Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In this essay, he discusses “Walk Your Body Down” as a poem that explores the speaker’s realization that leading a controlled life, a wholly structured life, is what denies him access to the experiences of walking his body through a richly textured, albeit often painful, world.

Lyric poetry stresses emotional responses to personal struggles and to the fears associated with living in the contemporary world. For the speaker in J. T. Barbarese’s “Walk Your Body Down” these fears come from a fragmenting sense of self and from a world that is no longer a familiar place. Trapped in a world that appears to be defined by the dynamics of &ldquo...