Editor's Remarks

             ​William Clifford CC



           A poem is a really good friend in a dark hour. I have seldom read a poem that gave me an answer to the center of my ache, but what a poem does offer is a felt presence, holding something in us, up. For as long as I can remember, creativity, in my life, was intertwined with healing professions and processes. "May we all find salvation in professions that heal," I first heard Shawn Colvin sing when I was 16. I swore, then, that it meant the song, the poem, the painting. Now that I am older, I realize she may have meant something closer to, "may we all find a really good therapist." But I still swear by it; that creative forms of expression save us. How would Paul Celan have possibly gone on as long as he did, after all of the horrors he had been through, if not for the poems? People are reluctant to conflate the two; art form and the therapeutic effect of the art form. It's almost as if the therapeutic effect of art is seen as some sort of reductive experience. We're wary of strictly defining or boxing in what art does. But who among us has ever healed in the same way? Healing is just as indefinable a process as a poem or story or dance. How does it come to us? And from where, exactly? What is the make of its visitation? There is no point on the map, no X marks the spot. There simply is, something. Something. 

         I was simultaneously very lucky and unlucky in my early life. I grew up in poverty, in a violent, volatile household. By sixteen I was locked up for two years in a mental institution. Around fifteen I had what were called respite workers, who were usually college kids in social work training, who would take troubled kids to stay with them for the weekend and do fun activities with them, sort of like big brother. One in particular taught me how to play Ani DiFranco songs on guitar. That's all we'd do every weekend, play Ani on guitar on the veranda of his apartment, what felt like a million miles away from the cramped, chaotic space of my section eight neighborhood.  At school there was the guidance counselor who would call me to her office every week just because she wanted to hear what new poems I had written. When I was in the state mental institution there was the art therapist who got down on the floor with me and shared the ear of a headphone as we listened to 10,000 maniacs sing, 'These Are Days' and 'Noah's Dove.' There was the staff member who would sit with me in the day room while we watched footage from the Lilith Fair, and the staff member who took one of my poems home with him over the weekend and recorded a song from it with his garage band. We sat on the floor with  a tape deck as he played it for a group of us kids. 

         There has never been a moment in my life where my ability to stay alive, to survive devastating circumstances, wasn't tied to some kind of song or poem. The ways in which I healed were anything but uniform and reductive. I went to hell in back before I was even eighteen. And though it was not a dark as thick and deep as Celan's, it was a swallowing force of despair to be reckoned with. There were no answers that came to me then, or now. No. But there were presences. And not just the presence of a song or a poem, but just as often, the presence of a person, down on the floor with you, on your level.

        It wasn't always as straight a shot to healing as it sounds. There was blood on the walls, things you can't un-see or unknow. There were jail cells where I was beaten and pepper sprayed and shackled to chairs in cold rooms stripped of all of my clothes, or left on the floor, shivering. Places where suicide watches were employed as a form of punishment. But even there, art got through. I remember Mary Chapin Carpenter coming on the small T.V. attached to the wall in jail, "it's gonna be ok," she seemed to say. I remember the poem I wrote that brought my cell mate to tears, and that he copied down to carry with him, a talisman of hope. What are we doing, if not that? Forging talismans of hope for the hopeless? 

         So yes, I believe art heals and saves. I didn't really have a choice in the matter. In recovery, they say it is our job to give back to those "still suffering," what was so freely given to us. It is my sincerest hope that this space, this new issue, gets down on the floor with you and shares a song of joy and sorrow in a dark, dark hour. None of us heal or create in quite the same way. If you must keep them separate, healing and creating, at the very least, entertain the thought that we know not where the force behind each comes to us from. We feel the presence of something; the air that moves the flame, the wind that shakes the tree. The voice that say's to us; 'hold on a bit longer than you think you can.'

         "May we all find salvation in professions that heal." A good therapist, a good friend, a good song or poem. I don't know that it's not all the same thing, really. But that we're not alone in something. Isn't this the point? We are not alone. May there be a few talismans to take with you here on your journey of healing. May they hold you up and see you through. We are, none of us, alone.  Hold on friends, hold on longer than you think you can. We need you. We cannot do this without you.


James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic