Poetry thrives on becoming-other, enabling speakers to inhabit alien perspectives—animals, landscapes, historical figures. This philosophical concept supports lyric’s capacity for metamorphosis, where metaphor and voice blur boundaries, fostering ethical openness and ontological fluidity within poetic form.

Becoming-other, influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, describes processes of deterritorialization where identity fluidifies through contact with the non-human, the marginalized, or the imagined. In poetry, this appears as ventriloquism (speaking as animal, object, or historical other), as in Ted Hughes’s crow poems or Ocean Vuong’s inhabitation of his mother’s war trauma. It’s distinct from mere metaphor: becoming-other implies ontological transformation, not representation. Useful for discussing ecopoetry, posthumanism, or decolonial poetics where fixed selfhood is ethically suspect. Related to mimicry, empathy, and intersubjectivity—but more radical in its dissolution of boundaries.