Answer Addiction

Tag: William Brewer

  • 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

  • So You Want to Write About Addicts

    So You Want to Write About Addicts

    At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    We started each morning of residential treatment with burned muffins, a house meeting, and introductions.

    “My name is Tom and I’m a junkie here on vacation. My goal today is to lay in the sun and sample the delicious food in this all-inclusive resort.”

    Tom’s sarcasm made orange juice squirt out of my nose. Humor was an elixir for the boredom of early sobriety and monotony of the rehab center’s strict daily schedule.

    Our addiction counselor corrected Tom: “You need to take this more seriously. I need you to redo that and tell us your real goal for today.”

    The story that society tells about addiction is one of tragedy. When we talk about addicts, we talk about pain, drama, and heartbreak. Of course, addiction is all of these things, but it’s also a rich, multi-faceted story with humor and joy. When we let addiction define the entirety of a human being’s existence, we flatten people to one-dimensional caricatures.

    The story that society tells about my favorite tragic hero Kurt Cobain is a prime example; his sense of humor gets buried beneath his pain. The media glosses over parts of his personality, like how he wore pajamas on his wedding day and a puffy-sleeved, yellow dress to a heavy metal show on MTV. “The show is called Head Banger’s Ball, so I thought I’d wear a gown,” Cobain deadpanned. “But nobody got me a corsage.”

    Two weeks after Nirvana released Nevermind, they pranked the famous British show Top of the Pops. Wearing sunglasses and a smirk, Cobain infuriated producers and the audience when he dramatically sang “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in a mopey style that evoked Morrissey from The Smiths.

    If you want to write about addiction, remember that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. Addicts can be both funny and tragic. Another example: Cobain’s original name for In Utero was I Hate Myself and Want To Die, but the record company opposed the title, fearing that fans wouldn’t understand the dark humor.

    While I love satire, I also understand why we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of addiction. Addicts suffer. Addicts bleed. Addicts, like Cobain, die too young.

    *

    I know a thing or two about almost dying.

    I recently discovered an old home movie of my ex Sam* and me. In the video, we were strung out like Christmas lights. Watching it made me feel like a voyeur in my own life.

    Thick tongued, I slur, “Let’s jaaammmm,” to my musician boyfriend. He pushes a tuft of blonde hair out of my face. My unruly David Bowie mullet always gets in the way.

    Sam’s strumming his acoustic guitar and singing “Needle and The Hay” by Elliot Smith, a classic junkie song.

    I’m taking the cure/ So I can be quiet whenever I want.

    He hands me a bass guitar, but I can’t hold it. My limbs go limp. Thunk. The maple-neck, cherry wood bass crashes to the floor.

    So leave me alone/ You ought to be proud that I’m getting good marks.

    The bass doesn’t break, but I do. I try to pick it up, but my body slumps into a question mark. I look like a bobble head doll, with glassy blue-green eyes. Doll eyes blinking open and shut. Opiate eyes. Open and shut. Haunting thing.

    Sam stops singing. “Are you okay? Tessa, did you take Klonopin this morning?”

    Shut. When my eyes roll in the back of my head, he grabs my shoulders and commands, “Wake up! Wake up!”

    “I’m fiiiinnnneeee,” I mumble as my pale skin turns blue.

    I wouldn’t be fine for years.

    *

    When I heard there was going to be an opioid overdose memorial, I was skeptical. When I saw that Showtime was releasing a new docuseries about the epidemic called The Trade, I was skeptical. When Andrew Sullivan christened a non-addict “Poet Laurette of the opioid epidemic,” in a New York Magazine essay, I was skeptical. But not surprised. Never surprised.

    I’m skeptical because I’ve been devouring books, essays, documentaries, and movies about the opioid epidemic for years, charting their predictable rhetoric, cliché story arcs, and stigmatizing portrayal of addicts: addicts as cautionary tales, signal fires, propellers for drama. We’re afraid to color outside these lines, to show the ways in which addicts contain multitudes.

    I wear skepticism like a shell. It feels safer than being vulnerable. My skepticism asks questions like: who has the right to tell the addict’s story? How can a writer dip their plume into the well of an addict’s pain without having been there herself? How can we do justice to addicts and the addiction story?

    If you want to write about addicts, you first need to familiarize yourself with the formula and conventions of the “addict lit” genre. The territory has been well-charted in recent books like Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

    Human beings are intrigued by conflict and drama. We are all complicit. I am, too. Even though I’ve been clean for multiple years and know that I shouldn’t be gawking, I do. Even though I feel like they exploit people’s pain for entertainment, I still watch shows like Intervention and Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew. These shows jolt us out of the doldrums of our own lives or, if we are addicts ourselves, they reassure us that we are not alone.

    We watch from a safe distance, with the luxury of returning to the comfort of our own cocoons. At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    *

    If you want to write a story about the opioid epidemic, you must imagine how addicts hunger for stories that represent us, encourage empathy, and feel believable. We long for stories to be our anchors and buoys to keep us afloat. Unfortunately, some stories sink. We must study those too, as a lesson of what not to do.

    The Prescribed to Death Memorial is a dehumanizing failure. It features a wall of 22,000 faces carved on pills to pay tribute to those who overdosed in 2017. If I died of an overdose, I wouldn’t want my face carved on a pill.

    I’ve spent my whole life being carved out. Instead, I’d like to know what it feels like to be whole.

    When I heard about the docuseries The Trade, I quickly signed up for a free trial of Showtime and checked its Metacritic score: 84.

    Steve Greene of Indie Wire praises the series. The Trade “doesn’t purport to be a corrective or some magic key to unlocking the problem. But as a means for empathy and a way to understanding the human cost at each step of an international heroin trade, it does far more than hollow words and shallow promises.”

    Each episode shifts between three main story arcs: a Mexican drug cartel, law enforcement, and addicts and their families. It is technically well-made, with sharp cinematography and juxtapositions like masked members of the cartel guarding poppy fields in Mexico as children play in the street; a grieving mother and father at a memorial rally in Ohio flying signs that say, “Hope Not Dope.”

    But the series was predictable and flat. The addict’s story arc of The Trade is a simple five-part dramatic structure. In the exposition, we see white middle-class young adults are prescribed painkillers for a sports injury or surgery. As their physical dependence grows, they need more and more to manage their pain. At the climax, they switch to heroin because it’s cheaper and sometimes easier to find than painkillers. They fall deep into the well of addiction.

    Then they go to rehab or they don’t. Cut. End scene.

    Paste film critic Amy Glynn says it was “dangerous from a watchability perspective…Junkies don’t make good television because they are really, really damned boring. They are painfully uninteresting, because heroin turns most people into zombie reptiles who are deeply depressed and deeply depressing.”

    At first, I was taken aback by this quote. But Glynn has a point. If you want to write about the opioid epidemic, you might want to do more than rely on pain porn. The poetry of a needle plunging into the crook of a junkie’s arm, crimson swirling into the plunger. Junkies drifting through public streets like zombies.

    Glynn redeems herself: “Someone needs to start telling the rest of the story. Like now.”

    *

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to realize that it’s still a stigmatized condition. My friend had to leave a grief group because other parents said her son’s overdose death was his fault and not as sad as a child who died of cancer. It’s as though grief was some sort of competition of suffering and pain. But an entire super bowl stadium could be filled with dead bodies like her son. There were 64,000 overdose deaths in the US in 2016.

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to know that life-saving medication-assisted-treatments like Suboxone and methadone are still expensive and difficult to access. Unfortunately, many treatment centers are “abstinence-only,” meaning they don’t allow their patients to take Suboxone or methadone. For a more in-depth plunge into the world of harm reduction, read Tracey Helton, Tessie Castillo, or Maia Szalavitz.

    *

    In addition to these dire facts, we have to deal with our stories being appropriated and exploited. Enter the poet William Brewer, who has never used opioids or struggled with addiction himself. Brewer inhabits the voice of addicts in his poetry book, I Know Your Kind. The title derives from a Cormac McCarthy quote, but it’s very clear to me that Brewer doesn’t “know my kind.”

    I don’t want to be harsh on Brewer. Being from the polite Midwest where we’re supposed to avoid confrontation, I almost deleted this part. But Brewer’s words feel like a chisel mining people’s pain. I also feel it’s my responsibility as a recovering addict and writer to call it like I see it.

    Brewer writes lines like: “Tom’s hand on the table looked like warm bread. I crushed it with a hammer, then walked him to the E.R. to score pills” and “Who can stand another night stealing fistfuls of pills from our cancer-sick neighbors?”

    In a world where artists and writers are constantly being called out for cultural appropriation, I was surprised that nobody called Brewer out for appropriating the addict’s story for his own artistic gain. Brewer’s sole connection to the epidemic is that he was born and raised in Virginia, the state with the highest overdose death rate in the nation. In an interview with Virginia Public Radio, Brewer said when he visited over the holidays, he inquired about whereabouts of former classmates. “People replied, ‘They’re on the pills. We don’t really see them anymore.’”

    If you want to write about an addict, you should avoid infantilizing and dehumanizing addicts, along with the trope that addicts are all “lost and forsaken.” Some of the strongest, most courageous people I know are addicts. Active drug users like The People’s Harm Reduction Alliance in Seattle established needle exchanges, distributed the overdose reversal drug, naloxone, and are fighting to open supervised safe injection sites.

    *

    If you want to write a story about addiction, realize that most addicts struggle with whether or not they should publicly share this part of their identity. For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever write about my addictions to alcohol, opiates, and benzos. I didn’t have the courage. Here in the Midwest, we keep the laundry to ourselves. We don’t air it out. When I wrote about my first struggle with alcoholism in 2011, my family warned me that it could impact my future job opportunities and dating. I knew they were just looking out for my “best interests.” But I insisted: my privacy, my mistakes, my choice. I hoped that sharing my addiction and vulnerability might be therapeutic for me and maybe even help others.

    If you ‘re going to write a story about addiction, realize how it’s affected by different identities. For example, I’m extremely lucky, because I have supportive friends and family. When I was broke and had nothing, they offered me food, shelter, and support. Also related to my privilege as a white, middle-class woman is that I don’t have a criminal record. Yes, my hospital records bother me, but they are protected by confidentiality laws.

    In a way, writing about my addiction felt like making these private records a public matter. I was hesitant. Brewer was also reluctant to write about the opioid epidemic, for different reasons. He said, “West Virginia is very rarely looked at in a positive light. And so here again is a situation where something really quite terrible is going on, but it became so clear that this thing wasn’t going to go away and was starting to seep into my daily life.”

    *

    Heroin doesn’t seep into most people’s daily lives. Heroin is a tsunami. Heroin drowns.

    *

    There may be value in writing beyond our own experience, as Brewer did. Representation is important and if we all followed the advice to only “write what we know,” things could get bland and boring. Artistic expression would suffer. But it’s a tightrope. It’s a practice in tremendous empathy, wanting to diversify representation, while also being respectful and staying in your lane.

    *

    If you want to write about addicts, you’d benefit from also depicting the humor of early recovery, a story that often falls outside the margins. When I was digging through my own videos and journals, I was of course humiliated by some of my own narcissism and self pity. But I was also surprised and heartened by the unexpected joys like my friendship with Tom at my first rehab.

    On my first day, I noticed him in the smoking tent, wearing bright red Converse, a beret, and long sleeves to hide his track marks. I noticed the way his brown eyes brimmed with both kindness and sadness as he deadpanned in meetings.

    “You guys are like The Wonder Twins of rehab,” staff said. Despite our 20-year age difference, we were inseparable.

    Tom bummed me Parliament menthols and lent me one of his ear buds, so we could listen to The Replacements, The Pixies or The Velvet Underground together. On weekends, we went to record stores, ate pizza, and he read my shitty poetry. We made beaded lizards and built crooked birdhouses bedazzled with feathers and glitter.

    One day in group, we had to watch a 1987 film called, The Cat Who Drank and Used Too Much.

    “Was I just daydreaming, or did you just say we are watching a movie starring a cat?” Tom asked.

    “Yes, it’s made for kids. Lost and Found Ministries recommended it as a good way for parents to explain addiction to their kids.”

    “Drunken cats, who knew?” I said.

    I later learned that the film was praised as an “audience favorite about a beer drinking, drug addicted cat,” when it was screened at the Oddball Film Festival in San Francisco.

    Our story begins in any town USA, a sleepy suburban neighborhood lined with rosebushes and plush green lawns. Cue sappy flute and piano elevator music with too much treble.

    The film opens as Pat the Cat is getting into a red car for his morning commute. We see Pat drinking alcohol from a pitcher and beginning to experiment with other things. A cigarette here, some prescription pills, a bit of coke there (powdered sugar).

    “He’d try anything, it was never enough. Then it was too much.” Pat crashes his car and almost loses everything, but then decides to go to rehab!

    “I’m not trying to be catty, but Pat seems to be pretty well-off to me,” Tom said.

    At the end of the movie, Pat has a cupcake to celebrate his sobriety. Ah, it seemed like only a few weeks!

    “If only it were that easy!” I said.

    “Sure, his life isn’t purr-fect, but it’s pretty close!”

    *

    What I’m trying to say is: If you want to write a story about an addict, we might not be perfect, but we can do better. Starting now.

    If you want to read stories about heroin or the opioid epidemic, I recommend starting with nonfiction. There is power in reading about people’s lived experiences.

    Of course there are also excellent and illuminating fictional books about the opioid/ heroin addiction. Check out this list by Kevin Pickard.

    View the original article at thefix.com