In Need of Seawater is a poetic documentary for writers, poets, and artists who understand language not simply as craft, but as necessity. The film follows writer Mark Anthony Thomas as he returns to the poems that shaped his early creative life—work first written in his twenties and later collected in The Poetic Repercussion. Viewed through a twenty-year distance, these poems are not treated as artifacts, but as living texts, still capable of carrying weight, memory, and meaning.
Directed by Richard Yeagley, the film blends staged performance, intimate readings, and rare archival material to create a cinematic space where poetry is experienced rather than explained. Lines are given room to breathe. Silence matters. Gesture, voice, and rhythm become as important as interpretation. What unfolds is not a literary retrospective, but an embodied encounter with language as it moves through time.
Set against the shifting cultural landscape of America, In Need of Seawater traces a young writer’s negotiation with identity, history, masculinity, and belonging—while also reflecting on what it means to sustain a creative life. The film asks how early impulses endure, how words carry us through upheaval, and how expression becomes a form of survival when clarity is hard won.
As the first installment of a poetic documentary trilogy, In Need of Seawater revisits the past not as nostalgia, but as a map. For poets and writers, it offers a rare meditation on craft, memory, and the long arc of voice—an invitation to sit with language, return to beginnings, and consider what still moves beneath the surface.