Page of Cups Interview: Poet Derrick Austin
By FT Kola
Our Page of Cups interview series explores how individual writers and artists connect with and use Tarot as a tool in their creative practice — and their life’s journey.
Here, we talk with poet Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness and Trouble the Water, both from BOA Editions. His first chapbook, Black Sand, was released by Foundlings Press in 2022. Derrick is a Cave Canem fellow, a 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, and winner of the 2021 Isabella Gardener Award.
Derrick’s poetry is sensuous and miraculous, roaming across the twilight landscape of the soul, illuminating the strange architectures of the observable world. As his poetry would suggest, Derrick is also a connoisseur of beauty and a wielder of elegance. I find myself dazed, astounded, enamored, and subtly changed by every one of his poems. You can read some of Derrick’s work here.
FTK: Do you have a relationship with the Tarot? And if so, how did it come to be? Do you read the cards, or do you have someone read them for you?
DA: I have a casual relationship with the Tarot. I don’t have a deck, and I can’t read the cards, but I have a cursory knowledge of their meanings. I feel like I’ve known about the Tarot most of my life thanks to pop-culture. Tarot-adjacent things come to mind, like the Clow Cards of Cardcaptor Sakura.
I’ve always been interested in the spiritual and occult. When my parents got the newspaper, I’d read the comics and entertainment sections, which inevitably had horoscopes. In middle school, at one of the Scholastic Book Fairs, I bought a book about the Chinese zodiac. It wasn’t until college that I got my first reading from one of my best friends, Cody Waters. I’ve had a few more Tarot readings since.
In my twenties, I had my cards read quite a bit by friends, usually as a means of checking in with myself. But I mostly use them now as a source of inspiration for my poems. I’ve written ekphrastic Tarot poems, like “Major Arcana: Judgment,” or interpretations of cards like the “Knight of Cups.”
It’s less about working with the physical cards than with the images, and how they can tell infinitely varied stories depending on how they're arranged. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say the Rider-Waite deck contains some of the most evocative and iconic images of the last century. I’ve had readings with other decks, but the Rider-Waite cards are the ones I’m most familiar with and that move most vividly in my imagination with their simple yet allusive images.
FTK: Can you talk about your two Tarot poems, “Knight of Cups” and “Major Arcana: Judgment”? How did they come to be?
DA: “Major Arcana: Judgment” came first. I wrote it shortly after I graduated college as part of a writing exercise with my friend Cody and essayist Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn. We’d all just graduated together and thought this project would be a great way to make sure we kept writing.
We planned to write poems for each of the Major Arcana, and, as happens with ambitious projects, we never finished. I wrote one about The Devil (terrible) and The Star (a few lines became part of the poem “City of Rivers” in Trouble the Water), but my poem about Judgment was the only one that stuck.
“Knight of Cups” emerged from a collaborative project with Vlad Beronja, a friend, scholar, and translator. In summer 2019, I wrote poems titled after and inspired by Paul Verlaine’s suite Aquarelles, and Vlad drew illustrations to accompany each poem for a chapbook that he designed and printed. It was such a joy to write impressionistic, improvisational poems about desire. Most of those poems depended on each other for context, but I thought the three of them not only worked well as stand-alone poems but resonated together. This is how the three sections came to be.
The title came last. I keep a list of phrases I’d like to use as titles, and “Knight of Cups” had been on that list for years. It felt true to the spirit of the poem and the mood I was in during the summer I wrote them.
FTK: I love how in “Major Arcana: Judgment” it felt as though the image on the Rider-Waite card that we are all familiar with is painted over with a contemporary image:
… Jade oak leaves quiver
and clouds wing
from the bay. It’s not unfamiliar
to see bodies rolling in the water
after flash floods. Clothed
in tuxes and paisley dresses…
The themes of death and of consequence also feel so present in the poem. Did you reference the image on the card as you were writing, or was it more thematically driven?
DA: It’s a little of both. The image conjured up associations that were swirling in my head at the time. I started drafting in Florida during hurricane season of 2011. After years of particularly devastating seasons and environmental disasters — natural and man-made — it felt urgent.
The Judgment card gave me a new way to approach that subject matter. In the image, it appeared as if the people rising from their tombs were floating in the sea, their graves like boats. I remember reading news stories at the time that described how, in towns and cities at lower sea levels, hurricanes would sink graveyards or unearth coffins. It felt very apocalyptic.
[Enjoy Derrick reading his poems!]
FTK: I know you also have a deep knowledge of astrology, and your work makes frequent reference to Christian concepts and imagery. How do all of these spiritual practices influence your creative life, if they do at all?
DA: For years I’ve been trying to articulate the relationship between spiritual practices and my poetry. I didn’t go to church growing up, nor were my parents particularly talkative about God. When people have asked if I consider myself a religious poet, I demur because I didn’t and still don’t have any kind of regular spiritual practice. But I like thinking about God and belief and the soul. It brings me pleasure to think critically and read and learn about these subjects. There’s a wonderful moment in an Anne Carson interview at The Paris Review where she’s asked if she believes in God, and here is her response:
CARSON: I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen.
INTERVIEWER: God is not available because he chooses to remove himself or he’s not available because he doesn’t exist?
CARSON: Neither. He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. “Not knowable,” as the mystics would say. And knowing is what a worshiper wants to get from God — the sense of being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing, and being known. It’s what anybody wants from any relationship of love, and the relationship with God is supposed to be one of love. But I don’t think any kind of knowing is ever going to materialize between humans and gods.
DA: I think the “emptiness where God would be if God were available” is where I am with my idea of God. That emptiness is where I work as a poet. Astrology, the Tarot, the Bible, religious art — they all contain stories and images that help me understand that emptiness. My poems inquire after His availability. But the limits of my senses and knowledge means my poems are failed endeavors.
My mentor Martha Serpas has written a lot about the complexity and fruitfulness of paradox, being able to sit with it as artists or believers. That paradox of failing before I begin is both the problem and the engine that keeps me writing. As long as I’m here, and writing continues to be a generative mode, I must keep writing. I’ve gotta decorate the void, so to speak.
A friend once called me a cheerful nihilist, which I didn’t understand at the time, but maybe this is what he meant by it. All this to say, my artistic life is the closest thing I have to a spiritual life. I’ve never felt compelled to be part of a church, but I am drawn to God. Poems are my way of thinking through God, but, more importantly, they’re a means of praise and celebration. I don’t have a gospel choir, but I’ve got these poems.
FTK: I’m also curious as to the above in terms of the interior world of the poems themselves. There are poems that directly reference the Tarot (like the two we’ve discussed), Christian imagery (like in “January 2017” or “Black Magdalene”), or the folkloric and occult (“Letter to Cody on Walpurgisnacht”). How do these images and references make their way into your work, and how you see their function?
DA: They’ve saturated my brain, I’m afraid! Tarot and myth are part of my language as a poet. Writers have big, consequential themes and images that recur in their work, which are studied and analyzed, and then there’s the odd pattern or the recurrent fixture that simply obsesses the writer. If you read a book by me, chances are good that there will be Tarot cards, drag queens, wine, and oak trees. They’re the texture of my poems.
FTK: Your poetry also has a sense of courtly, almost Renaissance beauty — the child-knights in “Black Dandy,” the “knife, its handle made lustrous through the passing of hands” (I gasped!) in "Cachet & Compassion." Yet these images feel alive, fresh, and contemporary. I find that quality in Pamela Colman-Smith’s illustrations for the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, too, and I wonder if it is because of her highly particular style mixed with recognisable symbolism and use of archetype. Does that feel resonant at all to you?
DA: It does! I think the enduring appeal of the Rider-Waite deck is because the images rely on archetypes (kings, queens, knights, laborers, magicians), but each card is so particular that it creates friction. What we know (archetype) butts up against what we encounter for the first time (those particularities), and out of that tension comes story, poem, interpretation. The Hermit’s lantern makes me ask, Where has he been and where is he headed? Are the kids on the Six of Cups siblings, friends, or strangers? Are the flowers for the girl, or will she deliver them to someone else? Who is the blindfolded woman on the Two of Swords? Who knows, but the image is fantastic! The evocative images come from the same landscape as folklore and dream.
SUPPORT OUR BOOKSHOP
If you’d like to purchase Derrick Austin’s poetry collection Tenderness, we invite you to do so via this link, or other links in the post, which are hosted through our Bookshop.org affiliate page. This is our online book shop, featuring decks and books to support your growth, inspiration, creativity, and magic — hosted through Bookshop.org, a company that directs revenue and other support to independent bookstores across the United States. When you purchase from our Bookshop.org affiliate shop, a portion of your purchase supports Typewriter Tarot as well, helping us continue and expand our work. In our bookshop, you’ll find curated collections on Tarot, creativity, psychology, social justice, ecology, and more — hundreds of books to bring more magic to your life and your library. If you choose to purchase from our shop, we thank you!
CREATIVE SUPPORT IN YOUR INBOX
If you’re a Creative Spirit — as we suspect you might be since you’re here! — we have a lovely gift for you when you sign up for our newsletter (an almost weekly love letter featuring creative rituals, inspiration, and personal essays on magic, Tarot, and creativity). This free gift is a fun, magical, reflective workbook that will guide you into new facets of your relationship with creativity. To receive it, simply sign up for our newsletter down at the bottom of this page.
About FT Kola
FT Kola is a fiction writer interested in all aspects of faith, symbolism, bodies, strangeness, and the weird movements of time. She lives in San Francisco with her little black cat.