William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind, a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Boston Review, Narrative, The Nation, New England Review, and The New Yorker. He’s currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, CA.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: First, I’d like to ask about your epigraph and collection title. I Know Your Kind begins with the Cormac McCarthy quote “I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through.” Immediately novelist Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel comes to mind, given his complicated relationship with home and writing of those he knew. Since you do write of West Virginia and the opioid epidemic—a particular landscape, people, and moment—I wonder, are there risks in such an overt position of ‘knowing’ a type of folk at the onset? What are the benefits or drawbacks of writing, as so many advise ‘what you know’?

WB: I think the most obvious risk I ran in such an overt positioning was failing to represent the people and place to the best of my abilities. And yet, that very issue of representation became a driving force in writing the book because, as any West Virginian will tell you, we’re hardly ever represented with any nuance. My goal was to write a book that someone in West Virginia could read and feel that their world, which is rarely represented or, if it is, is done so in unsavory or clichéd ways, had instead been treated with dignity, focus, and care. At the same time, I wanted to write a book that someone who has never been to WV could read and feel like they maybe had an experience of the place, its people, and its heart. In my mind, one of the thrills and privileges of being a writer from West Virginia is that it’s a place for which we don’t already have a kind of large, preexisting literary imagination in the way we do for other distinct American locales, WV being just as distinct, in my opinion. (This isn’t to say there isn’t already amazing writing focused on the state, just look at titans like Jayne Anne Phillips and Breece D’J Pancake.)

As for writing “what you know,” I’m not sure I can speak about that because I don’t think I’ve done that. I wrote about WV because trying to understand it as a landscape, a place, an idea, and a state of mind has long been an obsession of mine, and that’s because it’s my home. I’m inclined to believe that I’d feel the same way if I was from Phoenix or rural Arkansas or Cleveland, as I’m an inherently place-driven person. Lastly, I’ll say that, in my opinion, writing about the opiate epidemic in WV specifically makes for a book with much more universal appeal. This is hardly a new idea, but I believe that when a reader encounters something that is very specifically rendered, it becomes way easier for them to hold it in their mind like a kind of matter, which they can then reconfigure to fit the details of their own reality and imagination.

CL: Oh definitely—God’s in them, right? Your details are so startling. Off hand, I recall a speaker so shocked by beauty his toenails turn black, a friend’s hand smashed again and again with a hammer, mosquitoes snaking so thick through the nostrils of a cow that it chokes, the rain clear as gin…I could go on and on. But what’s most fascinating is how often these details get punctuated with something un-visceral, a more outright philosophical realization like “oblivion is all we have” or “after escaping an obedience to desire/you fear it. That, too, a kind of obedience.” It seems like in this way the details start to diagnose, to clarify or complicate, maybe even remedy. How do you approach something you want to understand when you sit down to write? How do you balance describing or telling in a particular piece with letting the poem tell you what it needs to?

WB: I very much like that idea of details leading to a diagnosis, and here’s why: For the first 18 years of my life, I did nothing but visual art, so my brain is trained to think in those terms. I never begin a poem with an idea or an ambition, it’s always an image. In this way, my process is essentially sketching: a few lines freely drawn become a shape that becomes an object that summons other objects around it, making a space, a scene, a composition. Three of the four details you’ve mentioned were in fact the originating images of the poems in which they now exist. In each case I visualized that image, put it down, and then began to instinctually build the world around it. When enough detail has been assembled I’ll begin to recognize a texture and tone that they share—what’s being described, how it’s being described—which reveals to me a kind of psychology, mind, voice. The poem takes off once I’m in that speaker’s head, and it’s only after I’ve spent enough time moving through their world, seeing how they see, understanding the symptoms and specifics of their reality, that I can understand what’s compelled them to begin this kind of thought-speech in the first place (I perform something like a diagnosis, if you will), and only then does a statement like “oblivion is all we have” become possible.

The larger ideas and concepts I want to understand—in the case of IKYK, West Virginia and the opioid epidemic—function as parameters that orient my imagination over the writing of a book, but they’re never a poem’s catalyst or guide. The poem tells me what it needs 98% of the way, and then that 2% right at the end is where more philosophical, intellectual, and analytical concerns become apparent and are implemented. Poems are like cinema in my mind. For much of the writing experience it’s like I’m in a dream, and then near the end I feel more like an actor, and then at the very end I’m in the director’s chair, watching the whole thing through the small, grainy monitor, making practical decisions, telling people to step over to the left, adjust the light, scream a little louder. And yet, I never want to understand it completely. I never want to lose the mystery.

CL: As someone who writes primarily by sound, I love hearing visually driven writers talk about their composition processes, and also savor the mystery—maybe one of my favorite parts. Your transition from actor to director makes me think of the speaker in “There is a Gold Light” who says, “People say I’m performing grief. I say I’m keeping things alive:” Many speakers live in this Oxyana space, and your process for inhabiting a psychology, mind, voice, sounds much like a fiction writer might describe a character-building process. Yet this is not a narrative-driven collection, but more snap-shot-like, more collage. When is it important to have narrative and when to abandon it, both in terms of individual poems or at a collection level?

WB: My reading life began with fiction and that’s had maybe the greatest impact on how I think about, and conceive of, books. For that reason, I don’t think I’d ever be able to do a “collection,” so to speak. My love of visual art is also responsible for this, because I think compositionally, so while I in no way believe a book of poems must have a narrative, I often find myself more attracted to books that function like compositions, i.e. the poems interact and build off one another, certain peaks and valleys are achieved over the course of the reading, and when I finish it I feel like I’ve just experienced a larger work (made up of self-sustaining pieces).

Now, while there isn’t a traditional linear narrative in IKYK, I’d argue that there is an overarching narrative that functions as a kind of shadow structure, keeping those snap-shots in place, which then interact with each other—certain voices appear and reappear, memories are shared or perceived from different perspectives, characters are hinted at or directly mentioned, all within the same landscape—and when all of that starts percolating together you get a type of narrative: a portrait of a place and a people.

I think it’s hard to say when it is or isn’t important to have narrative because I guess I see narrative in just about everything, or at least a kind of deep narrative potential. This is especially true in voice and image, which, for me, are maybe the two most important elements in a poem, in part because their narrative potential is vast. To be clear: I don’t think of myself as a narrative poet—I just think that one of the gifts of the lyric is that it can harness the force of narrative in a tip-of-the-iceberg type way.

CL: Oh yes—I can’t think of an outstanding collection that doesn’t operate that way with those poem-to-poem interactions, in terms of composition. But I also question a through-thread narrative as required for emotional or intellectual transformation; IKYK actually seems proof of that to me! One of the most intense moments I had when reading came at the book’s center in the long piece “Resolution”: “Last night / was the last night // I’m high. I mean it. While everyone / was drinking and ringing in / the New Year, I stood in the yard // and decided that sometimes / you have to tell yourself / you’re the first person // to look out over / the silent highway / at the abandoned billboard // lit up by the moon / and think it’s selling a new / and honest life. // All you’ve got to do is take it.”

There’s such exhaustion in these lines, and a hesitance that the breaks enact, a wary hope. The struggle of spirit, body, and spirit against body, is continual with addiction—the hook and denial, plummet and recovery, then relapse punctuated by elegy—this seems less linear than cyclical. And so I wonder about a narrative that gets told again and again—what poetic tools (or maybe even why poems) are well-suited to do this work? I think about this a lot in the case of chronic—how to write from a place of ostensible stasis but not let that be the final word—to move, as this collection does, not within the confines of some sort of labyrinth, but transformed, as a staircase might spiral?

WB: I’m very happy and humbled to hear that you feel an exhaustion and hesitance and wary hope in those lines, as that’s exactly what I wanted to capture—so, thank you!

I’m very much interested in this notion of the cyclical versus the linear, in part because I envision IKYK as a hurricane-type storm cycle, this swirling mess with an eye at the center. The poems in the book very much feel like a record from inside the storm, and this poem, “Resolution,” which sits at the center of the book, I also see as taking place in the eye of the storm, where things are momentarily calm, but are surrounded by an immense amount of pressure and chaos that you know is, one way or another, going to return. The poem takes place on New Year’s Eve, and is framed as a desperate New Year’s Resolution, in part because the holiday and its celebration is a weird contradiction where we pretend we’re experiencing the end of something when in fact we’re experiencing the oppression of repetition, and so we make these resolutions as attempts to cause a break in the patterns of our lives, though these breaks often fail. As for exploring a narrative that’s getting told again and again, I don’t think the poems, or the book more generally, is doing this. Instead, I see this as a book that is a study of the oppression of a cycle, this swirling storm of tragedy. It’s not that a narrative is getting told again and again, rather the intensely concentrated cycle is the narrative, and this is something I think poetry is particularly adept at doing. Because of poetry’s limits and pressures, you’re actually able to zoom in and out in really grand ways, or to jump through space and time without going anywhere, all within the matter of a few pages, and that’s something I really love about it (again, these aren’t new ideas). A poem isn’t beholden to the obligations of storytelling, so it’s free to just obsess, observe, contemplate, swirl. The very idea of a swirl is physically enacted in some of our greatest poems—the shape of Dante’s hell, or Yeats’ gyre, for example. I don’t think I was consciously thinking about that as I wrote the book, but it’s clear to me now that that’s how it functions. That said, I feel the last poem in the book does not exist in the storm. Instead the speaker is calling from outside the storm because the person that connected them to it—the loved one—has died, and so that storm has passed, and they’re living in the aftermath. Much like actual landscapes after a terrible storm, I wanted that poem to have a sense of calm, brightness, and peace (though not closure) that is coming from reality, as opposed to the chemically induced versions that make up the book. Moreover, I wanted the feeling of a new narrative beginning, one that is wide, wandering, and in a state of freefall. I think this is the direction my new poems are taking. They seem to be mostly post-storm, and sometimes pre-storm, too.

CL: You mentioned Dante’s hell and Yeats’ gyre echoing subconsciously, but other voices and mythic references come explicitly. In “Daedalus in Oxyana,” for example, abuse passes to new generations with the lines: “Then I fixed on scraping out my veins, // a trembling maze, a skein of blue. / Am lost in them like a bull // that’s wandered into endless, frozen acres. Times my simple son will shake me to, // syringe still hanging like a feather for my arm. What are you always doing, he asks. // Flying, I say. Show me how, he begs. / And finally, I do.” Or later, in “In the New World”: If you say lets make a myth of our troubles / I’ll say let’s call an Oxy / a moon’s tooth / And a needle? / god’s antenna / And heroin / Heavenquick.” Why is it important to use or re-make myth here?

WB: When Oxyana is mentioned in the book it never just means the small town of Oceana (that originally got the nickname). Instead, it takes this notion of a place transformed and makes it applicable to any town in the state, and the state as a whole. Throughout the book I reference landscape, culture, and detail that applies to different parts of the state in hopes of creating a kind of centralized, mythic idea of West Virginia that the book could contain. Moreover, I think the scale of what’s been going on in West Virginia—and is now going on in the greater US—is so extreme that it feels mythic, even apocalyptic. Lastly, using Icarus and Daedalus is maybe a little more complex. Being a West Virginian means you’re from a place that many Americans don’t know exists. It means constantly having to correct people and explain to them that West Virginia is, in fact, its own state, and not a region of Virginia. It means you could be watching the West Virginia University Mountaineers absolutely dominate a team in the NCAA Basketball Tournament and have to listen to an announcer—a professional sports journalist—refer to them as Western Virginia. Or it means that when you tell someone you’re from West Virginia they do something like stare down at your feet and say, Oh, I’m surprised you’re wearing shoes, or they ask you to smile so they can see if you have teeth, or they ask if your partner is also your cousin. So often being West Virginian means you’re either not seen, or you’re seen in purely demeaning stereotypes. I wanted to push against that by attaching these narratives to the greater narratives and ideas of human struggle that ancient myth has so effectively represented for millennia. They deserve that dignity. This isn’t just hillbillies dying in a shack.

CL: To clarify, I don’t think any reading of this book could sum as ‘hillbillies dying in a shack,’ in fact, in asking about myth I wondered also about the opposite end of the spectrum—where a mythology can make superheroes even, and the burdens of that, too. There’s a unique fallibility that comes across in your verbs though—much of the book is in either the present or conditional tense. I think of the lines “Should I wake / they’ll ask me // if I can tell them where I am” or later, in the concluding poem “As if my grief were a hall. As if / it were of any use to the dead. How can this not be for you? / I would have done anything.” Can you talk about your choices in tense?

WB: The use of the present tense throughout much of the book is simple—I want a sense of immediacy within the poems. The lyric is so great at doing this, of course. But in addition to that, having the poems in the present is often because the book is about our present moment, the things it’s describing were happening while I was writing it, and are still happening right now. Of course I very very very much hope that one day this is not the case, and that the epidemic is curbed, and should that happen, and should people in that future time still feel compelled to read the book, then I hope the effect of the present tense will be that it places them right back in this moment, and it will feel immediate, and real, and terrifying. The conditional is used because these speakers are dealing with a destabilized reality. In the first example you mentioned, there is no guarantee the speaker will wake from the hit they’re about the take. In the second example, the speaker, dealing with a personal case of grief in this landscape of death and tragedy that’s so persistent it’s destabilized any sense of grief—and thereby death—as being in any way connected to a larger network of experience or meaning. Of course nothing is ever guaranteed, but the general stability of average life allows us to feel like some things kind of are. The epidemic has upended that stability, so language accommodates that change.

CL: I’m always interested in the ways non-discrete circumstances—epidemics, war, long-term oppression, disability—come to alter the way one writes, not necessarily even ‘about’ but ‘from’ these things, thereby reflecting the instability. Which is often manifest in the language, but I wonder about ‘accommodate.” Is accommodation the goal? Can language re-stabilize? What sort of language or poem would that look like? I notice many of your poems move into dream. How does that factor in?

WB: I agree that people write differently in non-discrete circumstances and I’d like to think my book reflects that. But as for language re-stabilizing—I have no idea. I’m probably just not sharp enough mentally to get into all that. Do I think that ways in which we talk about, and from within, a situation can have serious implications? Absolutely. But I don’t think the book is engaged with that concern. None of this comes into my mind when I write. Maybe somewhat during revision, but for the most part it’s all instinctual, and that instinct is driven by my lifetime’s worth of reading (which is very small, all things considered), and a lot a lot a lot of observation and care. The poems were driven by very simple concerns: to portray a people, a place, and a situation as humanely as possible. To get it right. Any complexities that arise beyond that are gifts that I had no conscious part in engendering.

Dreams—or dreaminess?—function in the book in maybe three different ways: Most of the book doesn’t include any dreaming, per se. The majority of the poems are, in fact, anchored in reality, it’s just that the circumstances of that reality are so extreme that they appear surreal/bizarre/dreamlike; the blurring of the boundaries of reality is a lyric response to how the epidemic has blurred, and in some cases obliterated, what was once reality; also, how the psychologies of the speakers have been altered.

Then there are more overt moments of lyric leap and imagining, and those moments often happen in poems that have to do with interiority and escape, i.e. what I’m dealing with right now is so painful, strange, unfamiliar that I can’t really think through it through my basic frame of mind (which is really how most lyric poetry works, yeah?).

And lastly there are the overt dreams, which are usually titled as such and attached to specific moments of extreme physical and mental pressure when the mind very efficiently crafts dreamscapes to flee into because the idea of staying where it is would feel like being incinerated from the inside out.

Leap, heavy imagining, and dreaminess are just as present in my new work (and will probably always be present in my work). They just function differently. Nowadays I’m very much interested in how, if you look carefully enough at even the most banal moments of American life, a kind of strangeness, mystery, darkness, and sinister energy starts seeping out of things. I’m also very interested in capturing the specific moment when something super intense happens—like witnessing disaster or losing a loved one—and how, in those moments, we feel the placid surfaces of our reality get disturbed, and how that can feel less like being in a dream, and more like being in what is actually our reality. Which is to say—we feel woken up. Everything else is just television.

CL: What a great definition of what a poem can do—wake us to the world. Say you met someone who had never encountered a poem before, ever. What one would you give him or her?

WB: This is a very tricky question but I’m going to try and trust my mind on this one and go with the first thing that it thought of, which is Keats’ “To Autumn”, which I’m pretty happy with as an answer because it’s maybe a perfect poem, or as close as you can get, so much so that it can’t be mistaken as anything other than an absolutely 100% Grade A single malt Poem with a capital P.

This has been a serious treat, Cate. Thanks for playing brain-tennis with me.