In the literary world, where writers soundwave the lyrical self, Azad Ashim Sharma stands out. As a poet and thinker influenced by Theodor Adorno’s philosophy, he explores the nuances of writing not just poetry but living within this psychological space, one that resonates with a collective and historical consciousness.
Sharma’s connection to the subject is not merely academic. He has lived and intensely felt themes found in his latest collection, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2024). Grounded in Sharma’s personal encounters with poetic technique as a transformative practice, “writing within poetry” as opposed to writing individual poems challenges conventional boundaries and opens new realms of artistic expression.
I spoke with him about the layers of his poetic ethos, the philosophical currents that underpin his latest work, his unique approach to craft, and how his book reflects the darker self that rises from death to find a life worth living. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Rumpus: I read Boiled Owls from a recovery lens, among many other perspectives, and I got the sense that you wrote within that space of recovery. Does the voice in your poem surface from the addicted self or the recovered self, or is it a mixture of both?
Azad Ashim Sharma: Thank you, Arthur, for the grace of the implied separation between the lyric ‘I’ or voice and the poet. It’s a grace that isn’t often received in this era of reducing all ‘I’s to a living person as is wont of our identitarian era. The distance you acknowledge is productive, and I hope I do that gesture justice in what follows.
The story of Boiled Owls is a long and circuitous one with frequent tangents and failed attempts at embedding recovery into my life in a sustainable way. When I decided to enter recovery in 2017, I did so waking up the day after my twenty-fifth birthday having been assaulted the previous night. The first thought, oddly, was not revenge or shame but a desire to heal from what had taken me into a situation in which I had encountered that kind of violence. It was the first time the words recovery, sobriety, and healing took on a real meaning for me, and it still registers with me as a moment I am grateful for, a significant moment of shift. Boiled Owls began to take shape during that time in my life as a concept that I assembled poems around. So, certainly, to some extent I was in the space of recovery, for the majority of the six years since then, all the way up to now when the book is, well, a book! But the voice in the poem began quite sincerely as my own voice trying to make sense of what this new experience was, what I was leaving behind.
The book went through so many iterations of the same linear recovery narrative until I relapsed in 2019, found recovery anew in the pandemic, then relapsed thrice in quick succession in 2022 before entering this new phase of the journey. Whilst the title and the overall gesture of the book has not changed too much, for me at least, the poetry did. It constantly resisted the authentic and personal and moved into a waywardness, a constant sleight of hand, which was mimicked in my own life as I chanced on recovery and periods of active addiction in oblique succession.
The linear narrative doesn’t apply to my life, and it took me a while to accept that. Relapse occupies this special place in the book. It begins there, really, with double movements, the backtracking of a period of progress in sobriety and then in the strange forgetfulness addicts suffer from, making the same choices expecting different results, etcetera. That double movement is what, for me, characterizes the voice I was exhuming and exorcising from my real-life experiences into a portrait of the fraught addict in recovery. As such, the voice is unstable, unsure, uncertain, but it does move between the two realms of addiction and recovery as it collages a “self” as a surreal fiction that the voice needs to live with, as much as it needs to narrate that fiction, to try to make sense of its particular and unique existence as a voice in a collection of poetry that doesn’t want to remain flat on the page but leap off it, into the world of dreams only to discover it’s at the bottom of a rock. Sometimes, it’s hard to wake up and look at this “red round globe hot burning,” to quote Blake, and not think, “Really? Did I get sober for this?” Even as that nihilistic narcissism creates a void where there might be the fiction of the self, it’s a void we have to remain in, with the comfort of hope for something better or the wit to keep the sadness at bay for the next twenty-four hours.
Rumpus: In “Taking a Walk,” which I interpret as taking a step at a time, you grapple with your darkness when you write: “This art I tried to make out of illness.” This sounds like the small loops of hope we try to remain in that you mention. How do you find pockets of hope in a burning world?
Sharma: We are living in an era of huge loss, and you have my full solidarity and empathy when it comes to this stark reality. I know that here in the UK, during the 2020 lockdowns, the relapse rate was something like forty percent. Imagine that! Forty percent of addicts were in a cycle of relapse. Of course, some made it back to recovery, but many didn’t. That loss is amplified by what we are witnessing in Palestine—there’s the economic reality of mass accumulation and transfer of wealth to the top percentiles of the population, excluding a global majority from access to basic means of subsistence—then, you factor in the climate catastrophes that have been preventable since at least the 1980s. It’s a truly dismal outlook for humanity and the future looks precarious, to say the least.
It’s also the case that sometimes recovery amounts to a repression of those outside issues to just focus on one’s individual health to get through the day. I’ve always been more of a fan of speaking about, or at the very least moving outward from, my own personhood, to reach for social recovery as a phrase that offers something of a respite, as well as a unique motivation. Recovery when it’s just “my recovery” is always a coping mechanism, but when we think of “our recovery,” there is a completely different existential state that takes precedence. Hope, for sure, plays a unique factor.
I’ve been reading Anna Kornbluh’s wonderful recent book Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism from Verso. She writes about hope and hopelessness in a really compelling way. She explores the hopelessness–hopefulness conundrum. What is hope in a time of so much loss? Perhaps it lies in that idea of refusal, a collective refusal we are seeing on the streets crowded by protests. Our capacity to witness the harshness of our era is a collective one, and that makes me feel less alone. We addicts know that hopelessness is driven by alienation and isolation, but when I am with people with common cause, namely a livable future, I am filled with hope for “the Not-Yet,” to borrow from Ernst Bloch.
Hope stems in the imagination, in our capacity to re-imagine how life on this finite planet could coexist with non-human life and the cycles of shift that give us a cool summer breeze and the hurricane.
So how do we make sense of hope in the midst of all this loss? The question returns, rhetorical, open, unanswered. That’s where “Taking a Walk” came from. It’s the culmination of easily 10 different versions of that poem, starting off with a walk during a minor storm in the UK in 2018 when I was burning for a drink, but then, the emphasis of the poem changed to one about recovery as I rewrote and reworked the manuscript at every different interval my recovery gave me. The art I tried to make from illness had to include recovery, the poem had to have hope, otherwise what would be the point in writing it?
It centers around this old English oak tree in Morden Park, close to my family home, a park I only discovered during the lockdowns, and when out on my mandatory 1 hour walk during the day, I would go around that oak and speak to it, hug it. It was one of those trees that park rangers had to build stilts to help it keep its enormous low branches from breaking off, indeed some had broken off and there was this majestic merge of the continued life of this tree and its severed limbs left to rot in the park. I identified with this tree and in that connection found some kernel of hope, as Romantic as that sounds. The motif of the “tawaf”, which is the heart of that poem, calls to mind a circuitous movement, a ritual, which of course is walking itself. One rejects the promise of progress, whilst at the same time forging an opening. The residual construct of that tree, the fact of its survival, and that it needed, quite literally, to have support, made recovery appear to be a collective project, captured for me in a single image that recovery from capitalism, from colonialism, from fascism, was where the poem wanted to amble towards.
Rumpus: Your title, Boiled Owls, points to this idea, demonstrating how we are past the point of negotiating with the burn and that we are now at a tipping point. Can you talk about the symbolism of the boiled owl? Why an owl? Why did you choose this title?
Sharma: Back in 2018, when I was reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time, both with a sponsor and as part of a book study with some other members of my local group, I discovered the phrase: “. . . we were once all as boiled as owls,” or something to that end. It is used to describe the state of intoxication prior to recovery. I’d never come across that simile before. I knew then that the title for the collection I was writing, as I mentioned before, to make sense of the newness of the experience [recovery] would be “Boiled Owls.” It is interesting to think of the other valences of signification, that happen with language. Reading works, mainly because, as Gabor Maté has questioned often, how can addicts be told to get sober and clean and stop consuming in a world where the industry of consumption is so rabid and pervasive that we’ve destroyed so much of the ecosystems that support life on this planet? Read through the ecopoetic lens, the title reminds me of the fact we are boiling ourselves alive and the impact that has on life in general. That reminder compels me to think of recovery in that context, as a means out of consumption’s logic, the mute compulsion of economics, the accepted normalcy of microplastics.
The owl as a symbol has many registers too. I’ve often joked with my mother that she looks like a wise owl. I even got a tattoo of an owl when I was nineteen to remind me of her and her sage advice. The owl is associated with the night, wisdom, luck, but it is also a ruthless predator and can hold its own, despite its magnificence and beauty. They seem to me, quite strong as birds, and that, too, is inspiring for an addict in recovery, who has to go through a difficult but total rearrangement of the psyche in order to survive.
We’ve always had symbols and signs for healing as human beings. Much of our art is about this sort of healing. I hope the boiled owl becomes a symbol for this transition, from a state of intoxication to something other than that—the luck you need, perhaps the anger you have to cultivate to revolt against internalizing capitalism and becoming a mere vessel for the commodity rather than a fully rounded person.
Rumpus: What other writers, authors, or poets do you turn to in subjects of addiction?
Sharma: Since I began thinking about Boiled Owls as a unified book, my research took me in all sorts of strange directions. In the book, for instance, I refer to Maia Szalavitz, Avital Ronnell, Jeet Thayil, and Helio Oiticica. I was also influenced by Gabor Maté, the stunning portrait of an addict in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Thomas De Quincey, and the film Half Nelson, which stars Ryan Gosling. There is a veritable canon of addiction literature, I think, across the traditions and periods.
I think there is a tendency, however, in this era of the wellness fetish, to misconstrue addiction as a problem to be solved rather than a behavior to be understood. What does addiction communicate as a behavior? It obviously communicates the desire to consume without consequence. Gabor Maté links this to the way in which capitalist economies have ravaged and destroyed entire ecosystems, for example. It’s an important link, one might even go as far as suggesting it’s a psycho-political statement to allow for that dovetailing of addiction and ecocide.
My research led me to believe the transition John Donne made from Lincoln’s Inn lad to theologian—a kind of twelve-step experience for the Elizabethan era. Then there are the modernists, like Mina Loy, who mentions cocaine abuse in her work, or the Black Mountain legend John Wieners, who ended up institutionalized. The Wire also does perhaps the best job of linking drug addiction to the matrix of capitalism—both illegal and legal markets intertwined by substance distribution and consumption, a wove of extremely sad existences bound by a corrupt Law. These all gave me much to consider but, more importantly, a sense of identification of experience and existence that assisted the book’s composition greatly. It made my humble poems feel like they were reaching to be part of a tradition of writing about this singular facet of human life and the life that comes after survival of it. There is also a sense that the claustrophobia one feels as an addict is represented so exquisitely in Samuel Beckett’s novels or that the humility one moves toward in recovery, premised on going with the flows and rhythms of life, are best exemplified in Peter Gizzi’s poems. I think of Stephen King, of Kaveh Akbar, of the wonderful Waithera Sebatindira’s Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass.
The list could go on and on. I hope, one day, to do a kind of monograph on it, looking at “narco-poetics” in a broader cultural study. Even as I type this, I think of the contexts of the crack epidemic in the US or slightly before that, when jazz ran all night, fueled by and then found guilty by association with illicit substances. Sober literatures, too, don’t need to be all glossy and New Age, they can be gritty and difficult—the history of jazz also tells that story, as do many of the authors I’ve named. There’s a lot of work to be done on literature and addiction, but some of that is happening even as I type.
Rumpus: I love narco-poetics as a subject matter and poetic craft for its resilient message of hopefulness. What advice can you provide young addicts who are writers trying to send a message?
Sharma: Those who have just embarked on recovery and who may have been moved to writing during this experience—this could apply to anyone early in their writing life too—you need to put the hours in. Unfortunately, that’s just the best advice I’ve received from people I hold both dear and in high esteem: any writer needs both a serious and studious reading practice and some form of motivation to keep putting words down on paper. I’d then ask: A message to whom? A message about what?
The message isn’t always in the author’s jurisdiction, that’s why interpretation and reception are such important gifts from readership and audience. I’m also greatly skeptical of moral sermons in literature that mask the ways in which political economy and social structures are mediated by literature. I’d suggest any writer avoid moralizing and grandstanding and focus more on the style required to meet the conceptual world they’d like their work to contribute to as a first parameter.
From a more personal perspective, one of the things I found hard when composing Boiled Owls, was the impulse I felt as an addict (in recovery) coming to a strange articulation during my writing process which, to demystify, meant I would often “share” the work with friends [and] editors too early. There is absolutely no editorial supplement I know of that can bend time significantly enough to speed up the process of taking distance from one’s own work, sitting back and then returning to it with fresher eyes and insights. In short, the final piece of advice I can give, outside of reading and trusting your process, is to bide your time. Writing, like sobriety, is a lifelong practice, and we don’t need to rush living to “make up for lost time” despite our impulses telling us to the contrary when we finally leave the wringer behind. Let the work tell you what message it wants to send to you, let the reader tell you what message they received. You don’t need to be in control for that, just enjoy the moment.
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Author photograph courtesy of Azad Ashim Sharma
