The Fix on Poetry Informed by the Opioid Crisis

For The Fix, Richard Tayson shares with readers three poetry collections that delve into the realities and complications of addiction: Sam Sax's Madness, William Brewer's I Know Your Kind, and Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf. "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'," Tayson explains. From there: 

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?

Read more from there at The Fix.