SOURCE & METHOD
The text? That of the 2020 Presidential stimulus (or CARES Act) letter. The method? A black marker, passed across its self-aggrandizing paragraphs until the language says—as I said to my wife when the letter arrived—what it really means. My inspiration is the one and only Ronald Johnson, whose Radi os, a sustained erasure of Paradise Lost, I’ve written on but never emulated. Of Radi os Johnson wrote, “I compose the holes.” In the middle of a pandemic, I compose the troll.

Derek Mong is a poet, essayist, and translator whose books include Other Romes (2011), The Identity Thief (2018), The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), and The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (with Anne O. Fisher, 2018). He’s the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College.