This interview was conducted by Assistant Editor Nell Kriegel with Dominique Ahkong, recipient of the Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry for her poem “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father,” featured in SCR Volume 57.
Nell Kriegel: In addition to your work as a poet, you serve as an editor for Shō Poetry Journal—how do you navigate the balance between your editorial mindset and your creative work? Do you find it challenging to “turn off” the editor while you’re writing?
Dominique Ahkong: This was a problem for me in my 20s and 30s; pulling all-nighters before a deadline was the only way I could squeeze past my inner editor. As an editor now, I try to approach work with curiosity, and I often read poems intuitively.
Since reading submissions as well as producing and promoting the journal takes up much of my time and energy, most of my writing happens between reading periods. I tend to write in bursts and often get so caught up in the excitement that I sometimes over-edit poems as they form. I’ve learned to avoid revisiting my own poems in the evening and know when I need to leave them alone for a while.
NK: In your poem “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” the form is a long block of text; how do you decide which poems are suited for line breaks and which ones lean into prose? What’s the motivator behind this form?
DA: I originally composed “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” in free verse. I was working on a group of poems that each began with the title “Times I Said Nothing.” The poems sat for ten years before I took them up again, and “A Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend’s Father” was the first to take shape. I remember trying to write it as a duplex: the form helped me voice lines that felt true to the experience, but I was also taking broad liberties with variations on the repeated lines, and the syllabic count was off—maybe not a duplex, I thought.
When I’m feeling stuck with a poem, I sometimes box it up as a prose poem to see what’s going on. I read my poems aloud as I compose and revise; musicality is important to me. Over time, my memory of this incident has solidified into a block. On one hand, there’s a long-haul flight and the heaviness of feeling drugged, and on the other hand, there’s the active mind pushing doubt back and forth. When I changed the title, things clicked into place for me.
NK: “When I Met You” closes with the line, “I will become whatever I become.” Do you see poetry as a mode of becoming? More broadly, how intertwined is writing with your sense of identity—and how necessary is it to you?
DA: In college I had a poetry professor who championed my work but gave me very little feedback. He said: 1) You have to go deeper; and 2) You should be reading more contemporary poetry. That was it. Looking back on it now, that was exactly right. I’ve been a reader for most of my life, but at the time, I was so burnt out that I stopped reading books for a few years. I was steeped in film/video, interactive media, and photography, where my work could be personal but less vulnerable. But I missed paper, the physical page.
At some point I took an interest in book arts, which brought me back to poetry. I also left the tropics and found myself, for the first time, surrounded by space, and quiet, with a study of my own. It’s taken about 20 years for me to inhabit the practice, but yes, I consider poetry my life work—both reading/studying contemporary poetry and writing poetry.
NK: There’s a line of yours that is just so stunning— “I begged to be useful, knowing nothing is too small to be useful: brackets in a sum or a decimal point or a stub still wagging.” The attention to small details feels so essential to the poem’s impact. How do you scale in your writing, balancing both expansive ideas and those precise, intimate details?
DA: This poem came together very quickly for me. I was already in the writing zone and remember sitting down with the title to meditate on an experience. Instead, I ended up with this poem. I don’t really think about scope when I’m writing—I might think about that sort of thing if a poem isn’t working and I’m trying to approach it from a different angle, but for the most part, I write intuitively. I’d been listening to Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El Daoud and ended up following the current.
NK: What themes do you find moving right now?
DA: I’ve been trying to carve out space to work towards my first collection. Secrecy, silence, and shame are key themes, along with migration, inheritance, and ritual. Faith and caretaking are other layers beneath that.
