What Poets and Actors Share

Derek JG Williams | April 2024

Words

are flesh 

craving to become idea, idea

dreaming it has found, this time, a body

—Frank Bidart, “As You Crave Soul”

When the poet finds words befitting the body, ideas become animate, real. The right language is a kiss that gives the poem life, breathing it into being. Actors are a vessel for words through speech, through action. In practice and approach the two vocations are undoubtedly opposites, but poets can find communion with actors. The actor’s transformation from the self to a character is a public act. They are incarnate in a role, making something from nothing—words in a script or play. Poets, especially when attempting to transcend the limits of autobiography, encounter a similar problem: nothing comes from nothing. There must be a source. And there we find tension between the autobiographical life the poet lives and the fictional life they create. In consideration of this, American literary history urges us to look to the past. Louise Glück points out that

The self . . . was the nineteenth century’s discovery, an object for a time, of rich curiosity, its structure, its responses, endlessly absorbing. And as long as it was watched in this spirit of curiosity and openness, it functioned as an other; the art arising from such openness is an art of inquiry, not conclusion, dynamic rather than static.

We universally accept that dynamic art is good art since static art is one-dimensional. It is also noteworthy here that she thinks of the self as “watched.” The designation implies distance from the subject while indicating that it is a kind of spectacle; a performance. Glück’s spirit of inquiry and a necessity for openness highlight two characteristics that actors and poets share. In both vocations, practitioners must tangle with, and untangle, the weedy notion of a self that must be charismatic and authentic in its artistic performance. For them, watching is becoming. 

We are taught to think of a poem’s speaker as independent from the poet, while the actor is always apart from their role on the screen or stage, even if it is much lauded, or career defining, and even if the role was written specifically to serve their talents and personality, which are so frequently and inextricably bound together. So it is with poets, too, since their name becomes synonymous with their writing. Despite what we have been taught, it is only natural for readers to consider the “I” in a poem to be the poet. This is evidence of the strength of a poem’s performance. It is convincing. These notions point toward larger issues about identity and the self. The qualities of a poet’s writing, which exists on the page, become, to the reader, the qualities they possess as a writer, and as a person—comprising a representation of the self, though the writing and the self remain separate. According to Karl Ove Knausgaard,

A name is intimately connected with this secret and particular self; so entwined are the name and the individual’s sense of identity, in fact, that one thinks of the name as belonging to the self. . . . And since the proper name points both inward and outward at the same time, it is an exceptionally sensitive thing. There is a remnant of magical thought in the fact that the word is what it refers to, or may awaken it. I am my name, my name is me.

For both the poet and the actor, their name no longer belongs to them. Their self is lost or subsumed by their vocation; their name only points outward, toward the world. It is an arrow that travels in one direction. A distorted self might even be reflected back at the actor or poet. Like a doppelgänger, the distorted self might be particularly unsettling, since at one time the reflection of the self adhered much closer to the writer’s or actor’s individual sense of their own identity.

Actors are often trained using variations of the Method, which first became prominent in American cinema during the 1950s. There is much disagreement and misunderstanding over what Method acting actually is. For instance: “The idea is that Method actors inhabit their characters all the way, all the time. But many people . . . will tell you that this is not the Method at all.” The primary goal of Method acting is to help the performer form a bridge between their life and that of the character they are playing. Ultimately, the actor aims to undergo an experience in the present tense of the performance, or in its moment, rather than merely represent that experience to the audience. A similar concern between narrative and associative texts exists in contemporary American poetry. The narrative poem is representative while the associative poem is experiential. The associative poem is an intriguing parallel to method acting. Tony Hoagland has called it “a poetry equal, in its velocity, to the speed and disruptions of contemporary culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness.” Or, we might simply say that it is dynamic. 

 James Dean drew largely upon the Method. He “believed that the moment was the most important element in the process of acting, that an actor should work only moment to moment, and that an effective performance was a series of brilliant moments strung together like pearls in a necklace.” It sounds like Dean is teaching a course on poetry. In it he is telling us that each verse or stanza is one singular pearl comprising the larger necklace of the poem. The pearl as an object has a compressed and contained beauty, which lends it to further comparison with poetry, which usually embraces brevity and concision. 

Both poets and actors continuously try on and wear different personas, even as pieces of themselves shine through and are necessary to nuanced performances on the screen, stage, or page. Their desire to be seen thrives adjacent with the need to remain, at least partially, hidden; thus revealing the self while curating distance. It is a private solitude made public. Consequently, the isolation in both vocations can be tremendous, which is a truth that poets intuit. Yet actors seem to be more fortunate than poets in this regard, since poetry is (except in very rare cases) not a collaborative act. The poet has no director to seek guidance from, nor any other actors to share a scene with—they have only their experiences. Crucially, they do have a wealth of other texts to draw upon. These can help to juxtapose and contextualize their concrete lives against their fictive lives. The poems in this article indicate the myriad ways in which the poem is a performance, exhibiting the poet’s remarkable kinship with the actor.

Frank O’Hara is not an especially masked or unknowable poet. The colloquiality and intimacy in his poems make for a reading experience that is widely relatable, and even in the face of turmoil, his poetic speakers exude wit and humor. These qualities are a significant part of the charismatic pull in his writing, that is also a performance. 

Though she does not make an argument relating specifically to O’Hara, Mary Oliver writes compellingly about this precise point in her nuanced discussion of tone in contemporary poetry:

You feel that the poems might have been written to you. They are not unlike letters you might have received from a good friend. . . . Inside this poem of plain speech, the poet has moved, with great skill and all deliberate speed, from the role of “professor” to the role of fellow-citizen, neighbor, and friend. And so there exists a definite sense of a person, a perfectly knowable person, behind the poem.

O’Hara wears the mask of the knowable person through the performance of the poem. To accompany this strategy, he frequently alludes to the lives of famous actors, like Lana Turner in “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!].” Intriguingly, in these poems he portrays iconic figures in the same fashion in which he characterizes his own friends—everyone seems like a trusted intimate of Frank O’Hara. Consequently, this causes the reader to think of him as a friend as well. Who would not want to attend a party thrown by O’Hara? As we will see, it would, without a doubt, last until dawn. 

“Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” is a succinct, white-hot flash of a poem prompted by a newspaper headline: a piece of found, fragmentary text. It is ample evidence of O’Hara’s intertextual approach. In this, the poem uses Turner as a conduit, as a character to communicate an intimate and funny truth about the speaker. The poem begins not with the headline itself (that comes later), but with the speaker repeating the headline in the poem to themselves: “Lana Turner has collapsed!” We know this is not the headline, since when it later appears in the poem, it is entirely capitalized. It is easy to imagine the speaker repeating the line out loud on the street. Or perhaps the headline plays out in the speaker’s mind as a part of their internal monologue. Either way, it is a curious path into the poem. Following this audible or internal headline, we are given the circumstances surrounding the moment in which the speaker learns of Lana Turner’s collapse. The description is chaotic and jumbled:

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

The action is breathless and exasperated. The speaker is late, harried by both time and weather. The poem uses no punctuation, so our pauses do not always come naturally during the reading of the poem. In this manner, we find communion with the breathless speaker. While reading, we can imagine the crowded street and the inclement weather. There is a physical intimacy between the speaker, the headline, the reader, and the words on the page. As readers, the chaos of the street becomes our chaos, our storm.

The weather in “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” is vital to our understanding of the text; it is as confused as the speaker, who is having trouble differentiating between snow and hail. Today, meteorologists would call such nasty weather a wintery mix. We learn that the “you” in the poem is not the reader since the “you” corrects the speaker regarding the weather. It is conceivable that the “you” is a friend, and that the poem was originally composed as an apology and explanation for the speaker’s tardiness. This gestures toward the poem as a calculated performance that is very well constructed, and durable since it retains resonance today. With this in mind, the poem thoroughly meets Mary Oliver’s idea of the poem as a letter. Thus, we might also read this as an epistolary poem. Lastly, it is not only snowing, and raining, and arguably hailing; the traffic is a mirror of the sky—it, too, is a confused mess. In this light, we might think of Lana Turner’s misfortunate fall as its own kind of a storm or natural catastrophe, which also means we might think of it as a relentless force, which coheres with the poem’s characterization of the weather and the speaker’s experience of it. 

The second time we read Turner’s name, near the middle of the short poem, the capitalization of the text indicates that we are reading the actual headline, rather than the speaker’s repetition of the headline in the first line of the poem. This time we read: “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!” The exact transcription seems to capture and refer to the moment the speaker reads the headline. Following this moment, the poem’s tone drastically changes, the early bedlam fades away, and the speaker reflects on Hollywood and California, where there is no rain or snow. We imagine it is sunny and perfect in Hollywood, where Turner, the famous (or infamous) actress, must live.

After the shift in tone, the speaker confesses: “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I never actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up.” Her collapse is not something to celebrate, though it is commemorated by the newspaper headline and O’Hara’s poem, which itself provides a commentary on fame and the lives of the famous, who face public scrutiny and ridicule. We might mistakenly read the poem as caricature, but it is contextualized with a counterpoint made by the speaker: the assertion that they, too, like Turner, have acted “perfectly disgraceful” in the past, but never “actually collapsed” at a party. It does sound like the speaker has been close to collapse, though. They, and we, want Lana Turner to get up, because we love her; the poem humanizes her. We even need Turner to get up, because who has not fallen over and behaved badly, or “perfectly disgraceful”? The speaker, on behalf of the public, will forgive her, and we all need forgiveness sometimes. This is the sentiment the poem points to, revealing the speaker, removing their mask through the exploration of Lana Turner as a famous actor. Through the body of the poem, O’Hara finds an intimacy that feels wholly personal, elegant, and necessary.

Another O’Hara poem, “A Party Full of Friends,” moves, like a camera, through the various rooms of the party where Violet, Jane, Hal, Jack, Larry, Arnie, Freddy, Gloria (who was not invited and brought a guest), Lyon, and Bubsy rollick, dance, leap, cry, pace, celebrate, complain, and vomit; leading the speaker to admit: “What / confusion! and to think / I sat down and caused it / all!” The population of this small, two-page poem is enormous. The characters are all written with such familiarity that we might think of them as famous; they are all individual Lana Turners—such is the poem’s intimacy. And its final lines possess a glorious swagger. They issue a broad challenge that is as memorable as it is original: “Someone’s going / to stay until the cows / come home. Or my name isn’t / Frank O’ Hara.” Such is O’Hara’s pride at the poem he has written, at the scene he has initiated, that he actually signs the end of the poem with his name. In this, he deconstructs the relationship between the poet’s private and public selves, dissolving the barriers that exist between the autobiography and fiction. It is as though the poem is an early film from the twentieth century with “The End” appearing on the movie theater screen before it goes dark and the credits begin to roll.

Neither poem by O’Hara is technically a persona poem. Still, we might consider him the original poet in New York City, which is a kind of persona. While O’Hara considers the public and private selves, “James Dean,” by Ai, annihilates the gap between performer, speaker, poet, and the poem as a performance. The persona poem (or dramatic monologue, if you prefer) defines Ai’s writing approach. Major Jackson considers her use of persona to be an “evolution of the form and a new extension of her selfhood, whereby an interweaving of identities yields another lyric entity for the reader to inhabit.” In the same essay, a friend of Jackson’s critiques Ai’s poetry because too much of the author, or the self, is evident in the poems. But for Ai the form helps her dig toward larger realizations about that self, and its individual identity. Part of what is compelling about her work is that we are allowed to watch this process of discovery; it is a kind of untangling that her poems undertake. According to Yusef Komunyakaa, “Ai’s characters uncover their senses of self as they speak, baring themselves physically, psychologically, and spiritually, and the music of telling seems to bring them to the cusp of being transformed. Each poem is a confession.” The confessions of her speakers are multiple, and implicate the poet in their telling. Her speakers wear the mask of their subject, and readers must question their relationship with the iconography and biography depicted in the poems, since she so often inhabits famous and infamous figures. A catalog of such individuals would be long and varied, but among them are the Ukrainian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, the American actor Marilyn Monroe, and of course, most relevant to our purposes, the American actor James Dean. 

In “James Dean” he speaks to us from beyond the grave to unravel his public image and the circumstances around his life. The depiction of his death in the poem is grisly. Of his death, Dean tells us, 

metal jammed against metal.

My head nearly tore from my neck,

my bones broke in fragments

like half-remembered sentences,

and my body,

as if it had been beaten

by a thousand fists,

bruised dark blue;

yet a breath entered my wide-open mouth

The poem does not depict Dean’s death as romantic; it is gruesome. The poem, years removed from the actor’s death, reminds us that he had a body that was made of matter. In the accident that took his life, his flesh bruised, his bones broke, and his head was nearly torn from his body. His life is the sentence “half-remembered,” and not accurately cited. The poem reminds us that he died in an utterly horrific way, yet the breath that enters his mouth at the end of the quotation frames the text—it is the breath of the poem to come—life after death. 

The speaker, Dean reincarnate, tells us that “I died, / but the cameras kept filming / some guy named James, / kept me stranded among the so-called living.” The poem here alludes to the basic fact that the life of his persona continued after his physical life ended. The camera does not stop because of death. The camera is life, and it keeps filming, keeps rolling, with or without us, whether Dean is dead or alive. The actor on the screen is no longer the intimate “James.” If Frank O’Hara were the speaker of this poem, our experience of it would be totally different, but the speaker here is James Dean, the icon whose face has hung on dorm room walls for the last fifty years. His image persists on film, in his work, and in the media. Beyond home movies, that is not the case for most of us (the afterlife of our social media accounts, and the images that reside there, is a wholly different discussion). Our lives remain private, but Dean’s life was undeniably public. We can visit and revisit him in Rebel Without a Cause, wearing

my red jacket, blue jeans.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

a shadow on a movie screen;

sometimes I caress a woman in her dreams,

kiss, undress her anyplace,

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

but when she grabs my hair, 

my head comes off in her hands

and I take the grave again.

The speaker is frozen in the public eye, though what the audience is capable of seeing is only the shadow of the living, breathing man. Young cinephiles still might dress up as Dean on Halloween, wearing his costume from the film. His red jacket and blue jeans are forever a symbol of anguished youth. In the poem, Ai again reminds us that this image of him does not correspond with the truth of Dean’s life. Real violence happened to his body in death. In this passage, his head comes clean off in the throes of a woman’s fantasy. In the previous passage on his death, his head only “nearly” came off. We are not to forget that he had a body and it experienced death. Dean, the speaker, cannot forget this, and will not permit the reader to indulge such naive mythology. 

The poem embraces the mythology that has grown up around the actor while still reflecting on his violent end. He is a figure of fascination, because in the annals of the American memory, his life, work, and death are so densely intertwined. In the film Rebel without a Cause, Dean’s rival dies in a car crash. Dean, several years later, ultimately died in a car crash as well. In the poem, he tells us,

They used to say that I was always on

 and couldn’t separate myself

from the characters I played, 

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

I didn’t do method; I did James Dean.

The Method approach dictates that the actor must, as much as possible, become the character they play. In some instances, actors have taken to staying in character outside of the film they are in for weeks or months, to facilitate a better, and truer, performance. The poem seems to be telling us that the inverse is true in the case of Dean. In life and in his performances, his authentic self is given freely, and totally. The speaker in the poem is indignant at criticism of his performances, and as a consequence, his life. He wants us to know that his performances were his life. The use of the italicized “do” has a snarl and contempt to it. It tells us that one does not do the Method: one lives, or is, the Method. The speaker in the poem further enlightens us, insisting that “. . . I didn’t need an audience. / That’s the difference / between an actor / and some sly pretender.” While the poem vacillates between violence and myth, it ends on a fantastical, and consciously artificial, note: “I’m doing one hundred eighty-six thousand / miles a second, / but I never leave the stage.” One hundred eighty-six thousand miles a second is the speed of light, which is then also the speed of film, and that is all that remains of Dean. He is stuck on the stage, and a mere shadow of his self is represented there. Yet the poem still insists that his life was his performance.

Frank Bidart has written numerous memorable dramatic monologues that could serve as a counterpoint to Ai, but let’s focus on one particular found piece, “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger.” The text interprets and critiques two film performances by the actor Heath Ledger, and in it Bidart skillfully crafts an ars poetica using material drawn directly from the mouth of the actor. Bidart has discussed his persona poetry in an interview with Mark Halliday. In it, he said: “I didn’t feel like I was ‘making up’ the drama—they were there, and I felt that to write the poems I had to let them . . . enter me.” The “they” that he references is, of course, the characters and voices that drove him to write in the persona form. The process Bidart describes is an internal one that reflects outward, while in “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger,” the external dialogue from Ledger is taken in by Bidart, where it sticks, and it stays there until he repurposes it directly into the poem. It works from the outside in. Thus, the genesis of this poem, as opposed to more traditional persona work, can be found in two different impulses. Notably, they do not compete with each other; rather, they are complementary. 

“Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger” frames two distinctly different performances by the actor, drawn from two radically different films, The Dark Knight and Brokeback Mountain. In the poem, lines appear in italics in order to signal the work of the actor in the films, rather than the found text used by the poet later on in the second half of the poem. We might consider the first part of the poem Bidart’s commentary. The role of the speaker in the poem is very much played by the poet as thinker and critic. He wants us to contemplate the process of performance, both on the screen and page, and what it takes for the performer to enact it. Since the opening, italicized portion of the poem is short, its lines are reproduced in full:

Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to

centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his

mouth, he has mastered to mutilate

you: the Joker’s voice, so unlike

the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar.

The description of the vowels and the lack of punctuation between the descriptions allows them to run together, showing how they coexist in one performer, though they remain two separate voices. Furthermore, these lines are all one sentence, which contribute to the notion of the two film roles coexisting in one actor through his performance. The American quality of the vowels alludes to the violence done to the mouth, which, in the film, has been cut at the corners of the lips, to form a sick, permanent smile. That the vowels are flattened allows us to think of them as one-dimensional, or in American terms, perhaps originating from anywhere geographically, since there is no regional accent in the voice. However, the voice has mastered its mutilation to mutilate “you,” which could be any of us. More likely, the text is referencing the mutilation of the actor Heath Ledger, playing the character, or role, of the Joker. The effect of the role on Ledger as a person is a lingering question, and certainly one that the poem’s construction urges, given that it is split into two halves, like the two roles played by the actor. 

The latter interpretation of the “you” is reinforced by the lines that follow in the poem, since the Joker’s voice is juxtaposed as “. . . so unlike / the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar,” the closeted gay man played by Ledger in the film Brokeback Mountain. Del Mar, like the Joker, is also wounded, but the damage done to him is internal rather than external; it is not visible in his costuming or makeup, which in the Joker’s case, is extremely evident. Two American characters are illuminated in these five lines—violence is done to one, and violence is committed by the other—and Ledger, via the transformation of the two performances, manages to compellingly embody both psyches.

The second, and final, part of the poem is not italicized, and is in fact the sentence by Heath Ledger. The sentence is not authored or spoken by either one of the characters from the first part of the poem, or any of the other characters Ledger played as an actor during his career: the title tells us this. It is the first bit of information we receive upon reading the poem, and the form smartly withholds the sentence by Ledger until the poem’s unexpected conclusion: 

Once I have the voice

that’s

the line

and at

the end

of the line

is a hook

and attached

to that

is the soul.

The unpunctuated lines alternate between single lines and couplets. This lends the poem a dialogue-like quality, although it is a monologue. Concretely, on the page, it evokes the idea of fishing: a hook dropped deep beneath the water to fish out and up what can be caught. By setting the two portions of the poem apart in such a deliberate manner, Bidart helps us to understand that he takes Ledger’s sentence, his found poem, as an ars poetica. Bidart does often work in the mode of persona. In poems such as “Herbert White” and “Ellen West” he ventures outside himself to try and find humanity—or in the case of “Herbert White,” the lack of humanity—in others. In “Herbert White,” the speaker cannot stand the horrors he has committed. Once he identifies himself as their perpetrator, he wants to die: 

“and I couldn’t,  couldn’t,

get it to seem to me

that somebody else did it…

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

—Hell came when I saw

            MYSELF…

               and couldn’t stand

what I see…” 

“Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger” sees clearly beneath the surface of the water where the line is dropped. The speaker’s gaze penetrates through the two performances, toward the soul, which, if there is one, lives in the house of the self, far from the surface. Furthermore, if our souls can be found within our voices, investigating, on the page, the voices of others helps to reinforce our humanity. In the instance of the inhumane voice, the cruel voice, it is set apart, and in contrast with the humane, so that we may be able to see it as different, and ourselves as moral and good. Yet both the humane and inhumane are parts of the soul, the self, which is at the heart of Ledger’s performances, the lines from his interview, and the poem.

More recently, Alex Dimitrov’s 2021 collection Love and Other Poems wholly adopts the persona of the poet in New York, and is in some ways indebted to Frank O’Hara. Dimitrov writes: “I’m so dramatic. / I’m not even a poet. / I’m really an actor.” The acknowledgement of the two professions points to the poem as a performance. From the same collection, Dimitrov more deeply considers the idea in “River Phoenix,” where the speaker imagines lying in bed with the actor 

chain-smoking and talking about the afterlife. 

He’s about to give up being famous, 

I’m about to make him one more drink.

When I die, he says, looking at the way

I look at him, it’ll be a glorious day.

It’ll probably be a waterfall.

And because there’s so much water

in living, I help take his shirt off

right here on earth.

The pillow talk between the poet and actor is as doomed as it is romantic. Phoenix’s fame will be given up because (unbeknownst to him) his death is imminent. As readers, we are allowed this knowledge. Yet the poem is not morbid; its sexuality is sweet, focusing on the kind of “looking” that is being done, and by whom. Like James Dean, River Phoenix is preserved in amber; he does not age or change. We can only see him in the performances left to us. The speaker imagines Phoenix looking, not at him, his body or face, but instead at the way the speaker (the poet) sees Phoenix (the actor). This highlights the artificiality of the scene without spoiling its sentiment, since the actor’s death will be beautiful, like a waterfall, like the actor’s name itself: River. His name, per the poem’s title, is an acknowledgement of the secret and public selves, while the poem’s dialogue on the afterlife and death drives it forward, to life, to undressing, and to sex as an affirmation of life. 

Glück’s ideas about the watched self are again relevant since the poem’s perspective is both reflexive and reflective. It continues: “Me and him. You and you. / Reading this to see if I’m acting, / if I’m really myself, if I’m good at pretending.” The actor becomes the poem’s basis and a vehicle for Dimitrov’s imagination, which is testing its limits: what can successfully be performed or pulled off—like an actor in prosthetics playing a much older character. And what poet can claim to wholly understand the voice inside them? To understand the impulse too well, if the poet is acting, might shackle or silence it. Dean Young writes,

We think the mask is the person and the person is a center of descriptive gravity. Maybe so, maybe so. But who does not feel some tragic falling off from childhood, who doesn’t sense an unbridgeable alienation between ourselves and the world. . . .That our poems speak to no one, not even fully to ourselves?

If the person cannot be located, they cannot be the center or basis for the poem. The mystery or unknowability of that person is then the center around which the poem inevitably orbits. Therefore, the primary subject of the poem becomes the self as a distinct other. According to Tadeusz Dabrowski: “Nothing would be bearable if I weren’t / endlessly somebody else . . .” The poem, as in the performance for the actor, simultaneously facilitates both the transformation and exploration of an other—someone else. 

Poetry is the mask, but it is also the unmasking that allows for surprise, revelation, and strangeness. It tests us, as readers, since we cannot help but desire resolution, even as it challenges the poet, contending with selves that refuse fixed identities. The self escapes through the performance of the poem, while the actor tries to tie their self to the characters they play. The poet learns by watching the actor, taking direction from them, realizing the shared purpose of embodiment rather than mere imitation.

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Derek JG Williams is an American writer and the author of Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost Press, 2022). He holds a doctorate in English and creative writing from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His poems and prose are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Barrow Street, Salamander, Plume, Best New Poets, Banshee, Prairie Schooner, and Bear Review, among others. He lives in Germany with his family. Learn more about him at derekjgwilliams.com.