On Reading Water by Derek JG Williams

by Tyler Truman Julian

Derek JG Williams’ award-winning debut collection, Reading Water, is an incisive interrogation of the complex balance a writer attempts to make between individualism and isolation, especially in the face of personal tragedy and everyday struggles. In Reading Water, lyricism blends with the abstract and Williams reins in intentionally esoteric moments with everyday language and a palpable sense of urgency. Thus, the collection becomes an accessible look at the interior struggle of writers navigating the present moment.

Much of the collection revolves around grief and what it means to be a writer in times of distress. These personal themes develop into larger questions of identity and positionality in society. As a white, male artist, the speaker seems to struggle with his desire to embrace the American ideal of individualism, while also remaining transgressive and creating new and challenging art, all while avoiding sinking too deeply into himself and the often-depressed emotions found there. He highlights how the expectations and challenges he experiences impact him in “Mammals,” a poem recounting the discovery of a dead whale on a beach:

            I wish I could dive as deep
            and live in the bright
            quiet dark. Even now,
            I disappear beneath
            waves of chatter,
            far into myself. Too much
            of the time I want to be
            left alone.

It’s only when the speaker declares he is alone that he can emote and interrogate his feelings. In “Before He Got Shot Near the Hip, Frank O’Hara Said, I Don’t Have Time for this Shit,” the speaker describes the emotional release that comes when he is alone, explaining,

            on the balcony I was
            real ugly
            head in my hands
            I couldn’t catch my breath

            alone
           I felt just like him
           slumped at the bottom
            of a stairwell after a party

The speaker’s “ugly” emotions connect him with poets of the past, yet it seems the only safe place to express them is in private and through poetry, “writing through it,” even if this is challenging. In “When a Lawyer at the Party Asks if I Think Creative Writing Can Be Taught, I Tell Him It Depends on the Teacher,” the speaker shares his struggle with writing poems that resonate and cobbles together “helpful found feedback from a Distinguished Professor of Poetry”:

            nice-guy sententious not truly interesting
            not enough convincing FEELING
            what the poem does not do is try for any THOUGHT
            do you have any thought at all? any insight at all?

Though the collection develops a more traditionally structured and lyrical tone as it progresses—dropping abstract structures and unorthodox grammar in later poems as a way to engage more clearly with broader conversations on art and society—this poem comes early in the collection’s last section, showing the ongoing struggle of creating art amid personal conflict and the fraught political moment.

The speaker’s grief is relayed in poetry, but the desire to be alone with it both frightens and frees him. The American impulse toward rugged individualism challenges a writer, especially a male writer, to save emotion for the page, never indulging in moments of perceived weakness. In this way, writing becomes the outlet of grief for the writer, though he must overcome psychological hurdles to do so. The poems that chronicle personal distress and confusion frequently shed traditional punctuation, proper nouns the only capitalized words. This can be seen in “Before He Got Shot Near the Hip…” and other poems in which the speaker grapples with emotion and his purpose as a writer. The emotional urgency in these introspective moments is clear because of this grammatical change and even carries a sense that the author dashed off the words quickly before losing steam and falling too deeply into the “quiet dark” referenced in “Mammals.” This is seen clearly in “My Mount Auburn,” a poem describing a walk through a picturesque cemetery, in which the speaker announces,

            I used to get high on the paths that wind
            among the monuments
            but I could never write stoned

            would never spend
            on a slab of marble or granite
            my name isn’t worth that much

            despite the infinite pleasure of running
            a thumb across glossy marble
            I won’t have mine chiseled into a false forever

If the speaker-writer’s life isn’t “worth” a headstone in death, what is it worth in life, the reader intuits, then the speaker answers be reestablishing his resolve to write, even if it’s challenging and done “from afar.” This resolve is present throughout the collection, even as the focus moves beyond one individual grief to the many daily griefs that plague the speaker. In “Jungfrau, with Wild Cows,” the speaker is visiting rural Switzerland and is surrounded by cows in their summer pasture. Here, the resolve to write swells, the speaker declaring,

            The cows circle its craggy brow
            in weather fair & foul. When our paths cross, I sing
            to them because I have a voice: an ode
            to their freedom, which is mine too.
            But summer ends. I’d have stayed, but the wild cows
            have done & gone back to their farms,
            & me on mine. Oh, I long for escape, release
            from this unmerciful seat—
            the time is cow.

The tension between the desire to write, to be part of a community, and to isolate runs through the collection, which leads the reader deeper into the unseen drama of an individual life.

The urgency Williams develops in the personal poems of Reading Water makes this collection a pleasurable, if at times heartbreaking read. Writers will especially enjoy reading Williams’ collection because they will likely feel seen in the struggles his speaker relays, though all readers will find something to love in these poems, whether the interrogation of masculine individualism or the engaging line work and word choice. An insight all readers will take away from Reading Water is the belief that poetry has a place in our present moment, so long as we have the resolve to continue writing it.

In case you missed it—here is Williams’ poem from The Shore:
Mammals