Don't "Keep This to Yourself": Dispatches from Vermont [by Elizabeth Powell]

The Poetry of Kerrin McCadden and the Opioid Crisis

This week I will be reporting from my beloved home state of Vermont. Summertime is short here, but it is filled with literary and music festivals, readings, conferences, workshops, art shows, ballet on the farm. Vermont Studio Center, Brattleboro Literary Festival, Bookstock, Bread and Puppet, The Painted Word reading series, Feast and Field in Barnard, Monday night poetry readings at the Lamp Shop in Burlington, Bread Loaf. Poems are singing themselves into existence. We have a large population of writers and artists. Here, even the Burlington Chief of Police is a writer with a book contract. 

But lately what troubles sleep, whatever sleep it is, (to reference our state’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Robert Frost) is not a bumper crop of apples and the hard work of harvesting. Lately Vermont has been harvesting bodies. 

The nationwide heroin epidemic hides here behind bucolic vistas of Holsteins, quaint white clapboard houses, craft breweries serving farm to table gluten free pizza, and old-timey country inns. Even here many suffer poverty of pocket and soul. “Men die miserably everyday,” William Carlos Williams once said, “for lack of what is found” in poetry.

So what is it about poetry that can heal us? For starters it bears witness in dark times. There is much despair in the air. Many feel what is unseen in the zeitgeist of our troubled and troubling times. On top of that mountain oftentimes opioids are cheaper and have “more bang for the buck” than a suitcase of Bud. 

How can poetry help? It gives sustenance to the human soul with the lyric enactment of narrative. Sharing stories is an ancient human way to ease the suffering of another, to develop empathy and understanding, to share solutions or ways to stay alive. The psychiatrists of the confessional poets surely understood this: Poet heal thyself. 

If one can speak the truth through narrative, it will heal shame and trauma, roots of addiction. My dear friend, Dr. Anne Johnston, recently passed away, she was a world-renowned neonatologist in the area of mother/infant opioid addiction. In an interview with the Times Argus newspaper before her death she said: “I would say that all have shame and the shame is particularly bad when you are pregnant and you are using. I think that fear dominates in terms of coming forward. Most women who get pregnant and who are using opioids and are dependent upon opioids say ‘OK, now I’m pregnant. I’m going to be able to get myself off.’ The reasoning of it doesn’t follow through to the actual disease of addiction and you can’t reason yourself out of an addiction.”

Vermont poet Kerrin McCadden understands this intuitively, poetically, and gives us the perspective from the poet’s eye in her forthcoming chapbook, winner of the Button Poetry prize (March 24, 2020), Keep This to Yourself. On the loss of her brother to this crisis, McCadden says “poems are our secular prayers. They are the way we name and understand the world. Increasingly, the general public is hungry for poems. Poems are a primary engine for storytelling. The lyric poem seems to be “pre-story” in its adherence to the moment, but a series of lyric poems can tell a story, can help readers live in those moments. I think it’s important to invite those who have not lived with addiction in their families to live in the moments of poems about such families. I want to break silence about the opioid epidemic. I want poems—hopefully some of mine—to help people build compassion.”

Keep This to Yourself asks readers to reflect on the old fashioned values of family secret keeping and the damaging effects the practice has on the greater society. The chapbook’s title is, then, a dare. We can’t keep any of this to ourselves any longer; not to mention the book itself discloses the secret that is making large swathes of our society sick. Secrets force us to evaluate the nature of truth. And truth is in short supply in much of public discourse these days. 

The speaker in these tightly hewn and achingly beautiful poems is/was a sister, and these poems follow the speaker from childhood into adulthood. In the first poem of the collection, “When My Brother Dies,“ the speaker muses on the fact that even when her brother was living he was of the walking dead. In life as in death, the river carries much of the narrative. The lineation, like the river, meanders and cuts into what is solid. The speaker fights for her core, she will not go to the other side:

It happened already. It has happened five times

    and will happen again. My brother is dead.  

        We try to recover what he stole and start 

            by making a list we can’t finish.

I’ve been living up and down the same riverbank

    since I started having families. I stay on my 

        side of the river, which makes our list full 

            of half-truths. I will not cross the river.

McCadden’s expert use of repetition and dazzling, take your breath away syntax help to weave the complexity of the subject of addiction, its life and death consequences where none of us, even us readers, are spared what it means to be a witness. The lithe juxtaposition of images through most of the poems in the collection lets the reader live in the liminal space between past and present, the place of shadows, as a means to stand on the precipice of truth and survey possibility.

The liminal space between death and life continues, richly layered through the book, in a series of poems called “reverse overdose” that remind me of the dexterity of Martin Amis’ use of time in his novel Time’s Arrow. Here, time is a way to underscore and locate the barbarity of the soul being overtaken by a dark force out of control. Yet, McCadden’s brilliant play with language in these poems renders the reader into the transformative power of words across time, where a brain dead brother’s heart is kept alive for transplanting, so that life can win. 

Other “reverse overdose” poems in the series show us other sides of the brother where he is momentarily clean, and has a chance at a different narrative outcome. The frenzied hope it dwells in is reflected in internal and off rhymes, and the lack of punctuation propels it forward in a fitting stream of consciousness style: “He comes clean they have a baby boy they are high and low/high and low a photo of him as the handsomest/man I’ve ever seen I don’t recognize him he comes clean.” The “reverse overdose” can be read both ways with the forceful spinning of words as a way to try and raise the dead.

“The Mother Talks to Her Son About Her Heart” is perhaps the most devastating in the way the poem brings to life and tries to heal the unquenchable agony of a mother for her child. The poem speaks from the mother’s point of view and the voice and diction are alive with pain. The poem is the mother’s aria, a worthy last plea for her son to choose to live in the face of a disease that wants him dead. The trope of the heart as a room or a cottage that the speaker wants the son to enter works well; it is deliberate and not overly sentimental. It is the truth of a woman’s soul.

The Mother Talks to Her Son about Her Heart

So what. So what that you grew 

inside of someone else—

it doesn’t mean you aren’t in here now,

in here, right here. Oh, my heart—what’s in here 

is not all my own anymore, anyway.  

There is Teflon, and stitching—other people’s hands 

have been in here. By this I mean to tell you 

there is room. There is a house in here 

I had hoped to fill. I saved clothes forever 

waiting for more babies. So, I wanted you.  

I always wanted you. A heart has four rooms.  

You are one son. There is room.

When I was young and wanting to bring you home, 

they found the hole in my heart and patched it.  

I grow older and the outside door fails, 

and so I get a new one.  

In the lumber yard of the heart, the materials 

are strange, Teflon, like I said, for the hole 

and a valve from a cow to seal the doorway.  

Over and over, I shore this place up.

Steady, old girl, I say to my heart, 

and I call in its ticks to the doctor.  

I love her, like I love you, like I have always 

loved you. She calls me back and reads my stats.  

I call your sister and tell her the score, 

that I am always winning another day. Steady, steady, 

ticks the pacemaker. I keep a good house. You know that.  

These days, I keep my heart like a summer cottage.  

The light is bright and warm. I won’t speak 

of anything else. You forget, you forget all the time.  

You are supposed to come home. You are supposed to know 

these things. You are supposed to know which door 

to knock on, that I will open it. 

The Father’s grief, however, is more like a mountain that looms over the rivers and tributaries on the banks of which this family falters. 

My Brother Wailing

There is a river outside 

my window, which is more 

than I ever asked for.  

Sure, a river is a bigger monster 

than I am used to, but, most of the time, 

it is no worse than my brother.  

The river stones get worn fine, 

like my parents did. All of this 

is more than I asked for.  

Even the armchair by the window.  

I didn’t ask for that 

any more than I asked 

for the word soon to mean 

what it does. Soon is everything, 

almost. My brother was almost 

a mountain. Not in the way that 

mountains are majestic, but in the way 

that mountains are also monsters.  

He blocked the sun often enough, 

even from himself. What is a boy to do 

in the armchair—with the tourniquet gone slack, 

his veins filled with the drug 

I always thought must feel 

like sugar tastes—but let the light fade?  

This is also what mountains do, 

they let the light fade early 

in the houses to the east of them.  

I remember my father pinning him 

to the stairs, himself a mountain, 

and my brother wailing, 

like he did not understand.  

My father is a mountain 

in the way that mountains are mountains, 

tall, majestic, proud. My father 

is a mountain in the way that 

mountains greet the morning, 

like a basket to hold the sun.  

Good morning, good morning, 

the houses to the east filling 

with light at its base. The people sit 

on their porches and watch.  

What the boy does on the other side 

of the mountain is he becomes a river, 

and soon, and he does what rivers do, 

he becomes a monster. He etches 

and etches shadows into everything.  

I rescue his dog, who has eaten 

the kitchen floor. I even rescue 

my brother once. Monster friends come 

to visit. They smile, and they have diamonds 

in their teeth. I get a gun.  

I tell my parents to get a gun, 

but they are mountains. They carve a path 

against the sky instead.

The chapbook ends on “Only Child,” where the speaker now has to face what that means. The poem exhibits a stunning lyric dexterity as the speaker ends with a eulogy from the only surviving child, four lost around birth and one lost to addiction. The “only child” stands in her strength, the same strength as the son who stays in the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son—a much-needed message even today—God loves us all, whoever we are.

Comments

[elizabeth cohen]

i love her poems.
Thank you.

[Suzanne Lummis]

Such vital,rich and striking poems, and what an effective approach to this difficult subject. I love how she melds the literal and the imagined, the worldly and the hallucinatory. Thank you for introducing her poetry.