addiction

[note 2.6]

[philip guston, head and bottle, 1975]

Friends,

[note: I’m taking a break this week from discussing the fuckery going on in higher education in Texas, so that for a little longer you can tell yourself that since you ain’t in Texas it ain’t coming for you].

Anyway, I’m just back from AWP (the associate writing programs) conference. I hadn’t been back since covid derailed the one in San Antonio in 2020. This year it was held in Baltimore, a city that feels real in about a thousand ways—some great, some terrible. As usual, I tried to book a hotel at the last minute, and ended up in a grim Airbnb basement, complete with flickering overhead fluorescent lighting—it felt like I’d woken up in a slasher film.

This time around I was part of a panel discussion called I Could Not Stop for Death: Poets on Addiction and Substance Abuse. It was pulled together by the poet Stevie Edwards, and included Joan Kwon Glass, K.Iver, and Edgar Kunz. The room was packed—by the time we began people were sitting on the floor and standing in the back three deep. It seems there’s a hunger to understand this thing that touches us all in some way, yet that many hold deep inside.

As each poet stood to speak (I’m not speaking of myself here) something special happened—each was completely honest, vulnerable, and nearly egoless. Maybe it was the tone set by Stevie, who began. Each spoke for a few minutes of their relationship to addiction, of how it had affected them, their families, and how they had found their way to poetry—often it was a poet who had come before them who had opened the door. Each read a few poems that circled around not just the consequences, but also the lure—what it offers, before it takes away.

I was the last to speak—here’s the last poem I read (from Low):

BAPTISMAL

A spiderweb is not

a tool

the spider uses to catch

its prey—it is

the spider, stretched

outside itself. How far

beyond our fingertips

do our bodies

extend? What

is it we are suspended

over, what

holds us? Maybe

we are the reason

God made other people,

so we could wait

together, held.

Just as I ended my seven minutes, just as I read that last word (held), the lights in the room cut out, and we were all plunged into darkness for thirty seconds, which somehow felt right.