The Landing: An Interview Series seeks to gain insight into the diverse creative processes of some of our favorite writers with the hopes that we can inspire others through this sharing. Each quarter we will highlight one previously published poem in a short interview.
KAVEH AKBAR founded and edits Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in Poetry, Tin House, Guernica, APR, Boston Review, and elsewhere. His debut full-length, Calling A Wolf A Wolf, will be published by Alice James Books in late 2017, and a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, will be out with Sibling Rivalry Press in January.
Poem: "Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving" by Kaveh Akbar, published by Boston Review.
Several of your poems, including “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving,” have a back and forth movement across the page, both the stanzas and lines alternating their alignment, which seem to portray a sense of longing. Here and in “Learning to Pray”, your want is front and center. Was this a conscious choice? How do you go about deciding how to format a poem?
“Your want is front and center,” I love that. Thank you. The poems you mentioned, and most of my poems, went through countless bodies before finding the ones they live in now. Those reincarnations tend to happen in the sort of ecstatic fugue of writing, so there are both conscious and unconscious forces at work. The way my poems look on the page has everything to do with cadence, with thinking of the poems as incantations. Roethke said, “The serious problems of life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.” I think about that all the time. I can’t improve upon that.
This poem is different than many of your other poems published online which deal with alcoholism and carry a dark undercurrent of dependency. (See: “Recovery”, “Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before”, “Crisp”, and “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal”.) Instead, “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving” embodies a sense of tenderness, both for the lover in the poem and for alcohol. What drove you to write and include this piece in your upcoming chapbook, Portrait of an Alcoholic?
As a person in recovery, I have to walk with the awareness that the fundamental crisis of my biology would immediately resolve with a trip to the bar right across the street from my apartment. Or to the liquor store on my corner. Or to my one friend’s place. There is nothing the cells of my body want more than to be greeted by their old pals, you know? I will always be addicted that way. In recovery, I’ve learned short- and long-term interventions against those cellular demands, and some days are easier than others. But the fact of it is, the same organ that controls my sleeping and breathing and the contracting of my intestinal muscles also wants me to drink and use. How can you not love something your body wants so much? And how can you not resent it? I think this poem is interested in those questions.
When read together, these poems seem to want more than the act of admission. What work do you hope that sharing your experiences will do? Or maybe, the better question is, why is it important to share these stories with the public?
That’s a good question. I’m not interested in poetry that seeks clemency. I’m not looking to exonerate myself. Or indict myself, for that matter. We write about whatever seems essential to us, I think. And my recovery is the defining experience of my adult life. So of course it’s going to come into my writing. In a lot of ways, both esoteric and literal, the person I was died the last time I used/drank. And the person I am was born right after. What poet isn’t obsessed with death, with the possibility of rebirth?
And then of course there’s something to be said about creating a compassionate awareness of this condition. I write poems for myself, but I don’t publish even close to everything I write. So the decision to publish these poems, to speak openly about addiction in the poems and with you now and whenever I’m asked, has everything to do with compassionate awareness. With visibility. The attachment of shame to chemical dependency is so ass-backwards. And it’s lethal! It puts a chasm between sick people and the help they need. Nothing thrills me more than the possibility that these poems might narrow that chasm a bit for someone. That’s the dream of dreams.
What advice do you have for poets who want to write about their invisible illness/disease?
I’m always a little scared of advice-giving or sounding prescriptive because what works and feels natural for me might doom someone else. But I like Wallace Stevens’ definition of poets as “priests of the invisible.” I like the reverence and dutiful attendance to the unseeable self that implies. Engaging in my writing whatever animal is roaring loudest in my brain’s rainforest (brainforest?) is essential for me. Often that animal is addiction, so I have a bunch of addiction poems. I’m comfortable enough with letting people into that part of my life, but another writer might not be. I think it’s probably inevitable that they’ll eventually engage it creatively in some way, but I would never say that every writer with a psychopathology should have to publish about it. I think a lot of good can come from that for the writer and for their audience, but it depends very much on the individual writer, on their wellness and safety.
Interview by Rhiannon Thorne.
Read more The Landing: An Interview Series
Dalton Day
Sarah Sgro
Chen Chen
Lisa Martin
Fatimah Asghar
Several of your poems, including “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving,” have a back and forth movement across the page, both the stanzas and lines alternating their alignment, which seem to portray a sense of longing. Here and in “Learning to Pray”, your want is front and center. Was this a conscious choice? How do you go about deciding how to format a poem?
“Your want is front and center,” I love that. Thank you. The poems you mentioned, and most of my poems, went through countless bodies before finding the ones they live in now. Those reincarnations tend to happen in the sort of ecstatic fugue of writing, so there are both conscious and unconscious forces at work. The way my poems look on the page has everything to do with cadence, with thinking of the poems as incantations. Roethke said, “The serious problems of life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.” I think about that all the time. I can’t improve upon that.
This poem is different than many of your other poems published online which deal with alcoholism and carry a dark undercurrent of dependency. (See: “Recovery”, “Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before”, “Crisp”, and “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal”.) Instead, “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving” embodies a sense of tenderness, both for the lover in the poem and for alcohol. What drove you to write and include this piece in your upcoming chapbook, Portrait of an Alcoholic?
As a person in recovery, I have to walk with the awareness that the fundamental crisis of my biology would immediately resolve with a trip to the bar right across the street from my apartment. Or to the liquor store on my corner. Or to my one friend’s place. There is nothing the cells of my body want more than to be greeted by their old pals, you know? I will always be addicted that way. In recovery, I’ve learned short- and long-term interventions against those cellular demands, and some days are easier than others. But the fact of it is, the same organ that controls my sleeping and breathing and the contracting of my intestinal muscles also wants me to drink and use. How can you not love something your body wants so much? And how can you not resent it? I think this poem is interested in those questions.
When read together, these poems seem to want more than the act of admission. What work do you hope that sharing your experiences will do? Or maybe, the better question is, why is it important to share these stories with the public?
That’s a good question. I’m not interested in poetry that seeks clemency. I’m not looking to exonerate myself. Or indict myself, for that matter. We write about whatever seems essential to us, I think. And my recovery is the defining experience of my adult life. So of course it’s going to come into my writing. In a lot of ways, both esoteric and literal, the person I was died the last time I used/drank. And the person I am was born right after. What poet isn’t obsessed with death, with the possibility of rebirth?
And then of course there’s something to be said about creating a compassionate awareness of this condition. I write poems for myself, but I don’t publish even close to everything I write. So the decision to publish these poems, to speak openly about addiction in the poems and with you now and whenever I’m asked, has everything to do with compassionate awareness. With visibility. The attachment of shame to chemical dependency is so ass-backwards. And it’s lethal! It puts a chasm between sick people and the help they need. Nothing thrills me more than the possibility that these poems might narrow that chasm a bit for someone. That’s the dream of dreams.
What advice do you have for poets who want to write about their invisible illness/disease?
I’m always a little scared of advice-giving or sounding prescriptive because what works and feels natural for me might doom someone else. But I like Wallace Stevens’ definition of poets as “priests of the invisible.” I like the reverence and dutiful attendance to the unseeable self that implies. Engaging in my writing whatever animal is roaring loudest in my brain’s rainforest (brainforest?) is essential for me. Often that animal is addiction, so I have a bunch of addiction poems. I’m comfortable enough with letting people into that part of my life, but another writer might not be. I think it’s probably inevitable that they’ll eventually engage it creatively in some way, but I would never say that every writer with a psychopathology should have to publish about it. I think a lot of good can come from that for the writer and for their audience, but it depends very much on the individual writer, on their wellness and safety.
Interview by Rhiannon Thorne.
Read more The Landing: An Interview Series
Dalton Day
Sarah Sgro
Chen Chen
Lisa Martin
Fatimah Asghar
