Lynn Emanuel:

In this narrow world…a single familiar object smiles at me:  the phial of laudanum:  old and terrible love; like all loves, alas! fruitful in caresses and treacheries. — Baudelaire.

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I have distilled these paragraphs from a talk I gave on an AWP panel entitled “Strong Medicine: The Poetry of Addiction.”  The panelists included Nick Flynn, Kaveh Akbar, and Dawn McGuire and Owen Lewis, two physician-poets.  When asked to participate, I initially turned down the invitation. I’ve written only one poem whose straightforward subject is addiction. However, the panel invited us not only to discuss the theme and subject of addiction but also, (and for me this was the most interesting part), we were invited to explore the way addiction was part of the constitution and design of our poetry. 

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If my mother had not been an alcoholic, I might not have been a poet. My mother’s alcoholism underwrote a great deal of the writing in my first books. While I do not write about alcoholism, and the subject of alcoholism is not my subject, I do write from alcoholism; it is the style and structure of my poetry that have been influenced by the style and structure of the drinker—

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which is, as Walter Benjamin calls it, in his book Illuminations, the “empathy of intoxication,” the ability of the intoxicated to abandon oneself and become something else. Quoting Benjamin, “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else…  Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open.” 

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