Answer Addiction

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  • There Was Light A Mile Deep: Interview with Poet William Brewer

    There Was Light A Mile Deep: Interview with Poet William Brewer

    Someone contacted me when the book came out, who had very recently lost a parent to heroin. She said to me, and I’ve held on to this, “The poems gave me a feeling that I had a place to go.”

    The West Virginian landscape exists as one of the great splendors of North America, but beneath the canopies of spruce and maple and folded inside the canyons smolders a public health crisis whose effect has verged on apocalyptic for some communities, both spiritually and literally. Peddled by big pharma, opioids found special traction, furthering the hardships inherited from a history of economic injustice. Like new gears spinning a rusted machine.

    These conditions have sown a very human consequence, which looks out from the porch of William Brewer’s debut book of poems, I Know Your Kind, with lines like: “[I] have placed my lips against the shadow / of his mouth, screamed air into his chest, / watched it rise like an empire then fall.”

    Born and raised in West Virginia, the poet left Appalachia to pursue higher education, but his craft was drawn back towards the hills of his youth, rendering the anguish and ghosts that multiplied rapidly there in the mid-aughts when the state ranked as having the highest overdose rate in the country (it still does).

    With delirious imagery, Brewer uses natural subjects such as flies and logging to express deep emotions, at the same time accessing the past in order to help explain the unbelievable present. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and his chapbook Oxyana was selected by the Poetry Society of America for their 30 and Under chapbook fellowship.

    Then, last year Ada Limon selected I Know Your Kind as a winner of the National Poetry Series. A practice in empathy, the book illustrates not only the spirit of a place struggling to stand, but a cross-section of the epidemic timeline on a local level when the national media was just starting to grasp what was happening. Before the big policy responses. Despite all the graves already in the ground.

    Interviewed by The Fix, Brewer hikes into these “terrible truths” and cracks open the question of what drives someone to give themself to an artificial comfort, underlining that rural living can marginalize culturally and politically.

    Estimates place the number of people recovering in the United States around 25 million, and close to the same amount experiencing active substance use disorder. More than ever, there is a need for a strong literature to reflect this population, how we lived and how we want to live. I Know Your Kind stimulates our thinking about the prismatic possibilities of a modern addiction poetry.

    Note: This is sometimes a sad conversation, about suffering caused by substance use disorder. Seek out another interview if you’re unbraced.

    The Fix: Your book opens with the poem “Oxyana, West Virginia,” which establishes the setting of I Know Your Kind as a place where both splendor and suffering co-occur. Can you talk more about the relationship between the people and the land?

    William Brewer: Oceana is a small town in southern West Virginia, a blast site of the opioid epidemic. The nickname Oxyana refers to Oxycontin, the drug that took over. This poem takes the notion of a single place and applies it to multiple regions of the state to create a condensed fictional stage, to build out a landscape. Throughout the book, when I talk about one place, I’m talking about the whole state, because the problem is everywhere. The whole state is a kind of Oxyana.

    Now, with the idea of splendor and suffering, I think the word you used was co-occur—that’s absolutely right in West Virginia. It’s an immensely beautiful state, but it’s a state of contrasts. The ancient hills are beautiful, but that ancientness meant coal, which meant prosperity, but only for a very few until the mid-20th century. Coal, for much of its history, has meant a very hard way of living that has benefited very few. So the thing that gave West Virginia its prosperity is also the thing that has caused most of its destruction environmentally, economically, and to the physical well-being of its citizens.

    Now that the coal industry has died away, people are left in drained away communities, isolated from the outside world by the mountains and rivers, which also prevent jobs like manufacturing from coming in. The landscape becomes a beautiful prison.

    You often manipulate the symbol of light, twisting away from classic associations, or at least complicating them. For example, in “Overdose Psalm,” a tree is cut down and the line goes “Snow committing its slow occupancy, / filling the column like words, the light / saying in so few of them, like all terrible / truths, something here did not survive.” Besides being very very sad, it’s so resonant. How does light function in your book?

    In IKYK, I’m interested in exploring the power opiates have to mimic a kind of divine energy. They aren’t like psychedelics, which connect you to the feeling of a greater universe. Or amphetamines, which accelerate our reality. This is something simple: an optimism, a brightness, a luminosity, therefore light will function in the mind of the speaker as positivity, but for the reader the function is more sinister. Here, our feelings about beauty (which light is often in service of) become less straightforward than they seem.

    Writing has to look carefully at the way certain chemicals make people feel.

    We must recognize the ways substances make you feel fulfilled.

    Yes. And in the case of West Virginia, you have a largely poor, often isolated populace that is, in many respects, ignored by the rest of the country. When the outside world does engage with WV, it’s often through joke and insult. “Trash,” “Hillbilly,” “Did you marry your cousin?” “I’m surprised you wear shoes.” In her essay “The Fog Zone,” Leslie Jamison gets it right: “West Virginia is like a developing nation in the middle of America. It has so many resources and it has been screwed over again and again: locals used for labor; land used for riches; other people taking the profits.” With all that in mind, it’s suddenly a lot easier to understand how big unfulfillment can be as an idea, and how deep unfulfillment can function like a kind of pain. Through that pain comes the chemicals.

    What about the power dynamic between other parts of the U.S. and West Virginia? In your poem “Oxyana, West Virginia” you have those lines about river beds being wine glasses for the Roosevelts. It seems to me this dynamic could compound with the marginalization of the state, worsening the epidemic, distancing external aid.

    You’re absolutely right. That Jamison quote again. This is a place that gave everything to America during its rapid rise through the last century, and then when it was finished America turned its back on them. This was and continues to be a form of erasure. When people are told they don’t matter or feel like they don’t exist—that’s going to worsen a problem like the epidemic. The drug problem has been going on for over 10 years, but it’s only just now garnered attention. That’s in part because a lot of people—a lot—still don’t know WV is its own state. A few months back I was seated at a dinner beside an Ivy League graduate who kept referring to my home as Virginia, even after I corrected them multiple times.

    Yeah, that’s a completely different state.

    And when your country doesn’t know you exist, it’s like your suffering doesn’t exist. Then it’s like, who are they to tell you how you handle your suffering?

    All of this leads to the larger point, the key point about the book. IKYK is not about the opioid epidemic, and it’s not about WV, it’s about how these two subjects are bound together through a continuation of history. The history of WV is the history of massive industry making gargantuan profits off the lives of WV citizens. Timber, minerals, oil, coal, gas, and now: pharmaceuticals. They pumped 780 million pills into a state of 1.8 million people. By doing that, those companies, that industry, made a conscious choice: The lives of West Virginians aren’t as important to us as money; this is a population we can afford to kill.

    Leads me to think of “Daedalus in Oxyana.” There’s a line… “I gave my body to the mountain whole. For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses.”

    I want to hear more of how you funneled real life places and people into this book. What was your research process like?

    The research was living and seeing the issue grow. The research arrived. But I don’t necessarily like that word, “research,” because it suggests I went looking for it. It’s more that the problem appeared. Things snowballed very quickly. Sometimes I didn’t realize it, other times I did. In conjunction, at one point someone came to my fiancée and me and told us they were a heroin addict and they were terrified. I got angry, thinking they got themselves into the mess and didn’t care about anyone else. Ten minutes later I realized this reaction was repulsive. I wrote the person off at their most vulnerable. A flip switched, and I realized this was something deeper I wanted to sit with and look at. That meeting between personal interrogation and social observation is how the book came to be.

    I like how the initial motivation for this book was a reaction to the stigma you had fallen into initially. You were like, “Wow, this is the way I think, so I’m going to do some work and examine it.”

    The disease of addiction has taken a toll on my family throughout my life and my parents’ lives, so I’ve seen how people come to reckon with it. I thought I had developed sophisticated responses, but in that moment those responses failed when presented with this new problem. I’d seen what alcoholism can do, and how as a culture we accept it as a problem. But we were turning away from opiate abuse and denying its reality, and I felt I needed to resist that turning away.

    I think it’s stunning for someone who hasn’t experienced addiction himself, how you put words to those unique feelings and moments. There’s a line from “Resolution,” “…I stood in the yard // and decided that sometimes / you have to tell yourself / you’re the first person // to look out over / the silent highway / at the abandoned billboard // lit up by the moon / and think it’s selling a new / and honest life.”

    There are details about the way of life that can accompany opioid use disorder, which echo the conversations I’ve had with people. “Leaving the Pain Clinic,” you write “…and though the door’s the same, / somehow the exit, like the worst wounds, is greater / than the entrance was. I throw it open for all to see / how daylight, so tall, has imagination. It has heart. It loves.” Like, how did these lines come to be in such striking detail?

    For me, the writing of a poem is an impulsive act. But there’s a lot of gestation and thinking that goes on behind the scenes, before I write—a lot of thinking. And there’s living that goes into them, too. When I was in college I had an accident that required some heavy surgery and a long rehab period. Opioids were a big part of that period, I was on them for a long time. The power of those drugs, what they could do, has remained vivid in my mind, and always will. That passage about daylight comes from that.

    In regard to the former passage: I’ve dealt with serious depression my whole life. Depression and substance abuse are often bedfellows. What depression can unleash in someone—hopelessness, dependency, fear, recklessness towards how we feel about our lives, suicidal impulses—can certainly be unleashed by substance use disorders, too, with the volume turned up to 11. To be clear, I do not mean in any way to suggest that depression and substance abuse are the same thing. Rather, what I mean to articulate is that I brought every bit of myself to every poem. This is not just a matter of aesthetics. It’s me doing my best to extend myself out, to say, “Dear Person X, the possibility that your pain may feel even remotely similar to my pain is why I’m trying to do my absolute best to recognize you in hopes that you may feel less alone, but even more importantly, so that you may feel loved. Loved.”

    I come from a spoken word community that preaches sticking to your own story. Personally, I think your book is an important addition to literature, both generally and in the addiction/recovery sub-genre. But throughout it you often speak through the persona of someone with substance disorder. I worry other poets will take this as license to do the same, without possessing the knowledge or respect you have for the subject. What are some potential hazards here?

    First, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it greatly and don’t take it lightly.

    While you come from a spoken word community, my literary life is rooted in fiction. The literary texts we had in my house were Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne. They sat on a single shelf at the top of the stairs. I can still see them. Likewise, at school, literature = fiction. I read maybe two poems in high school, so my life in books began, and in many ways persists, through fiction, and so because of that, the root of my literary practice has always been—to use Roth’s (for better or worse) definition of fiction writing—“the crafting of consciousness,” with the understanding that this requires immense care, thought, patience, and humility. Do as much work as you can to get it right, and then do more. IKYK is very much a book that attempts to synthesize this quality of fiction, in addition to its immense capacity for world building and social examination, with poetry’s sense of deeply distilled emotional and psychological textures, its power to challenge language, and its unique ability to find unexpected connections. 

    As for other poets taking my work as license, I’m not sure what to say about that. It would seem to me that the potential for bad poetry, and bad poems about this subject, was there long before any of my poems came into the world. At the same time, for as long as that potential for faulty work has existed, there’s been a concurrent tradition of very valuable work being done in persona, poems by Bidart and Ai being just two gleaming examples (not to mention what has been done in fiction). So, maybe we could reframe the thinking in more positive terms, i.e. maybe this book can stand as an example of what persona can do? What the poem can do?

    What eats at me is how there aren’t a lot of poets writing about their personal experiences with substance recovery, at the level where they’re prominent within the poetry industry or community. Are these poets dead from overdoses? Did their time go towards using instead of writing? Or maybe they’re not writing openly because of stigma? Can you speak on the importance of us all lifting up and listening closer to people who have personal experience with these issues?

    I’m not sure about this, though it’s a wise question, one of huge importance. I don’t know of a clear answer. But it seems like the work you do in your day to day is connected to this and is very valuable. That’s something to be optimistic about. People have reached out and told me how they have brought my poems or the book into spaces like meetings, support groups, halfway houses, and that has been very humbling to hear. Just getting poems into spaces where maybe they’ve never been before—maybe that’s part of how we turn it around? As for the importance of lifting people up and listening closely—it is the most important thing. At the same time, the responsibility to write about this problem, which is now a national problem, shouldn’t rest solely on those suffering, should it?

    What do you hope your book accomplishes?

    Someone contacted me when the book came out, who had very recently lost a parent to heroin. She said to me, and I’ve held on to this, “The poems gave me a feeling that I had a place to go.” This was the greatest response I could have received. I hope that on a larger level, the book can extend the realities of the epidemic in WV to people who maybe had no idea what was going on, or didn’t believe it, or didn’t think it mattered—i.e. didn’t think the lives of West Virginians mattered.

    To graft onto that statement, I think the book is educational for people who don’t understand West Virginia, and how the opioid epidemic has taken root so deeply in this specific place.

    I surely hope so. That’s one of the book’s largest aims.

    I also want to add, while it’s a needed pursuit to write a place for pain to feel seen, it’s also necessary to create sites for recovering peoples to draw strength, hope, and triumph. What are some lines in your book that are doing this work?

    I think strength is an impulse that runs through much of the book—books about WV are inherently about strength. I think “Resolution” is a poem that leans toward a sense of hope or even triumph, even if it may be the first of a few failed attempts toward a larger triumph. Overall, though, I don’t think hope or triumph are large elements in the book, again this is because it’s a book about a specific situation in a specific place, and when I was writing it and editing it, things didn’t seem very hopeful or triumphant. I turned my book in to my editor in the fall of 2016. At that time, it felt like a situation that no one much cared about. The New Yorker hadn’t yet run its large profile about the state, the Charleston Gazette-Mail hadn’t yet run its now Pulitzer Prize-winning expose that gained national attention, Netflix’s Heroin(e) hadn’t yet been released, etc. etc. That said, I agree wholeheartedly that these sites and books are necessary, and I’m confident that they are coming, especially as our relationship to this epidemic, and our ability to help those afflicted by it, changes. So, while some of those elements may not be as present in my book, I don’t believe every book can or should do everything. Moreover, this subject, and its impact on our country, is vast. Perhaps, when it’s all said and done—if it’s ever all said and done—this book will be seen as one part of the larger record and discussion.

    Last question. What’s next for you? Anything that involves substance use disorder?

    I’m working on a novel that looks at the larger social, political, and economic networks that can be at play in making something like the opioid epidemic thrive in a place like West Virginia. I’m also working on a second book of poems about paranoia, suicide, and the idea of inherited death. And let me say thank you for taking the time to talk to me, your generosity toward the work, and for everything you do.

    More poems by William Brewer:

    “In the New World,” Southern Indiana Poetry Review

    “Oxyana, WV: Exit Song,” Diode Poetry

    Other interviews in this series about poetry and addiction:

    Lineages of Addiction: Interview with torrin a. greathouse, a Trans Poet in Recovery

    Addiction and Queerness in Poet Sam Sax’s ‘madness’

    Kaveh Akbar Maps Unprecedented Experience in “Portrait of the Alcoholic”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    Language Sideways: The Poetry of Addiction

    In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    Something poet Sam Sax said in an interview for The Fix has me thinking about poetry and addiction. “Poetry for me,” he told writer Christian Arthur, “is the only medium I’ve found that can accurately mimic how the brain moves.”

    I’ve sensed this ever since I stumbled into poetry in my early 20s, and though I’ve written books of poems and have taught writing for years, Sax’s statement reminds me that poets use language in radically unexpected ways. Rather than communicating directly, poetry sidesteps logic in ways that may enervate or baffle. Because its language may seem sleight-of-hand (or even swindle), poetry is a medium well-suited to embody the multidimensional shifting and meandering that the mind enacts on a regular basis. But what may seem merely perplexing language that distorts reality may also be noted as presenting how the brain actually moves, with dizzying speed from present to past, reality to fantasy, hard fact to symbolic representation, all in a moment or, more likely, a split second.

    Got it, and now we’re good to go back to our double espresso lattes and the latest CNN infuriation, right? But not so fast, for my coffee-charged mind is cycling through thoughts faster than I can process them, and my news-cycle drenched brain—well, never mind the news. The brain on coffee gets us closer to poetry, at least in the sense that I wish to explore here in relation to Sax’s statement. How, I wonder, does poetry fare under the strain of the addictive mind? What are the ways that poems written by recovering addicts mimic the mental circuitry of addictive thinking, that snarled labyrinth of brain moves that torture every addict I’ve known, both before and after sobriety? In what ways do current poems of addiction represent the minds of addicts in the throes of active disease as well as after the process of recovery’s begun?

    * * *

    Since American poetry is presently enjoying what may well be its golden age, I push away a stack of books by familiar poets and take up three recent books by first-time authors. Though Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, Etheridge Knight, Jean Valentine, Gregory Pardlo, Cynthia Cruz, Nick Flynn, Maggie Anderson, and Joan Larkin—whose poems on alcoholism The Los Angeles Times described as “the finest ever written on the subject”—have much to tell us about how the addictive mind works, I wish to witness the mental machinations of those at the frontlines of sobriety.

    So I turn to the most recent debut poets issue of Poets & Writers magazine, where I find ten first books, at least three of which address the subject of addiction.

    To read Sam Sax’s Madness, William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (both chosen for the National Poetry Series) and Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf is to enter danger zones in which the only direction we have comes not from GPS, but from eyeballing how close we drive to the edge of a cliff. In these poems, the mind is vertiginous, and in many cases its language sidesteps reductive meaning in order to reproduce, in the reader’s mind, states of mentality pertaining to the addictive impulse. In each of these books, non-linear, sideways-moving language introduces us to harrowing inner worlds. Words swoop down without warning to initiate us in the experience of drug-induced psychosis or to the grief in watching a brother overdose. Lines come at us from around blind corners to ambush us with the minutiae of what detox feels like, from the inside out. Meaning strips us bare then retreats, and words act not as locatable comfort, but as ventriloquized ephemera, cast-off detritus of the unspeakable degradations and mysteries of the addicted mind.

    In its 79 pages, Madness (Penguin 2017) reveals a mind reeling from institutionalization, addiction to alcohol and painkillers, and the initial stages of recovery. Its concision may appear, at first, as imprisonment until you find that Sax’s language is liberating, untethered, and—dare I say it?—downright playful. You read these poems as interior landscapes. Though statements such as “i can only half-blame alcohol for my overdose / the other half is my own hand / that poured the codeine” (“On Alcohol”) occur, by virtue of Sax’s skill with wordplay and cadence, we’re invited to participate in a mind surveying its experience of an addictive trajectory that spans active withdrawal to whispered reprieve.

    The heft of his subject matter—inpatient mental illness, queer identification and sex as painkiller, an uncle’s cancer, and, of course, drug use—may seem weighty enough to crumple the reader into one of Sax’s finely-wrought pages. Yet the writing style renders Sax’s project one of resuscitation and, for this gay reader, affirmation.

    I have to work for it, though, and Sax gives nothing away cheap. Starting with a prefatory block of clinical language from the DSM-1 (1952), words, in and of themselves, cannot be trusted. “[T]his must be the way of things,” Sax writes in one of the four poems titled “Psychotherapy,” “—all signs pointing toward unknowable destinations.” In the mental states of addiction, nothing clear-cut will do. Sax’s speaker opts for a more chaotic approach. “i’ve begun to grow distrustful of sense,” he says in “On Syphilis,” “let there be madness in the text.” Linear meaning oppresses the mind the way disease oppresses the body, until there’s nothing for language to do but to burst out of its skin. That means, in the mind moving in these poems, out and up, into the freedom of wordplay.

    Linguistic play sets the reader on notice as to the liberties this book takes with documenting a mind that refuses to move in acceptably linear ways. Words rub against each other, a form of auditory intrigue. “[A]ll our white blood / cells an oven,” Sax writes in “Fever Therapy, “a coven of bees blushing,” the off-rhyme (eye rhyme) of “oven” and “coven” creating a kind of linguistic harmony. Elsewhere Sax puts into motion a series of two- and three-word morphing patterns—“comets” / “comma” and “boarding” / “boring” and “sickle,” “silk,” “sick” (“Diagnosis”); “ward,” “warden,” “wars” (“Willowbrook”); “city,” “family,” “ancestry” (“On Syphilis”)—chains of sound that please the ear and, in one possible interpretation, mirror the circularity of the speaker’s addictive mind. Rationality is turned on its side, and we are driven over it, roughshod.

    As I read, Sax’s cadence catches my attention as language becomes a percussive instrument drumming out the mind’s anguish. Punctuation, or its lack, emphasizes these poems’ rhythms, as well as their barrage of mental buzz. In Sax’s hands, driving cadences refuse logic while simultaneously giving rise to a clashing sonic beauty that articulates feeling (drowning? enclosure?) better than most narrative can. Take these lines, for instance, from “Transorbital Lobotomy”:

    in the fifties there were tens of thousands performed in the states

    sour mess. sour mash. mash-up. macerate.

    cut a rug. jitterbug. wonder drug. gutter. tug. suture. lacerate.

    erasure. erase. raced. deadened. dead end.

    How can writing about lobotomy sound so, um, appealing? So mentally alive? There’s more than meets the eye: an outpouring of mind that moves toward implying the panic and dis-ease of circular thinking, while simultaneously (and subliminally) encoding that which is sonically recuperative. In one of the main ways that Sax’s poems encode mental activity, sound, in and of itself, simultaneously embodies the horrors of addiction and enacts recovery.

    Recovery’s brain moves happen in William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed 2017), but differently. New York magazine calls Brewer “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis,” but even those like myself who have never taken recreational opioids might find familiar ground here. Addiction is addiction, and in “Oxyana,” the place Brewer defines as “[a] nickname given to the town of Oceana, West Virginia, after becoming a capital of OxyContin abuse,” the addictive mind proliferates. But it’s also where I experience a degree of skepticism with regard to Brewer’s poetics, for this statement seems more explicit than what I’ve come to hope for in poetry. My misgiving only increased as I read further: “Following a successful crackdown on prescription painkillers, heroin has now flooded the state. West Virginia has the highest fatal overdose rate in America, nearly three times the national average.” How, I wonder, can this factual language reach a state of epiphany that poetry is primed to offer? Explanation, my thinking goes, kills the spell that lyricism attempts to cast.

    Which is what I expect to happen in I Know Your Kind. Brewer’s emphasis on Oxyana feels narrow, literally confining. And I sense a further problem in Brewer’s first poem, “Oxyana, West Virginia,” which opens with a panoramic view that winds through the Alleghenies and arrives at the town where the action is. Does the addictive mind think this way—in aerial shots panning down from the ethers to land us in an Oxyana? This seems too staged to be a useful representation of the addictive mind in action.

    But in the book’s second poem, “Icarus in Oxyana,” a striking image leads me to the discovery of another way poetry renders how the brain moves: “Someone on the porch / who’d lost both his arms / chain smokes.” This single image–bold, bewildering, painfully true–clarifies the addictive mind at work. It allows me to settle into this book, an eye out for other potent images.

    And I find them: “waking up in an alley with a busted face, // teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain / coming down clear as gin” (“To the Addict Who Mugged Me”); “have held the still hive of his head, / have placed my lips against the shadow // of his mouth, screamed air into his chest” (“The Messenger of Oxyana”). And these, from “Detox Psalm”:

    With the waves’ jade

    coaxing, I heaved my every organ

    through my mouth, then cut a mouth,

    at last, in my abdomen and prayed

    for there to be something more divine

    than the body, and still something

    more divine than that, for a torrent

    of white flies to fly out of me,

    anything, make me in the image

    of the bullet, I begged, release me

    from myself and I will end a life.

    Language moves sideways here by creating literal impossibilities—heaving internal organs through the mouth—that are metaphorically accurate. Detoxing does feel like the body throwing itself out of itself, the skin all wrong. The detoxing body is its own enemy, and glad we would be, at the worst of it, to be our own bullet that ends the body’s dangers. Such is the power of Brewer’s imagery to carry the reader through the stages of addiction, partial recovery, relapse, and finally sustained recovery. Brewer’s images depict the emotional and mental rot at the foundation of addiction, the skewed thinking at the heart of the disease.

    In the work 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Frank Bidart calls “an intensely inventive and original debut,” Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) is alive with images that render shifting mental states at dizzying speeds. Akbar’s poems shunt from one emotional state to another, giving a sense of mental motion more reminiscent of driving too fast on hairpin curves than of logical elucidation. We race to keep up with speakers who pay no heed to safety. In “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal,” Akbar offers a description that veers from one image to another: “I can hardly picture any of it now / save the fox I thought / was in the grass but wasn’t // I remember him quiet / as a telescope / tiny as a Plutonian moon.” Dimension derails, and disproportion prevails as the poem’s narrator lurches from fox to telescope to a moon so far in space that we’re granted a sense of how distorted the mind is that’s lining up these improbable—and emotionally accurate—images of DTs. “It’s amazing what you can find / if you just dissect everything,” Akbar writes in another poem, followed by a tumble of images: “Once / I pulled a glowing crystal from my beard / and buried it in the earth. The next day / I went to the spot and dug up a silver trumpet.” These images aren’t locatable in a linear context. They lurch and undulate beneath the skin of sense, advancing a project that, as with both previous poets, incites a sense of skepticism in relation to the body. As such, Akbar’s images wobble, as if they’re about to topple headlong onto bloody pavement. It’s no wonder, given the sidewinder moves the mind in these poems makes, that Akbar admits, “When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.”

    Because of Akbar’s linguistic bravura, it takes time for me to become aware of his use of topographical space representative of another way the mind moves. In the context of his poetry, empty space is not vacant; it connotes the unsaid, the impossible-to-say, the outer limits of implication. Every silence is an admission of not-knowing, a blow against hubris. Amid the linguistic swerves of Akbar’s poems, ample white space sometimes surrounds words, engulfs lines and whole stanzas in a silence that cordons off a kind of quiet amidst mental chaos. For showing brain moves in his poetry, silence is as meaningful as articulation.

    Akbar offers extra spaces between words (“my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour   with a turning away” [“Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)”], and he occasionally jettisons left-margin conventions in favor of lineage that moves across the page (“Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River,” “The New World,” “Against Hell”). Though the silences of the intake interview embodied in “Drinkaware Self-Report” indicate physical and emotional distance between interviewer and interviewee, the majority of Akbar’s silences are indicative of commonalities. The space between the three-line stanzas that filter across the page of “Learning to Pray,” for instance, are silences of communion, of reaching toward something greater than the addicted self. The white space between the unrhymed couplets found in “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy” is tentative with an uncertainty suggesting a fragile state of mind.

    In Akbar’s best work, silence girds understatement, and what remains unsaid gives a sense that within the frantic place of the addictive mind lies a locus of calm. There, the mind doesn’t explain. It doesn’t offer delusion or false comfort. Yet it comforts, perhaps because open space is public space that has the potential to welcome us all. In its meaninglessness, it aspires to greater meaning, the way, say, our parks and canyons and monuments are open to everyone. Language can undercut commonality, but silent space knows no identity other than that of all. Silence is, in a word, collectivity. We is its pronoun, as in we are not alone. No matter how difficult may be the stages of overcoming addiction, Akbar’s silences imply, there are others with us. The silences I see in his poetry of addiction are perhaps the most hopeful of all the mental moves I’ve observed.

    * * *

    Poetry of the caliber of these three debut poets reminds me that the mind is not a linear muscle. How can it be that I so easily forget this? Wasn’t it just last week that a stain in my bathroom sink reminded me of the cigarette burn at the edge of my grandmother’s porcelain tub from forty-five years ago? Didn’t that image trail with it the smell of her Slavak cooking and her devotion, in absurdly equal proportion, to the L.A. Dodgers and As the World Turns? Standing in my apartment a few days ago, at the sight of a mar on my porcelain my mind catapulted back to four years before I took my first drink before ricocheting into a present that contains the seven years (this month) since I’ve had my last. It happened so suddenly that it shocked me.

    Which is frequently how our minds work. What sideways language does is enact this process, so that we can see it in action. It’s the conduit between our current and past selves, making us privy to states of being we might otherwise miss.

    Though the majority of Americans express intimidation and disinterest in poetry, I wonder if in doing so they aren’t inadvertently expressing a fear of language that moves the way the untethered mind does. Sideways language may nudge us to wonder if it’s not linear logic, rather than its sideways counterpart, that enacts distortion. Minds of addicts and non-addicts alike traverse multiple planes of experience simultaneously. Poetry, in enacting the mind in all its vicissitudes and pyrotechnics, its leaps and mental gymnastics, is an art that counters, not codifies, linear distortion. Shouldn’t we honor, rather than disparage, the depiction of mental states as we actually experience them, something that Sam Sax, William Brewer and Kaveh Akbar are teaching us to do?

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lineages of Addiction: Interview with torrin a. greathouse, a Trans Poet in Recovery

    Lineages of Addiction: Interview with torrin a. greathouse, a Trans Poet in Recovery

    “I always compare myself now to a night when I was drinking and I looked in the mirror. I saw a lie, wearing a suit and full beard, and…I tried to kill myself.”

    A point on a map is the product of two dimensions, the x and the y, or longitude and latitude. For example, a liquor store or your plug’s house is located at the intersection of two streets. For example, one street might trace back to your childhood home. Or maybe trace to a moonless night in a park, your peers starting to circle up. Maybe one of your streets crisscrosses the inertia of a fist. Or the colored lights in a club filling your eyes like cups. Etcetera. Etcetera.

    Everything, including us, our identities and our addictions, exist at the intersections of other things. The human landscape is a network, and this interview series has sought to delve into the complexities by dialoguing with poets who write from personal experience, and by giving purposeful attention to how substance misuse can overlap with marginalized lives and histories.

    This new installment welcomes torrin a. greathouse, a trans woman in recovery from both bipolar disorder and substances, and who self-describes as a cripple punk (more on that below).

    Despite only being 23 years old, she’s already well into a strong career, having landed publishing credits on Poets.org and Submittable’s journal, Frontier, and garnering a shoutout from poetry star Kaveh Akbar in The Paris Review. torrin’s forthcoming chapbook called boy/girl/ghost is a winner of The Atlas Review poetry contest, and this past year she published her debut Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm on Damaged Goods Press.

    torrin has an inclination towards bravery in the way she does the work of transforming pain. It’s an exemplary case of someone using poetry to chew through toughness, to make sustenance out of issues that would otherwise choke us or rot and become pestilent. Even when her poems seem to conclude in a surrender, it feels like torrin achieves a type of mastery over the monster by at least naming it. Furthermore, displaying an energetic craft, she reaches for sophistication in form and concept, hewing down the opaqueness of personal uncertainties into sculptural elegance. Through processing her own story, she asks us to think about how the causes of addiction can be much deeper than the individual suffering.

    During the interview, we discuss how different lineages of addiction alternately rob and empower torrin, while we take a close look at some of her poems. We talk about soundtracks to gender transition. And more. Throughout our conversation she is candid about her struggles, and the violences that happened within her family while growing up in the Pacific Northwest. Before you read, it should be emphasized that the content traverses a number of sensitive topics, including suicidality, domestic abuse, and of course, substance misuse.

    The Fix: Can you tell me about some of your experiences, where transness intersected with addiction?

    torrin a. greathouse: Like many things that bring people into states of addiction, it became a method of coping. To be drunk or high allowed me to feel outside my body. And also, drugs allow you to disconnect not just from the physical body, but from life.

    An experience that is common among trans communities, is not necessarily being able to survive in the same ways as other people; having to turn to alternate forms of income creation like sex work. I was doing certain types of sex work that were not always conducive to my emotional wellness. I used alcoholism to cope with that as well.

    More often than not, conversation about coping focuses more on dealing with emotional or mental stressors, like trauma, for example. But there are also physicalities that people seek displacement from. Which makes me think about body dysphoria.

    You can’t feel dysphoric about your body if you can’t feel your body, was a point that I hit. I always compare myself now to a night when I was drinking and I looked in the mirror. I saw a lie, wearing a suit and full beard, and…I tried to kill myself. I think of myself now, in comparison to that moment.

    Wow. That’s so real. I know it’s such a tender subject and I value your sharing. A common characteristic of personal histories with addiction is that substance use “works” until it doesn’t. Sounds like you are describing one of those pivotal moments.

    I’m interested in recovery spaces, and I don’t know what your experience is with treatment or peer support, but I don’t hear as many stories from trans folk, or even queer folk.

    I wish going into rooms was easier. I’m lucky in a sense, that when I got sober, it was because of a DUI. I was in a collision, driving drunk, and went to jail, and then the court mandated I attend a peer support group. Had it not been court-mandated, I don’t think I could have managed to keep going, because those spaces are harder for folks that aren’t a specific subset of culture, primarily straight and middle-aged and male. Trying to get my pronouns used was pretty much impossible. Eventually I gave up and stopped presenting as trans.

    There are peer support groups meant for queer folks, but again, unfortunately, this ends up being cis-gay, middle-aged men. I’ve faced a lot of transphobia in those rooms as well. Luckily, there are new spaces opening up, like one in Long Beach, specifically for trans folk.

    My recovery consists of—and poet Kaveh Akbar also talks about this in the other interview—we can allow something else to subsume the addictive part of you. For both he and I, poetry has become that thing. We throw the same addictive energy at something healthier.

    Ok, now let’s talk poetry! Where are you at right now in terms of writing about addiction?

    Right now I’m in a double-headed mode in how I want to talk about the intersections of addiction. A big interest for me is the idea of alcoholism as lineage, as familiar bloodline and form of inheritance. My father was a drunk. My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side are drunks. My father’s father was a drunk. I’m thinking about how addiction ties into cyclical abuse; how leaning into it allows a lineage of violence to continue.

    And then the other direction I’m looking in is the ways in which queerness, transness, and addiction intersect with the prison industrial complex. Those violences. My father growing up was a prison guard, and so the familial abuses I faced were intrinsically linked to this other separate system of violence I wouldn’t experience personally until much later in my life.

    This is stuff you are tackling in an upcoming release? Like a collection?

    I’m working on a full-length manuscript. Also, a pet project tentatively titled Cell, meant to observe the different definitions of the word. Cell as a space, a physical confinement, a unit of memory, a telephone network, a part of the human body.

    I think of your poem, “Burning Haibun.” There’s the line about cells, how when alcohol is used to disinfect a cut, the scarring is worsened and made thicker, which you liken metaphorically to a blackout. It’s a brilliant poem, and I’d love to usher it into our conversation.

    Utilizing the form of the haibun, which is traditionally just a prose poem followed by a haiku, I began working from this moment when my mother accused me of throwing alcohol and gasoline on my emotions.

    The poem was a process of peeling off layers of trauma, the night of my DUI, and the night my father tried to kill himself by driving through a telephone pole. Then, I started writing about the ways addiction is not just a lineage I carry from my parents, but also a prevalent condition in queer communities because of the ways we are forced to survive.

    The first erasure narrows down to thinking about how I’ve been indicted by my father’s blood. I’m told being an addict makes me like him. “Once I just watched the wound accuse me of my blood. My father’s possessing the body. How each drink too is not mine, or I claim guilt.”

    But the bottom of the first two stanzas calls out my separate lineage. “My father hidden in an erasure of me. Each drink mine, my faggot blood.” So even if this is a lineage I carry from him, it is something my own, and it is something that belongs to another lineage, of queer addicts that have been a part of my life, some who have helped me in recovery.

    If I understand what you said correctly, by acknowledging the different threads of lineages that twist together, you deny your father from being the main contributor to your addiction. There is no single lineage.

    This poem allows me to access an identity as an addict and an addict in recovery that doesn’t make me like my father. My addiction doesn’t make me him.

    It’s interesting to think of lineage as biological, but also behavioral, which you are talking about, like the nurture from your parents, but more specifically, queer culture passed down between communities and generations.

    Tracing a lineage that is not genetic is inherent to queerness. Creating found family. Many queer and trans folks don’t have access to a genetic source of lineage, a family that supports and cares for them.

    I think this is a good time to talk about your poem “Inheritance.” What are some of the things happening inside that poem?

    This past year was the first time I was able to access mental healthcare, and I was diagnosed with a rapid cycling form of bipolar disorder. “Inheritance” is part of a series that, once again, recontextualizes experiences of lineage. Actions my mother and grandmother have taken. Actions I took. Because bipolar tends to be inherited from the mother’s side, she denied any family history. So this poem is responding, “Yes. Yes. There is a history of broken objects, shards, and of alcohol being a method of coping with the disorder.”

    Your opening lines are about your mother buying plates marketed as unbreakable. Within the poem, does the denial of breakability or the aspiration towards unbreakability become not only a symptom of mental illness, but also a path to it?

    No one seeks out something unbreakable unless they know they break the things around them. This poem is very much about my family’s denial of mental illness. In the poem I shattered one of these unbreakable plates by throwing it at my brother’s head while in a manic rage. I remember all the things my mother broke when I was a child, throwing them at my father. My grandmother smashing wine glasses. I tried to introduce this litany of evidence, but never put the reader inside the moment of breaking.

    That’s interesting, because I sensed this distance during my first read. I felt like I was looking at a pile of shattered memory, piecing together what happened. I felt removed. It’s almost paradoxical, but does your embracing of breakability and mental illness give you the best chance at being as unfractured as you can be?

    This poem ends, “My mother and I both know the slow ballet a glass shard makes beneath the skin.” Despite denial, all of this breaking is in our blood. For me, it’s interesting to be in a dual state of recovery, because recovery is also a term used in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Living with the disorder, when I’m manic, I feel invincible. Often times, also, addicts in the height of their addiction feel superhuman. So to turn away from these two modes of invincibility, you have to embrace or open yourself up to being broken.

    Wow, there are so many things I want to talk to you about haha. But let’s touch upon “wind-chime aria [for four hands].” I’m curious about the musical component, and about how the wind-chimes act as a vehicle. What is the music of this poem?

    I come from a pretty musical family, sharing music, singing songs together. It’s also as simple as the opening line, “My mother has always loved windchimes.” The house I grew up in, in Portland, was surrounded by windchimes. Music connects so much to memory in this poem, the spirit of Mozart, and the parental trauma in his experience.

    If this poem was a song, what would it be?

    Probably performed by Tori Amos. High energy, but creepy feeling. Maybe “Cornflake Girl.” I adore that song. This poem is from my forthcoming chapbook, called boy/girl/ghost, and written during a time when I was leaning into a feminine energy, after coming out as a trans woman, and needing to claim a softness that I hadn’t been previously allowed. Tori Amos was part of a soundtrack to that period of my life. There’s a line in my poem, “he became wind or light bulbs / began bursting on their own becoming a confetti of blades…” Even this violence is trying to find its own softness.

    The last thing I want to talk to you about…your bio includes the label cripple punk, and I know the term cripple holds political significance for the disability justice movement. Do you think mental health and substance use disorder have a place within this movement?

    I identify as a cripple punk specifically because I’m physically disabled. I have a spinal deformity. As a teenager, I hurt all the time and didn’t know why, and this began my abuse of painkillers. One of the hardest things about being clean and sober, I have no pain management anymore. Describing myself as a cripple punk is a sharpening of my identity, a fuck you to people who look at me and can’t imagine someone as both young and needing a cane.

    I’m only one individual and cannot speak for the entire community. As someone who is both mentally ill and physically disabled, I know both require a similar sort of activism and space. At the same time, many spaces where mental health is allowed to take on the same texture as physical disability, physical disability gets so erased. The conversation becomes dominated.

    So solely for the purpose of creating space for physical disability, I don’t personally like to see the picture overlap too much, but at the same time it becomes important to talk about the comorbidities, and intersectionality. So it’s a tough question. I think there needs to be room for both.

    Again, thank you so much for sharing about all the experiences and intersections that inform your writing. What’s on the horizon for you?

    My chapbook boy/girl/ghost is coming out through The Atlas Review chapbook series. Then also the chapbook Cell, which I plan on spending the upcoming month writing. Also just finishing up my undergraduate degree and surviving.

     

    This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

    More poems by torrin a. greathouse

    Erwin Schrödinger Speaks on Dead Fathers, The Rising Phoenix 

    Haunting with Alcoholic, Riverbed, and Handcuffed Magician, Nat.Brut

    Other interviews in this series about poetry, addiction, and intersectionality:

    Addiction and Queerness in Poet Sam Sax’s ‘madness’

    Kaveh Akbar Maps Unprecedented Experience in “Portrait of the Alcoholic”

    View the original article at thefix.com