CutBank Interviews

An Interview with Derek JG Williams and Lisa Kouroupis

July 2025

Derek JG Williams’ debut poetry collection Reading Water explores the ways in which experience, relationships, and memory intertwine to shape the currents of the subconscious. The perceptive attention of the poems–cast on everything from the sensory joy of jukeboxes and dumplings, to the contours of party small talk, to cows on a Swiss Alp–integrates experience into the impermanent flow of physical life. 

The collection is the winner of the Lightscatter Press award, selected by Eduardo Corral, who praises it for its “deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery.” Williams is also the author of Poetry is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022), and his poems and prose can be found in a host of literary journals.

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Derek graciously met with CutBank’s Poetry Editor, Lisa Kouroupis, over Zoom from his home near Zurich, where he lives with his family. They discussed his writing process, the arc of the collection, and his background in performance. Reading Water features a collaboration between Derek’s poetry and a multimedia dance composition, choreographed by Ashley Anderson and linked via QR codes throughout the book. The joining of text, dance vignettes, and audio of Derek reading his poems deepens a theme of ephemerality and brings a pleasurable interactivity to the reading experience. Derek and Lisa started their conversation by talking about that relationship.

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Lisa Kouroupis: The book’s introduction names “the disappearing trace of the moving self” as something innate to dance, and it’s also present in your poems. Can you talk a bit about how the collaboration with Ashley’s work came to be?

Derek JG Williams: For me and for writers in general, I think the idea of collaboration is somewhat of an anathema, right? The reason I think a lot of people become writers, or even specifically poets, is that you don’t have to work with anyone. It all comes back to you—it’s you alone in the room, making the decisions, which is appealing, but there’s a pressure that comes along with it. I was fortunate in Boston, in my twenties, to be surrounded by all different kinds of artists, not just writers. Most of my closest friends were musicians or actors and I think that had a real influence on my writing later on, although at the time I wasn’t writing much that was worth anything to anyone. It was really all still practice at that point.

So that would be the first thing, that I had an interesting situation in terms of being influenced by others. The second thing is that I’ve always been interested in film. When I was fifteen I wanted to be a cinematographer; that was my first idea of myself in the world. But collaboration began for me with a musician friend, Christopher G. Brown, in 2009 or 2010. I wanted it to sound like New Order, but with poetry. Those albums we did together were really interesting and made me think about what I could do with a more extensive collaboration. Chris and I did a performance or two with him doing the electronic thing, and me performing the poems, and I always thought that the missing piece in that was some kind of movement element or something more visual—I thought dance could be an excellent medium to bring into the performance.

Really, all credit goes to the team, to [dancer and choreographer] Ashley Anderson, to [videographer] Nora Price, and to my editor, Lisa Bickmore, who helped put this together.

LK: Yes—in bridging those interests of yours, you could create something that’s not only text on a page.

DW: And it always comes back to text on a page, right? This book encourages the reader to choose what kind of experience they want to have. If they just want to read the book, they can do that; or read the book and listen to me perform a poem—and then there’s the third element of being able to watch, in this case, three different multimedia interpretations of a poem, one in each of the three sections of the collection. The different ways of engaging with the work can collide or brush up against what a reader might expect.

LK: It did do that for me–when I listened it changed how I was thinking about the poems on the page.

This could be a good time to talk more about sound and performance. I would describe your poems as lyrical in the way they flow and pay attention to sound, as in “The Slow Dissolve” and “Midnight,” for example. Are you thinking about how something will sound out loud as you’re writing?  How do performance and writing interplay for you?

DW: I came to performance poetry around the same time as I made the collaborative albums; I had been going to readings and going to some slams and stuff for a few years, and I found it really useful for my writing. I never quite fit into that bucket as a writer, and it didn’t matter to me if I did, you know? What I was taking from it was a new idea of who I could be, both as a writer on the page and then as a performer as well.

I started thinking about writing in more of a narrative way, and I stopped thinking so much about sound and lyricism and said OK, what am I actually trying to say? Do I have anything that I actually want to say? Why should this poem matter to someone who’s reading or listening? That’s what I ended up taking away from performance. It took my early ideas about myself as a writer and my early tendencies, and broadened them and gave me another way to continue forward that I think really informed my writing. If I hadn’t had those few years attending slams and poetry performances, I wouldn’t be the writer I am now.

I should add that I try not to read a poem aloud too much while I’m drafting, not until I get more toward the end to hear what it sounds like, to see what’s happening. I think more about what it sounds like when I’m looking at form and thinking about what it’s actually going to look like on the page as well. And that’s different these days for me; the first section of Reading Water generally has the newest poems in it. In so many of those, I’m eschewing punctuation, capitalization. I’m trying to do more things without leaning on those elements; I want the poems to be far more open than maybe what they look like in the second and third sections of the book. The poems in those sections look far more traditional on the page.

LK: I wanted to ask you more about the sections. You mentioned that the first one has some of the newest poems. They feel to me like explorations of the speaker through past and present, which I see encapsulated in the last poem of that section, “Low Tide.” The second section feels more concentrated on moments and sensations, their ephemerality. I think about the description of Jupiter in your poem “Blink” as “a wild disco ball/strobing pink and green like strophes on fire pulse/with feeling rising from a page…”  The third section brings in other voices and art that serve as subjects for the speaker to reflect off of, in a way. Does that feel accurate to you? I’m curious to know how you were thinking about putting the collection together.

DW: Well, what I should say first is that I had a bit of a grand idea for what the arc should look like. In that first section, I see the speaker among family and loved ones, experiencing loss. Then the idea would be that through the sections, and especially in the third, where there are all these other artistic influences coming into place, it becomes about the speaker reinterpreting or thinking about those initial things. So it goes from a speaker in the present in the first section, with all these people, to someone who’s kind of completely in solitude at the end.

And I really wanted the third section to be surprising in that it would throw the reader off balance to have this other move happen at the end of the book. Because the first two sections are long enough that they’re a book; it’s a bit of a longer manuscript. And that’s partly because I have so many poems, which was useful in in putting this together; it allowed me to just make, you know, massive cuts. It also means there’s a lot more for me to work with and think about for the next book.

I think Reading Water is about reckoning with selves, the different versions of yourself that have existed in the world. But even bigger than that, the version of yourself that exists on the page, or as a writer. And I think, at least for my truest self, and again, this is very specific to me, but the version of me in the world is its own separate thing, and it can be a bit of a performance sometimes, a little bit full of shit. And I hope I’m communicating that, especially in the first poem in the collection.

LK: That makes me think about being a different self in different places, and I thought we could talk a bit about the role of place in this collection. There are some references to Elizabeth Bishop in here–her borrowed lines in your poem “Darkling with Lightning,” and in “Low Tide,” your line “this promise is no disaster,” makes me think of “One Art.” Bishop traveled and wrote from and of many locations, and your poems too are thinking about the lack of ownership or belonging to any one place. In “Murmurations” you write, “Ask me again. I live nowhere” and “I’m the blurry one,/center-frame, flaring/toward the edge–uncaptured.”

So, I’m curious about how place, or detachment from place, factors into your writing. You’re currently living in Switzerland. How has living abroad informed your understanding of your work?

DW: Yeah, that’s big. I mean, I should say first that I wish someone had told me ten years ago that I needed to be learning high German. It would have made my life much, much easier, although I probably would have been as frustrated with it then as I am now.

In terms of Bishop, she just kind of crept into the book. I’ve always really admired her work. She didn’t publish much, but in the body of work that she has, every single poem is a banger. Each one is fascinating and can be read numerous times. Like what is it, “The Man-Moth”? Did you ever read that poem? It’s such a strange, fascinating poem. Every time I read it I think I understand it. And then I read it again and I say, ah, you know what? Maybe I don’t understand it, what’s happening in this again? And that’s not a bad place to be in with work, to experience some kind of bewilderment, some kind of newness each time, and not feel like you need to understand every little thing perfectly to have an emotional understanding of a poem.

And in terms of writing as an expat, there’s a big difference between writing about something in the present versus thinking about how it once was. So there becomes this clash in the book between how things were and how things are.

LK: You can see from a physical point of view how things have changed, is that what you mean?

DW: Yeah, definitely. And a lot of this book existed in some way before I left the U.S.What makes the first section interesting is that [it comes from my] going back to the U.S. as a caretaker, as someone who’s caring for someone who’s terminally ill. That’s maybe the most important thing to say about this book in terms of writing it as a person who’s abroad.

LK: That makes sense to me, to be away and then come back and grapple with a new role and loss.

Running through the entire collection are moves that circle around the questioning of permanence, and maybe that also is influenced by your writing as an expat. There is a blurring of the distinction between past and present, and truth is made of fragments. In your poem “Keeping Time,” you write, “I know where I would put it if I found it the truth, but I don’t know how to keep it whole, and in “New Year’s Day: Ensenada” you have this cool move where the shapes of things in the portrait change. I’m wondering if that idea of impermanence resonates with you, and if you were thinking about that as you wrote? To me the title of the collection is related as well.

DW: The simple way to think about the title is the Titanic effect. You have what’s happening on the surface versus what’s happening below. There’s the swimmer who’s treading water, and on the surface looks calm and upright, and then beneath the water the feet, the legs are bicycling to maintain that.

And then in terms of impermanence, I guess, I think the subject of so many poems is just that they’re about time. I think that becomes many writers’ great subject, whether it’s spelled out as cleanly as in a poem called “Keeping Time,” which is an older poem, or it’s being addressed with less specificity, which I think is the case elsewhere in the collection.

LK: Those more obvious poems allow the reader to then pick up on the ones that are subtler.

DW: Yeah, you have to have some guideposts, right? If you don’t, you just have some poems assembled together that are juxtaposed with one another. It’s always the question of, how much guidance do you want to give to a reader? How much work is too much work for them to do?

I think that when I’m generating, I’m not thinking about guidance at all. Or I’m thinking about it from more of an abstract place. That stuff comes later for me as I’m thinking about OK, what am I actually trying to say? What is this? What is my actual point here, ladies and gentlemen? Do I have something worthwhile of a poem here that I’m going to ask someone to go on this journey for me and/or with me?

LK: I thought we could talk about a specific poem. You brought up the Titanic effect, and that made me think of your poem “Marginalia.” There are these lines in here, “another layer beneath this layer/of action, flex of green paint falls to the rough pine floor,” and then later on, “before I apply the next coat/over an inscription/our names & the date/temporary truths.” I’m interested in how this poem explores the idea of an underlayer, while also articulating ideas about anger and fear. When I think of marginalia, I think of scribbles, notes, and embellishments, and I like thinking about those things as traces or expressions of the subconscious. I’m curious about how that poem came to be, and what the title means to you.

DW: I mean in some ways, poems are marginalia to a life–all the stuff that is happening on its edges. And that’s what I was thinking about with this poem, where the action of it isn’t in the action necessarily, but in the footnotes or in the marginalia.

In terms of structure, I really wanted to put this long, loose poem near the beginning. I almost wanted to make it the second poem in the book, but I thought that might be asking too much too early, so it’s the third poem. It’s the longest poem in the book, I think. It’s five or six pages. I thought it would give a little bit of a challenge early on for the reader, and kind of upend the narrative, lyric “I” that’s in the first section.

As I recall, I wrote this poem in the same way that I write most of my poems, which is slowly. Kind of assembling materials. This doesn’t happen often, but I think I knew I wanted it to be in the shape it’s in, with the section breaks being used early on.

And I think I was in the process of trying to write this poem when my partner came in the room and laid a hair on my shoulder. So that was just a moment that ended up in there. And that took me down a path of being like, yet another thing that I have—and then it’s like gone, another piece of ephemera. A hair on a black shirt is very easy to see. But a hair is also very small; you lose it immediately as soon as you see it, if you’re not careful with it. And then you forget about it very easily as well.

LK: You said you had an idea of what you wanted this one to look like when you started. Are there any poems in here that really changed a lot from where they started, in terms of form?

DW: I usually don’t know what something is going to look like until I’m very deep into it. My first draft of anything is going to look nothing like what it looks like at the end. It’s usually going to be like a really gnarly block of text with some messy line breaks and a bunch of stuff in there that will never survive.

I can tell you the first poem in the collection, “Darkling with Lightning,” was one of those poems that I showed to two or three different people, and neither really liked it. Because that poem resets itself in the middle; it becomes a different thing by the end of the poem.

LK: Yeah, you’re like, actually, let me think about this trophy.

DW: The idea from the readers who I showed it to was oh, I really like this first part, or, I really like this second part. But why are these together? And I said OK, well this is one of those moments where it’s time to show this to no one, and I’ll just figure it out myself. Which is what happened, until it was published.

But I did have the idea that I knew I wanted it to be the first poem, based off the first line and the way this poem is reckoning with different selves at different times. This poem is trying to be critical about those different selves as well.

LK: Your poem “When a Lawyer at the Party Asks…” thinks about feedback as well. How do you relate to feedback?

DW: I did an MFA late; I had already developed and gone through different phases by the time I was starting, and had a pretty clear conception of who I might be as a writer. But I was kind of desperate for people to guide me a bit. I hadn’t figured out what was important. Often–and I say this after we just talked about the first poem in the book, which is essentially two different poems–but oftentimes I would have too many poems crammed into one poem. Or I would do things with tense that weren’t working, like, Hey, why am I switching tenses here? Where are we again?

LK: And you do need somebody to point that out and show you it’s a pattern.

DW: I think what’s crucial, as the writer, or as another student writer in the room, and then as the teacher or professor, is that we try and accept the grounds on which a poem is built and think about what this poem is trying to accomplish. I think that’s the situation in the poem “When a Lawyer at the Party Asks...” where the one giving feedback–the Distinguished Professor of Poetry–wasn’t thinking about the grounds on which things were made, so wasn’t was being as helpful as they could be, and was even potentially doing damage. And those things in the poem were actually all things written on paper, so it was very easy to assemble it. And it appealed to my somewhat rebellious nature. Also, I think it’s just funny.

But to answer maybe the initial question, I love getting feedback. I think it’s vital, and sometimes you get a poem out of it, like the found poem in this book. I think part of the reason I got those two pieces of feedback [on “Darkling with Lightning”] was that it was like, Wait, what are you doing in this poem? I know your writing as doing this other thing, so you should try and do that in this poem. And the younger, less experienced version of me would just be trying to do one of those things. But I was like, no, no, no— I want to restart the poem in the middle of it.

LK: I heard a piece of advice about how being dissuaded from certain tendencies in workshops can allow a writer to learn about them, and then come back to them later with vengeance. Like learn from it and then lean into it.

DW: Yeah, great advice that someone gave me is do a lot of something or don’t do it at all. If you’re going to stack up a bunch of images, and then you turn them into a narrative, what if you just kept it as images? What if we’re just stacking image on image on image on image and there’s just so much muchness? You talked about being gratuitous in writing before and it can be really fantastic to let language wash over you and bombard you, and then at the end you just come away feeling like oh, I’ve just been like smacked around by this poem, wow. And then in a collection you then turn the page and you have a different poem. One poem is the drums and then the next page is the guitar, right?

LK: Yeah, it comes back to that idea of performance, or a musical, where a big chorus number would be balanced out with a solo.

DW: Yeah, great way to put it.

LK: That brings us somewhat full circle, back to performance. Is there something we haven’t touched on that you’d like to?

DW: Well, I think that writing persona poems--and there aren’t a ton of them in collection--was very useful in putting together the collection as a whole, as a kind of influence living in the back of my mind. It’s the practice you might do while trying to figure out what you’re capable of, what you do well, what to lean into, as we talked about.

What are the persona poems…“The Aegean Sea Speaks,” “Pavlov’s Dog.” “Prizefighting” has the omniscient, semi-historical thing going on, but there’s lived experience in there as well. “The Shining” is in persona, I guess. I think that’s just an interesting thing to point out, in terms of what shaped this collection.

LK: Absolutely, thanks for that. And those poems illuminate other facets of what’s being examined in the “I” driven poems.

DW: I’ll also mention this, because it’s something you brought up before this conversation, but the thread of violence in this.

LK: Yes, and you brought up your poem “Prizefighting” which made me think of it again. I also noted an undercurrent of violence in “In the House of Words,” “Marginalia,” and maybe in “Moon-Man” as well. Were you thinking about violence and its role in either a version of the self, or in our culture, as you wrote some of these?

DW: Oh yeah. I mean, I think it’s hard to write a book of poems and not have some notion about American violence creep into it. It surprised me when I was in conversation in Boston with the wonderful writer, Angie Mazakis, and she was talking to me about how there’s a lot of political work in the collection. And I think that comes back to the violence thing as well, because I think it’s something that contemporary American poetry needs to reckon with in some way.

I felt like I had to address masculinity in some way as well. It’s specific in a poem like “Prizefighting,” which is about domestic violence, and is also about boxing and all these other things. My next book is going to be about that and much more.

LK: I was going to ask, what’s that look like?

DW: Yeah, I have written, or am writing, a book of nonfiction dealing with American-ness and leaving America and the thread of cultural alienation that has accompanied that. And the next book of poems is going be about what it means to be a son, what it means to be a father, and what it means to be a brother as well. Those kinds of male roles. What it means to be an adopted son, which is something that is alluded to in this book. So I think that what’s under the surface in Reading Water is going to be brought to the forefront in the future, in the next collection, hopefully.

LK: The roles you mentioned feel connected in some way to the persona poems we’ve talked about, and perspectives.

DW: Yeah, and a willingness to be critical about who you were or who you are in those roles. Marcus Jackson has a book called Pardon My Heart, in which his speaker is kind of critical owning some bad behavior and dealing with it. There’re some poems in there that do that really, really well that I’ve thought about and come back to a few times.

LK: It makes me think of Jericho Brown as well, in not being afraid to have a poem be “about” something.

DW: Not afraid to have a poem in which the speaker looks bad, either. It’s a good thing to lean into. It makes the reader trust you.

I had that in mind with this book as well, and that goes back to the question of what’s happening on the page. Like in the poems where there’s no punctuation or capitalization, there needs to be a vitality to them, a demand that they be in that form. Everything in those poems needs to be very deliberate for them to survive in that way.

LK: Anything else you want to add?

DW: I just want to say that I appreciate you taking the time to dig into the book and figure out what it’s all about.

LK: My pleasure. And thank you so much for your generosity and time today.

DW: Thank you, Lisa, and to CutBank as well for having me.