Imitations is a testament; a monument in reverence, in which reproductive reality concepts tribute as a site of both continuity and experimental regeneration. Aristotleian in its execution, Jamie Lee Hamann composites both poetry and essay into a commendative literary experiment in defense of mimetic creation. ‘Imitating’ its title from Robert Lowell’s 1961 forenamed collection, itself a translated assemblage of various historical poets, Hamann echoes in key the sense of creative derivation–it is the passing of a torch. It is the feeling of reading something and wishing you had written it yourself. It is the subsequent overriding force that compels one to create with the knowledge of action within an artistic continuum; more than lineage, it is communion. 
     Within the tributary frames of Auden, Eberhart, Dunaway, amongst others, sublime portraits of the poet’s life materialize amidst piquantly splendent natural images, imbuing a sense of successive personability propped by the familiarity of established pattern. What is interesting is the poet’s conjunctive ability to bring stylistic idiosyncrasy to each form while still perfectly retaining rhetorical precedent. As solute into solvent, properties of both saturate into the resulting admixture alchemizing nascent meanings inaccessed by either root’s poetics, an almost genealogical praxis of procreative language. 
     It is this procreative perspective of poetics whereby in the process of imitation, the individual ‘voice’ eventually speciates itself from the overarching semiotic taxonomy. By chaotic virtue of creative ‘genetic drift,’ each mimetic iteration is inherently imbued with individual singularities that morphs into its own independent operation. Regarding Eberhart’s ‘The Groundhog’ (and Hamann’s own ‘The Dead Wild Horse’) Hamann writes, “...the poem created through the imitation, whether successful or not, creates its own space and drama.” It is in the sole extance of the representation that cradles it in independent meaning; regardless of derivation, there are no true copies, only spatially lapsed originals. In advantage of this, Hamann actuates a philosophy of poetics that not only embraces but reveres foundation. 
     It is this eye-watering sense of gratitude, of individual significance almost too sacred to witness, that helplessly permeates each and every facet of this collection. Each section of Hamann’s poetry attaches to didactic asides relating the preceding pieces that inspired him. An overarching theme in these essays is the emphasis on the exertive motion of imitation; envisioning the poetic ability as a neural network, it is the creation of new channels, whose foreign synaptic ridges and grooves shapes the poet’s individual impulse into something resembling neither one or the other, but its own incorporated expressive entity. It is art that embraces the conglomerate, that eschews egoic identity and concepts of artistic ownership and instead chooses to exist in the realm of approbatory ideals. It is art that exists selflessly. 
     In “A look at Edward Lear,” Hamann relates how Lear, in reading his children’s poetry, would look toward his young audience and search for “signs of being moved.” It is this same stirring whose currents run through Hamann’s collection. The world is made in other people–outside of the self, art accelerates to accrue velocitous meaning, and it is in this collaborative accrual where art can approach transcendental completion. Art must be made in the world, and it is Hamann’s devotion to his poetic surroundings that exemplifies the collection–this work tracks the very movement of human creation. Creative mimesis is the cornerstone of human socialization–-we are built upon each other like layers of earth sediment. Imitations is consciousness upon consciousness, an experiment in generative interlocution, spanning both time and form, animated solely by the purest of expressive impulse–poetry as a practicum of love.