising star”? Does that help or hinder your sense of self as a writer?
DC: Oh, interesting. I don’t know—I feel like I fell into writing, so for a long time my identity as being a writer never fully registered. When I first started writing, I was motivated mostly by lineage. I wanted to emulate writers I loved, get lost in their language. I submitted work almost haphazardly, and for the longest time I didn’t even envision myself as someone who could be a writer. Even my name—I remember thinking, “Does Derek Chan sound like an author?” That’s the kind of internalized imagination I was working against. Getting into an MFA was the first moment that felt like I was vindicated as a poet-in-the-world. Before that, the pragmatic part of me thought I’d be a psychologist. But poetry started providing for me in very literal ways—fellowships, awards, stipends. It suddenly became more pragmatic to be a poet than not. That shifted something inside me. But with that came pressure and potentially dangerous ambition: the sense that I have to prove and outdo myself with every year. X publications. X books by X age. It’s easy to get swept up in the commodification of poetry, and being in the academy can amplify that anxiety. And yet—there’s relief in knowing I’ve built a body of work. That I’m visible now. And my childhood dream of being an artist wasn’t impossible. So I keep fluctuating—between delusion and doubt. Probably the natural condition of a poet.
DP: I feel that, deeply. Especially being poets in academia—sometimes it heightens the neuroses. So here’s the next question. As someone committed to craft and also teaching creative writing, what do you see as the next frontier for your poetic work? Are there themes, forms, or collaborations you’re drawn to but haven’t fully explored?
DC: Hmm. I think part of me still holds onto the conventional blueprint: publish my first book with a major press, continue placing individual works in established journals, secure more fellowships, and eventually try to land a TT job. Basically keep finding ways to keep creative writing at the center of my life through the security of the academy. But another part of me is restless, wanting to complicate those conventions and hierarchies. I used to be quite involved in film-making and photography—weddings, studio-work, short-film projects—and though poetry pulled me away from that world, I do feel an insistent desire to return. Andrei Tarkovsky, despite being a filmmaker, would often say that poetic reasoning is closest to the laws by which thought develops, and therefore to life itself. A “strong” film would therefore be one which honours such associative, heightened logics; it’s how we can come to be possessed by images that feel like they hold some kind of a concentrated inner power; it’s also how an audience can feel like they’re are actively entangled in sculpting the world of a film. So really, film and poetry are more twins than siblings. It’s why I think poets have such a natural multimodality. There are many recent examples of this convergence of mediums in Asian American poets, who are finding ways to exist inside and outside the academy at once: Ocean Vuong’s recent photography exhibitions, Jane Wong’s multi-media projects, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s image-text poems, Cathy Linh Che’s documentary debut. That fugitivity is inspiring. Likewise, I want my future books to feel radically different from one another in form and voice. I’m obsessed with lyric essays and hybrid forms. I think relationality and juxtaposition—the way poetry thinks and moves so uniquely and electrically—can open doors back to photography, film, visuality. That’s the next frontier for me: expansion, genre-bending, returning to the languages of other mediums which nevertheless still partake in the same artistic energies as the poem.
DP: As a BIPOC male poet-educator, how do you navigate the intersections of race, gender, and authority in your classroom and your poetry? What tensions or possibilities arise when you’re both the mentor and the marginalized voice?
DC: When I first taught at Cornell, I already had my own issues with the notion of authority, but the deeper issue was internal—I’ve always struggled with accepting my own authority. The first year of teaching wasn’t about learning how to have authority; it was about realizing that I already had it, and about whether I acknowledged it or not. I’d make an offhand comment and students would scribble it down furiously. That’s when I realized: they were already granting me a position I hadn’t granted myself. Being BIPOC complicates this further. Many of my students were People of Color, and so had their own fraught histories with authority—whether that be in school, family, or institutional settings. They weren’t going to respond well to approaches of conventional mastery. So being skeptical of authority and on the periphery myself helped me meet them at eye level, not as some figure circling from above. I think about formal approaches to the classroom much like the formal strategies we employ in writing. For example, the form Ocean Vuong uses in his first novel, the kishōtenketsu—tension through proximity, not conflict. Or Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome”—a network with no center, every part capable of sprouting its own path. That’s the classroom I try to build: de-centered, relational, self-generative. I hope to take myself off the pedestal and to act as someone who reflects and refracts my students’ thinking back to themselves. And no different to the writing process, every semester I’m revising and revising my pedagogy. Teaching is a field of constant becoming.
DP: Absolutely. Okay—last question. If you could speak to your younger self, what would you tell him now? What truth or freedom do you think he needed most?
DC: Wow. I think the first thing I’d say is: you made it. Or maybe: you will make it, and in some ways, you already have. I spent so much of my life struggling with ownership of the self. I constantly needed permission—permission to be an artist, to be unflinchingly permeable, to trust what I already intuited internally. Toni Morrison talks about how no matter what rational, ordered, or visible epistemologies we hold onto in our daily life, the act of writing necessarily inverts the periphery and the center of our knowledge structures. In other words, when we sit down to write, whatever perilous beliefs, symbols, or ideas circling at the far edges of our self— those that we might commonly dismiss, ridicule, or distrust in our waking, conditioned life—become revealed to us as the principal forces which make the act of writing possible at all. I resisted that for a long time. I pushed away the invisible because I didn’t know how to hold it. But poetry taught me that not everything has to be externalized to be real; that not everything measurable is actual. I’d tell my younger self: you have permission to believe what you feel before it’s proven. That permeability is not weakness—but the very source of the work, and its own kind of proof. And maybe I’d tell him: the struggle was necessary. It made the poetry possible.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.
Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MFA from Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH journal, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. He also earned First-Class Honours in Literary Studies and Psychology from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches creative writing and academic composition. His work has appeared in New England Review, Best of Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, the Forward Prize (Best Single Written Poem), the Palette Previously Published Poem Prize, and has been recognized with awards and nominations from The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. He has also received fellowships and support from the Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).