This article studies three interpretations of Sonnet 130 by three American experimental poets. Rereading Bloom’s considerations on Shakespeare in The Anxiety of Influence and comparing them with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx , this article shows that rather than thinking of Shakespeare as a cursing ghost, Harryette Mullen’s, Stephen Ratcliffe’s and Jen Bervin’s texts reveal Shakespeare as a ghost and a host. Their texts are attempts to live with Shakespeare in the present, thus prompting us to look back on the theory of the intertext.