“So Much More: A Conversation with Darren Demaree” — curated by Esteban Rodriguez


Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems (Harbor Editions 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.

I believe it was Stanley Kunitz that once said that even after decades of writing poetry, there was a sense of uncertainty when he approached an idea for a new poem, a mystery he wasn’t sure would reveal itself in time to feel confident about the end result. For Darren C. Demaree, twenty-three poetry collections no doubt indicates what confidence looks like on the page, but beyond the books, we see a poet whose thoughts about the world and desires about what poetry can be are daily endeavors that are to be contemplated, discussed, drafted into fragmentary musings, and rendered into greater poetic understandings of our world at large. To use a tired cliché, it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey, and for readers who have been privileged enough to witness Darren’s poetic journey, it has been nothing short of lyrically moving, tragically relatable, and undeniably necessary for the social and political landscape we find ourselves in. 

Hello Darren, thank you so much for your time. So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems (Harbor Editions 2024) is your twenty-third poetry collection, and I think it’s safe to say that your momentum is as strong as ever. Can you describe your writing process and the steps you take in your everyday life that make you so prolific? How do you motivate yourself to put these ideas on the page?

Darren Demaree: I’m a very routine-oriented person. Some of that came from being an athlete in high school and college. Some of that came from getting sober. My sobriety routine, especially the first seven years (my sobriety date is January 24th, 2012), was spent purposely exhausting myself with workouts and writing so that I wouldn’t have the energy to try and drink once my family went to bed. I used to write upwards of nine poems a day. That was obnoxious and not healthy, but I was choosing between unhealthy paths at that point. One of them required too much of me, and the other was going to bury me. It’s been a long time since I worked like that. I don’t feel that panic anymore, but some of that practice carried over. I probably write 3-4 poems a week now. It’s the only time I allow myself sugar, when I’m writing, and it’s a little bit of a Pavlov’s dog set-up. A piece of pie, a poem. Some ice-cream and cake, a poem. My favorite part of all of this is the crafting of new work. I feel different when I’m working on a poem. There’s an energy, maybe it’s just the sugar, but I feel confident and willing to experiment and challenge when I write. I like the trying.

Esteban Rodríguez: Immediately, I was struck by how tight these poems were, and how much of a punch they packed, despite their brevity. I remember reading “#7” and having to pause for a moment because of how honest and devastating it is. The poem reads:

the rose burns in the sun we are the rose we we we have counted on our
beauty to save us without understanding that each of our petals is meat
and no meat left in the field makes it to the river without being carried in
the teeth of an animal

Can you talk a little about this poem and the way you see beauty in the world? Does it always have to be “carried in the teeth of an animal”?

DD: I think the temporary nature of beauty, of us, of nature continuing is an incredible thing. I don’t get sad when the seasons change. I like to witness and hopefully be a part of that beauty as it changes and then is consumed. I like to be part of that vulnerability. The poems are an extension of that.

ER: We just had a presidential election, and while political poetry might not be on the top of everyone’s reading list, I think the prose poems in this collection are important in recognizing how we move forward. Obviously, we must reflect on what brought us here in the first place, and the poem “America chose to drown in the desert” really highlights the manner in which society’s greed leaves us questioning how we’ve strayed from a basic understanding of others. The opening lines state:

i have heard the orchestra of children discovering that we cage any thrust
of the garden before it can become the garden that we take the clay to
hold our flowers before they can take the clay to carry water to their
mouths that we are all limb and muscle and lost vein and we have never
had the heart for a nation that could survive the distinction between
breathing and being forced to consume an unhealthy air a measured and
wild sharing of the landscape we can compost sure but we compost the
native beauty before we can think to name the bloom before we ever
thought to ask what the bloom was already called

How did these political poems come about? Given that they are quite symbolic, how did you approach speaking about America without always having to directly speak about it?

DD: “America chose to drown in the desert” specifically came out of the completely unmanageable grief of seeing families separated at the border, of seeing children detained like prisoners, and the anger that lashed out of me when I finally stopped myself from reading those stories. You can’t tuck your own children in bed at night, see them sleep warm and loved and also know the truth of what your country is doing to other children for political reasons, and then write a pastoral poem about Ohio. I just couldn’t write about anything else at that moment. I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it. I think I’ve written mostly political poems since I wrote that 702-poem sequence “Trump as a Fire Without Light” that became my book, A Fire Without Light, in 2016-2018. I have to force myself to write other things at this point. It’s good that I force breaks to write more Emily poems or a sequence of hope or creativity or sobriety. I think when I feel strong and confident in the work I want to bring this nation chin to chin with me, and do my best to deal with it, poetically-speaking.

ER: Can you speak more about Ohio and what role it plays in your poetry?

DD: I think Ohio is one of those places that can define you as an artist. It’s such a beautiful and frustrating place to be from. You end up living and working in both appreciation and defiance of Ohio. You want to enjoy every part of these great seasons and places, and then literally fistfight this heart-shaped home until it admits it’s become unhinged and disfigured. I feel challenged by it and I don’t want to back down, so I write about it alot. Ohio is an inciting incident in my life.

ER: Regardless of what ‘incidents’ occur in your life, “no one can stop you from becoming a siren,” as you so eloquently say in “#55.” Your speaker goes on to say, “there is no panic there is only the call to open up your book of anchors,” which I interpreted as a call for writers (or anyone creating art for that matter) to settle in different spaces, disembark and open up your ideas to others. However, at the end of the poem, the speaker states, “let the crowd taste the water they will know what to do after all that.” What do you hope readers do with So Much More? With all of your work?

DD: I think the way this book is quilted together, with starts and stops, a music and energy that takes a little bit of work from the reader, I hope they give the whole book their attention. The themes develop. There are stark moments that work as fence posts for the reader to follow. There are repeated words and phrases that are cues for different things. I think what I hope most is that they cling to the idea that empathy is humanity’s silver lining.

In terms of all of my work, at this point there are twenty-three full-length collections, and I’ve tried to do a lot of different things. I’ve tried to experiment and push my voice. I’ve written a career’s worth of Emily poems already, but I’ll never stop writing those. I’ve written truly fun and weird books. I’ve written a lot of book-length sequences that angle towards humanism and philosophy. I’ve written well-researched books about the bombing of the thinker, Sam Cooke, and the Ray Mancini/Duk Koo Kim title fight.

Honestly, I think I personally know the only people that have read all of my books. I hope that anyone attempting to gauge my work in its entirety at this point would find the things they personally love about it and be challenged by the rest. If you’ve ever heard me talk about poetry in person, I love the process of writing so damn much. I love trying new things and following no path other than my loves and my curiosity. I’m a lifer in terms of this. I’m going to be relentless. Not all of it will work, but anyone who looks at the whole career when I’m done will be able to see how much I loved to play with and push around poetry. It’s incredibly difficult, and so much fun.

ER: I hope it’s safe to assume that you write with projects in mind. Do you find that your projects veer in a different direction than you originally thought?

DD: All the time. Every book I’ve written has a lodestone poem in it, and I don’t really know what the project will be until I write it. Sometimes it’s the clear and concise poem that shows you what you’ve been trying to write the whole time. Sometimes it’s an image or a metaphor that highlights the purpose of the project. Sometimes it’s just a phrase that ties the whole effort together. Every one of  my books has that poem in it, and I don’t think it would work if you took the poem out. So Much More has that opening piece to “with an empathy so fatal”, and for me the project revolves around it, having the pieces build towards it and then crest after that sequence into darker things. I think the key is to not fight it when it finds its footing in a different place than you intended. That part is magic. Don’t fight magic when it finds you.

ER: I love that last sentence: Don’t fight magic when it finds you. What magic, beyond poetry, is finding you nowadays and how are you going about not resisting it?

DD: The honest answer is truth and hope. Truth and hope have become magical entities in this world. My children show it to me. Artists show it to me. Great meals show it to me. I’m not taking an ounce of those people and their actions for granted anymore. To do so would be careless, and would cost me doubly in this current environment.

ER: In the first poem of the section “all that salt,” your speaker says the following:

i have been threatened by this world to be made into something other so i let this world turn me into something other by giving the best parts of my rebellion to you

I can’t think of a better line that summarizes what we as writers hope to accomplish with our work. What “rebellion” do you envision you’ll leave with others?

DD: I know that I’m tired. I’m tired and sad and frustrated about this world. Any call to rebellion begins to find life in those agitated states. As a poet you want to reach for more, for better, for joy when you can, and hopefully that reaching becomes a community of arms trying to go further and further with it. I think we need to be defiant and lift each other up even when we’re tired. Maybe some of these poems will find someone who is tired but manages to lift someone else regardless? We have to be all in at this point. Use my arms. Use my poems. Take what you need. If you’re for empathy and joy and art in a world that is openly hostile towards these ideas, then I’m with you, and you can take whatever part of me you need to move forward.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.