Today’s Poem: Uncredited

The contemporary poet Boris Dralyuk on artists and their artistry

A backview of Hollywood (Caleb George, Wikimedia Commons)

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” It was Yeats, of course, who asked the question, and it is in many ways the fundamental question of art. The question of the artist. The question of what remains of the maker after the act of making.

It’s more or less the question that Boris Dralyuk (b. 1982) asks in his 2021 poem, “Uncredited.” Born in Soviet-era Ukraine, Dralyuk came to America as a child and ended up in the Los Angeles area — the proximate cause of the title of his first collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems (2023). A widely published translator of Eastern European literature, he edited the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2016 to 2022, before heading to his present post, teaching at the University of Tulsa.

In “Uncredited,” Dralyuk imagines the life of a starlet, and the poem sharpens Yeats’s question down to a small needle, taken in the heart. The idea for the poem came to him, Dralyuk has said, while watching r…