Nick Flynn: Messy Emotions
By Christopher Busa
That Man’s Father Is My Father’s Son

Nick Flynn has a swimmer’s body, with long smooth muscles conditioned from plunging into whatever body of water is close by. Swimming is Flynn’s way of submerging himself in a cleansing medium. Provincetown is all about water, and his work has much water in it. The Nick I’d known for many years came to Provincetown to talk with me last year in the middle of December, and we had a catch-up conversation during the holiday season—with no intention of jumping in the cold water with the group from a local bar, the Old Colony, who make an annual dive into the icy bay.
Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), a national best seller, was broadly acclaimed for its artful recollections of the author’s emergence from a broken home. His growth as a writer had exceeded my understanding, and I needed to connect. In the fall I went to hear him talk at Suffolk University in Boston as part of a book tour for his memoir. On the podium, he mentioned the just-released film Capote, which I had seen the night before. Something about alcoholism and death seemed connected to Flynn’s life and work, but also something about the power of writing to transform the sordid into a language that saves. The students were enthralled by Flynn’s natural ability to speak directly to their concerns. The accessible author said things that made sense to them. Fred Marchant, a poet who directs the university’s creative writing program, was there making sure everybody used the opportunity to meet each other.
The university produced an oversize poster announcing Flynn’s visit, but they put some asterisks in the title of his memoir, much like the New York Times did when they reviewed the book. Something obscene lurked in the words of the title, and some unprintable vowels from "bullshit" and "suck" were obliged to be excised.
I had pinned the poster to a wall in my office. Nick took one look and said, "Oh, good, you got my poster. I lost mine. I had two and was taking the train back to New York, right after I saw you. Suddenly it wasn’t in my hand. I went to the bathroom and it wasn’t there. Vanished."
Flynn has left things behind before, but what has vanished has also returned. At the conference I had acquired two copies of the poster for the archives of the magazine. I offered one to Nick. His visage on the poster is sad; he looks a little homeless himself, although that is impossible since he recently purchased a house along the Hudson Valley in Athens, New York. He seldom is home, and his brother, Thaddeus, mostly maintains the residence. Nick teaches in Texas one semester a year, and much of the rest of the time he is zipping around the country doing workshops and writing on the run. He told me that if a person had read earlier drafts of his memoir, they would have seen a lot of self-pity, bitterness, and small-heartedness, which is blissfully absent from the published work.
Writers collaborate with their first readers, the friends and editors who shape the way the story becomes presented as a finished work of art, launched from the author into the ocean of public domain. Here is contemporary resonance with T. S. Eliot’s aim in his writing to separate the artist from the person who wrote the poem.
Flynn said, "I encourage my students to engage the messier emotions to get at what the trouble is. A lot of memoirs these days seem to strike a heroic stance—I’m the one who has figured it out, who survived, or am the victim who overcame some tragedy. This pose rings false. Still there’s self-pity in this book, but it’s tempered, hopefully. I’d rather the reader come to it, than have it be presented by me."
Three stately cliffs rise from the shore along the town of Scituate, just south of Boston. Nick Flynn, born 1960, the son of a single mother, grew up here, spending a lot of time in his grandmother’s attic where, I imagined, a small window gave a peek of the ocean.
Flying in an almost-empty commuter plane from Boston to Provincetown on Cape Air, the view framed by the window gave me the feeling that I was navigating Google Earth on my computer. I viewed the coastline and wondered about the turf where Flynn spent his boyhood. I was the only passenger on this particular flight. I saw North River, which a map told me separated the harbors of Scituate and Humarock. At this time of day, the sun at a low slant, the river showed its serpentine form, twisting as much side to side as flowing toward open water. The river’s surface shone dully as an undercurrent meandered toward its purpose. Ripples were flecked with flashes of color. The weak winter yellow of the sun gave wan light and little heat, and the surface looked like unpolished, hammered gold—inspiring country for a budding poet. I watched to see if I could spot a rickety pier that I thought figured in Flynn’s writing. I saw First Cliff, Second Cliff, and Third Cliff, looking keenly to see which roads had hairpin turns at their summits, for one of them may have been the twist where Nick lost control of his motorcycle fifteen years ago and went flying over the handlebars. He had forgotten that a girl held him around his waist—and where was she and was she OK? He tumbled and landed in a field of tall elephant grass, which cushioned his near-fatal fall. Losing an important but non-vital organ, Flynn took a rest for a year.
In his preschool days, while his mother was working, Flynn spent a lot of hours at his grandmother’s reading books that had been stored away. He liked illustrated collections in which a picture showed what the words meant. He found a book of riddles with drawings, and he went back and forth in its pages trying to figure out how each picture served the story. He read about the Sphinx, a strange beast that guarded a walled city in Egypt. The Sphinx had the face of an enigmatic woman. Anyone who wished to enter or exit the ancient city was obliged to answer a question. A wrong answer, and the monster devoured the traveler. The Sphinx fattened on those who failed this riddle: What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night?
In Sophocles’ classic play Oedipus Rex, the hero demonstrates cunning intelligence by answering, correctly, that this creature is man, crawling when he is an infant, standing on two feet in the prime of his life, and then walking with a cane in his late hours. The solution of the riddle destroyed the creature that asked the question. The Sphinx committed suicide; from its acropolis, this mystery with wings now toppled to the terrain where humans walked, where they could feel the spongy path in the padded toes of their own feet.
As an adult, another riddle haunts Flynn:
Brothers and sisters I have none,
But that man’s father is my father’s son.
In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn says that the drawing accompanying this riddle showed "a man on a sidewalk, pointing vaguely into a crowd. After a year I decided the guy was looking into a mirror, just to put it out of my mind. Years later I realized I was wrong."
Flynn’s memoir conveys the way memory chafes against time, shaping the story until, at a certain point as random as the way a piece of driftwood finds its way to the shore, the thing that is weathered is a record of its own history. As Norman Mailer, another Provincetown beachcomber, said, "Form is the physical equivalent of memory." Flynn’s quest for identity takes the form of someone "pointing vaguely into a crowd," and picking out his exact subject.
The details in his book of prose flesh out information left out of his two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber. Flynn’s prose maintains casual dialogue with the power of poetry to offer sharp inflections of insight. His father, the absent person who figures so prominently in the son’s memoir, insisted that the easiest mark in a bank is a teller who is young and attractive. Flynn’s mother worked in a bank. She was young and attractive. Even as Flynn summons his father’s flirtatious manner in a number of scenes, his writing balances a callous father with the very definition of a nurturing mother.
Following high school, Nick delayed going to college, despite the fact that he had graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. He worked as a carpenter, and then trained with an electrician who taught him to work with live current to get over his fear of electricity. Sparks, many times, showered around him. Screwdrivers melted in his hand.
When Flynn was a toddler, his father abandoned the family. At twenty-one, when other students his age were graduating, Flynn enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After studying literature for three years, he returned home for Thanksgiving recess. Unaccountably, he left a notebook in the bathroom containing a story he had begun writing about a single mother who worked two jobs, yet who was driven by a desire to spend more time with her children. All she wanted was to chop carrots in the kitchen while her boys smelled the onions sautéing in butter. Who knows why Nick left this half-finished story where his mother could find it? In the published memoir there is no discussion of the effect that the discovery of this story, surely a riddle for the mother, may have had on her decision to take her life.
A friend was getting married the day after Thanksgiving, and Nick went to drink whiskey at the reception. His mother, staying home, found the story. Previously she had attempted to take her life by swallowing a vial of sleeping pills. In a letter she wrote after the holiday weekend, she determined, "next time," to use a gun. Close to Christmastime, she did.
Her name was Jody. She was born in 1940 and was twenty years old when Nick was born in 1960. She was young and attractive when she died. Nick’s brother, Thaddeus, discovered her body in the house. Her robe was soaked with blood. The chair she sat in was splintered from the bullet that passed through her chest.
The next day the brothers opened her safety-deposit box in the bank where she worked, finding $50,000 in cash, which Nick surmised was "her take" from laundering money she received from the shady fellows who worked the waterfront, using fishing boats and dock warehouses to smuggle drugs. Nick worked with them, doing honest labor, but was aware that the fishing business was a fishy one and that the business had other purposes. His mother’s money might have made Flynn think twice about what his father called "the checking business," but when I asked Nick about this, he said, "Not really."
Like many of the phrases Flynn encodes with foundations of firm meaning, the "checking business" involves writing words on paper and getting someone to accept that the document is credible. His father, released from prison, began a foundation for fact-finding, even printing up a letterhead with his name as president, and Nick also seems to adopt in his writing a respect for the resonance of facts. Picasso, when he didn’t have enough money to buy a bullfight ticket—he was only twelve years old—drew a drawing of a bullfight that he sold for the price of a ticket. One could transform one’s signature into actual cash. Cash is founded on fact.Shortly after his mother’s suicide, Nick quit college, and, a year and a half later, took a job as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. Perhaps he imagined that he himself was an orphan; he also may have sensed that he was an embryonic poet with a gift for metaphor—he understood, profoundly, the lost connection with family experienced by the homeless.
Flynn’s father was not homeless when he fathered his son. He was not homeless for the first year that his son worked at the homeless shelter. When Flynn began working at the Pine Street Inn, his father lived at the Ashmont Arms, where he was the guesthouse manager, in charge of collecting rents. He used the same club he kept in his taxi, a bat-like stick with a spike in the business end, and the landlady finally had him evicted. Nick said, "My father was only homeless for five years. Not always homeless. Not homeless now. Not born homeless."
One evening working at the Pine Street Inn—which houses three to six hundred men nightly—Flynn arrived for his shift. His boss told him that a man had come in during the afternoon, demanding a bed. The man had said that his son worked there; he received an entry bed ticket. Nick’s boss suggested that Nick take the night off. Nick, as a newcomer three years before, had worked in a caged area where valuables, if any, are stored for the night. Now he was not a newcomer. He knew that when the doors, closed for the day, opened for an army wearing rags, the men were not wearing rags. They were dressed like you or me. Two large lobbies, one painted brown, the other yellow, would swell with men whom Flynn first got to know by the numbers on their tickets. Slowly he learned their names, and then he learned about the men themselves.
Jarmal Dexter would smoke dope all day under a weeping willow in Boston Common. Randy Phillips spoke incoherently and never looked Flynn in the eye. Jimmy was known for his trick of stashing a fifth up his sleeve and holding his arms like a salute above his head while being frisked. Eddie, who had lost a leg when a bus ran over him, was brought in by the police, unable to walk because he had somehow lost the prosthetic leg he had been fitted with.
A few hours later Flynn’s father showed up. Like all "guests," as those accepted by the shelter are called, he was frisked for booze, a knife, or anything dangerous to himself or others. His father ate a meal, showered, took some clean nightwear, and went upstairs to an assigned bed.
Nick writes, "No ominous music, no deep chords. He wasn’t backlit as the doors blew open, the wind didn’t pick up, the earth kept spinning. Just another ‘new guest’—new ones appeared every day. He raised his arms at the door to be searched, just like everyone else. Bottles or weapons I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son. It all took a few minutes. Nothing was said."
Yin/Yang: Provincetown/Boston
From 1984 through the summer of 1991, Flynn spent the warm months on a boat in Provincetown harbor, a quarter mile from the little houses that hug the curving shore. Winters, he continued working at the Pine Street Inn. The alternating environments of water and concrete, seaside and city, became part of Flynn’s annual cycle. Perhaps these years seasoned the person who became the future poet.
Summers, Flynn dove into the water to check the three Danforth anchors, connected to a swivel, which secured his floating home. Most days, he read or wrote or rowed a skiff to shore. He worked as a waiter at the Moors restaurant and made friends with some of the artists and writers hired by the restaurant’s owner, Marlin Costa, a fervent supporter of the eccentrics that drifted into town. His restaurant once burned down and was rebuilt from driftwood picked up on the nearby beaches.
From the shoreline, Flynn could sight across landmarks, determining accurately if his boat’s anchorage had shifted. His anchors were designed to self-adjust, but he was obliged to monitor their movements in the sandy bottom. By staying mindful of his boat’s position in the water, as measured by a position on terra firma, he succeeded in keeping his vessel securely tethered. It survived a lot of bad weather, including a hurricane that beached and battered boats with supposedly better moorings. One might say, by saving his boat, Nick Flynn saved himself.
At first, Flynn bought a small boat, lived on it for two years, found it too small, then bought a forty-two-foot Chris Craft yacht once owned by a judge—a "faded jewel," he called the damaged relic that became his home for two winters in Boston and two summers in Provincetown. The boat was built in the same year his mother was born; this fact lodged in his mind, and Flynn became obsessed with fixing her up. He worked every available hour to get her launched before the anniversary of his mother’s death, and did so. However, when he pushed the boat into the water, the moment of joy was marred by the nail that pierced his foot on the rickety landing in Humarock harbor. His rubber sneaker filled with blood. A bad omen? If so, it was one he lived with happily for those years on the boat in Provincetown.
After his father became a steady guest at the Pine Street Inn—some days showing up "relatively sober"—Nick took on the duties of driving the shelter’s van, rolling the streets, looking for the homeless who were too downtrodden to walk to the shelter, but often the opposite was true. Nick described to me how he discussed it in his book: "I speculate that perhaps they are too independent for the shelter, and that this self-reliance actually bodes well for them to get off the streets, as they aren’t as institutionalized." Flynn writes about the elegant doorways he scoured on Newbury Street, the open grates that blew hot air from the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, and the ATM machines where his father, late at night, grabbed forty winks, sleeping on the floor by the baseboard out of view of the searchlights of the circling cops.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City opens with an improvised scene in one of these glass boxes: "A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly in the screen."
All the street guys know that you need only a plastic card with a magnetic strip to enter the transparent shelter of the ATM booth. On a cold night, it’s heated inside. Flynn’s father’s toes on his left foot had begun to blacken from frostbite, but he told his son proudly that he walked out of the hospital without allowing the doctors to amputate. He possessed the confidence of a seasoned survivor, devoid of self-pity, especially when he was most down and out. I mentioned this characterization of his father to Nick and he said, "Really? Or is it bravado?"
Flynn’s father believes he is a great writer. His unpublished novel, The Button Man, appears in a brief chapter toward the end of his son’s memoir. In truth, he is not a bad writer, has wit and rhythm, and turns of phrase with amusing self-characterizations that rescue his folly via the charm of his verbal rejoinders; this is perhaps what Nick means by "bravado." However charming, Nick’s father’s writing is inconclusive, lacks drive, the desire to finish. In the memoir’s next-to-last chapter, Flynn presents his father with a copy of his first book, Some Ether, a volume of poetry published by Graywolf Press in 2000. His father opens the book in the middle, reads a poem, and says, "That’s heavy, about the gun."
His father’s reappearance in his life, Nick says in the book, made him feel "transparent," and the word suggests something eerie about how fathers engender their progeny. Flynn’s memoir takes its epigraph from the spare statement of Samuel Beckett, who is even more terse than Shakespeare was in the telegraph brevity of his late style, when he wrote King Lear.
Beckett’s stark exchange in Endgame is Flynn’s Minimalist epigraph:
HAMM: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
NAGG: I didn’t know.
HAMM: What? What didn’t you know?
NAGG: That I’d be you.
Late in his memoir, Flynn presents a surreal section in which there is a village-like effort to canonize the village idiot—a celebration of his father, which is called "Santa Lear" and is performed as a four-person persona poem, with his father taking separate parts of himself. The scene has a pre-Shakespearean innocence to it, much like the mystery and miracle plays that were popular in European villages during the Dark Ages. These plays often had biblical themes with characters from the Bible played by fellow citizens. In Flynn’s riddling play, four Salvation Army Santa workers, neighbors on street corners, are each ghosts of his father. Each Santa speaks more to the reader than to each other, and this play-like chapter may be the most challenging chapter in Flynn’s book. It is a commentary on the grandeur of King Lear via Flynn’s personal access through the character of his father, white-bearded, ringing a bell, doing good works for charity, serving his fellow man. His father now is a bona fide character in a work of nonfiction, made round by the pillow in his tummy. Illuminated by this text, Flynn’s skinny father shares contradictions with a great figure in literature.
At the Pine Street Inn, less numbed with shame than bewildered by an abundance of perception, Flynn cannot speak about his father with his coworkers. What is unforgettable is really the recurrent routine. The absurd becomes actual, everyday. Months pass; nonsense, day by day, becomes normal.
One of the wonders of working at the Pine Street Inn, the reader gathers from the evolving details seeding each short chapter, is the accumulation of alarm, crisis, and need. Acute becomes chronic. Shock becomes soothing and familiar. The Pine Street Inn, with its tall tower, seems the lengthened shadow of the stunted men who endure the humiliation of the grand stack of bricks that so paternally hoards them. Here Nick notes, "Perhaps it’s not the shelter that is the humiliation."
Many times, leaving Boston by automobile on the interstate, I drove past the elegant pinnacle of the Pine Street Inn that was sunken below the highway. I found the building with the bell tower easily on foot years ago when I had occasion to visit, but I noticed I was walking on sidewalks surrounded by spiraling one-way ramps, and I wondered how I would get there by car. Then I wondered how the homeless who could not walk would get there.
Reading Flynn’s book, one begins to inhabit a pervasive feeling of low energy made intensely visible, like constant humming from fluorescent lighting or white noise from a rapidly running river of automobiles. On the wall of the Inn, an enormous sheet of polished stainless steel, riveted at intervals along the edges, serves as a mirror, but the rivets distort the surface. The reflected image becomes a distortion of the person who stares into it. I don’t think Flynn, in his descriptions in the book, detailing the distortions of certain figures, once compared the mirror’s power to distort to a funhouse mirror. However, in this mirror, the faces have strange folds, as if certain smiling muscles in the face have gone unused.
Adding to this disturbing atmosphere, a bizarre and alien smell fills the halls, and one recalls Dante’s inscription over the gate to Hell: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." Some wail loudly, screaming in the brown lobby. Others sit silent in the yellow lobby, the opposite holding room, awaiting entry with coats pulled over their faces. Here is a hive of activity, yet the television drones like a narcotic drip, and white noise silences every complaint. Misery, so easily absorbed, becomes mundane. There are medical emergencies. Ambulances come and go. Police drop off drunks they claim are ambulatory, and yet they slump to the floor when no one helps them stand. The phones ring with anguished calls from anxious relatives. The twenty-four hours of the day are divided into three shifts, and each shift keeps a log that the next shift reads, adds to, and leaves for the next shift to read.
Nick Flynn’s father’s name is Jonathan. In high school he cut a notable figure and was an editor of his class yearbook. Before his shotgun marriage to Nick’s mother, he strolled Harvard Square in tennis whites, racket tucked under his arm, hitting on Radcliffe girls. He was handsome and charming, fit from physical work, spoke well, and said he was a poet, was writing a book.
Jody’s father set him up selling automobiles, and he charged his suits at Brooks Brothers. After two years, the business failed; years later Jonathan set up shop as an artisan named "Sheridan Snow," who specialized in making tables out of driftwood in a seaside town in New Hampshire. A photograph in the local newspaper identifies him, jaunty in a wool watch cap and black sailor’s sweater with buttons across one shoulder, as "a local artist who works the docks." When the driftwood business declined, Jonathan returned to Boston and began a career forging checks in partnership with Dippy-do Doyle and Suitcase Fiddler. The three developed an elaborate scheme to defraud the John Hancock Life Insurance Company by acquiring authentic checks, creating a likeness of the check, returning the real check, opening a bank account where they would deposit the facsimile, and then withdraw the money. The first check they passed was for $8,800. Two years later, Jonathan, now in a federal prison, learned that surveillance cameras were his undoing. Upon his release he developed a keen interest in photography’s power to invent what is real.
Flynn uses photographs, or some variation of a way of making images, to record the foundation scenes that locate his father in his life. The photograph replaces the experience. His entire life, Flynn’s father maintained that he possessed a "photogenic" memory. The word suggests biological connection, what gets passed on. It could mean a photographic memory flawed only by the fact that it was never "developed."
In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud said that, despite his best efforts at analysis, a dream retained a navel of mystery, a knot that could not be unraveled. Nick Flynn, in his quest to know his father, dreams the man who engendered him via the power of literature to concentrate the real into verisimilitude. Each chapter in the memoir takes its own form, evolving out of itself like an oval seed that grows into something original, as an acorn grows into an oak, a bulb into a tulip, or a withered speck into a watermelon. Whatever the full-grown form becomes, the originating mystery remains. Freud wrote an essay about the word uncanny. In German, the word means "unhomelike." For Flynn, the uncanny was the familiar that seemed equally alien.
As Nick matured as a teenager, his remembered portraits of the men in his mother’s life slowed down and became more detailed, fuller with witnessed experience. He possesses a photograph of himself as a two-year-old, reaching for his father’s face, and it makes him think that, yes, his father was a ship of hope, and, yes, he was the hopeless ship that sank without a life raft for his son. Flynn does not cherish this photograph—rather distantly he calls the image an "artifact." He brings to mind an observation of D. H. Lawrence, who said that one only cherishes a photograph when vital feeling for the subject is lost. Perhaps Flynn, not cherishing the photograph, retains vital feeling for his hapless father.
In the first five years of Nick’s life, his mother, Jody, moved to ten addresses within Scituate. She rented rooms or houses or crashed with friends or coworkers—"each a rat hole, a sty, each a step down." Without a high school diploma, she worked multiple jobs in bars or restaurants. When she ran a bakery in a supermarket, Nick wandered the aisles eating candy bars, never imagining that he was stealing. Maybe he didn’t care. He said he felt that "we each had one foot nailed to the sidewalk." In these various hovels—a word that echoes in the memoir in quotations from King Lear—the prepubescent Flynn secured himself by building "forts out of blankets draped over chairs." When his mother went to work, she left the children with her own mother or father, who were divorced, living separately, but both residing locally in Scituate.
At last Jody found a stable job as a bank teller. She took out a loan and bought a house—"a two-thousand dollar ruin, a complete wreck of a house." Seven years later in a second house, Nick helped his mother’s boyfriend, Travis, construct an addition to the house, doubling its size before the building inspector could blink. Without bothering to put shingles on the plywood, they painted the addition yellow, the color of the house, and the new part seemed instantly old. Travis arrived one afternoon to make a repair in the kitchen; Nick avoided him, hiding in a closet, overhearing Travis engage in conversation with Nick’s dog. Travis held its ears tautly, making sure that it listened, telling the animal that in Vietnam he "ate better-looking dogs."
One day a distant cousin visited, a boy slightly older than Nick. His right hand had no fingers. Little blunt knobs, like buds, concluded the digits before they began. They walked together through the woods beyond his grandmother’s house, with Nick taking no obvious note of this deformity. They returned to the house, strolling the backyard, and Nick pointed to a scrawny tree planted by his grandmother three years earlier, a pear tree, now producing its first pear. Nick explained to his vague relation how proud this pear made his grandmother feel.
What is replayed in memory can haunt forever with the resonance of the Sphinx herself. Solemnly, with the fingers of his left hand the deformed boy plucked the pear from its stem and flung it skyward in a slow arc. Landing on the street, it split apart. Though Flynn doesn’t discuss his feelings, instead expressing pain for others less fortunate than himself, the reader feels his broken heart.
From age ten through sixteen, Nick earned money by delivering newspapers. One story that stirred his thinking was the "adventure" of Patricia Hearst, the wealthy heiress of the Hearst media empire, who seemed to turn against her family and join the radical group that abducted her. Especially intriguing was the tale told by her psychiatrists. One proffered the diagnosis that Patricia suffered from "chronic bafflement disorder": "She was simulating behavior, but was later convinced that she was not lying but acting reactively in fear for her life. She had no mental disease or defect."
Perhaps Nick also suffered from chronic bafflement. Drugs and alcohol, in particular, baffled him. He got drunk on beer for the first time when he was twelve and grew to enjoy the chemical haze of combining marijuana and alcohol—but did not imbibe enough to impair his developing skills in working with electrical circuits. In his book Flynn confesses to the delight he feels when a light he’s wired goes on with the click of a switch. When he became bored with the limits of the push-button magic of electricity, he decided he needed more education. At the University of Massachusetts he found himself in a classroom reading the trenchant rants of a deranged king wandering in a barren field where lightning—God’s electricity—split the big trees beyond. Lear was dazed, became crazy like a drunken man. He had lost his children, or his children had lost him. He hobbled, unsteady, looking for shelter in any close-by hovel.
Perhaps the most moving moments in Flynn’s memoir occur fleetingly as he returns to primal scenes with maturing perspectives. Thoughts recur, becoming richer in texture. Flynn scrutinizes, with mercy and compassion, his father’s "flawless" scheme for defrauding banks by passing false checks. Nick seems to want to know, if the system was so flawless, why did his father land in federal prison? Flynn shows that his father’s scheme is the perfect fulfillment of a neurotic purpose. Failure becomes the accomplishment he sought.
Flynn, tracing down details of the men in his mother’s life, interviews not just the dozen men she knew after his father disappeared, but the father himself, whom he videotapes in a documentary set in Boston’s Old Granary Burial Ground. His father walks among the tombstones, which are tilted like mute tongues whose inscriptions are erased by time. Blood of pride courses through Jonathan’s face. Now he feels as photogenic as he knew his novel could be. His son’s camera is his last shot at fame. To commemorate this moment, Flynn’s father advises him, with devastating irony, what to do if he wants to go into white-collar, victimless crime:
One thing—always go to a female teller. Always go to a young female teller. A man would never work. Most of them are homosexuals and I despise homosexuals and they despise me because they can tell I despise them. An African-American? Me? I’d have never gotten off base with an African-American. They had to be young, good-looking women. Some of them even slipped me their phone number, because they wanted to have a little . . . relationship, you know—I even wrote a couple from prison. Never got any reply.
Nick Flynn’s mother was his father’s flawless mark. Flynn, the author, is the flopped image of failure. He was born from a semi-divine mixture of mother love and father fuckup. Now, what poems could he write?
Distilled from Alcohol
Ether, distilled from alcohol, is commonly used by surgeons, as T. S. Eliot observed in The Waste Land, to etherize "a patient on a table" prior to an otherwise painful operation. An archaic use of the word remains today as a metaphorical description of the medium that once was supposed to fill all space in the universe. During a time in human history, all matter was believed to be comprised of four basic elements—earth, air, fire, and water. Ether was thought to be a fifth element, the quintessence, matter so pure, concentrated, and ephemeral that it was regarded as the cosmic mother of all things, lasting from the beginning of time to time’s conclusion in the imagined future.
A bullet killed Flynn’s mother. One of Flynn’s poems says, "She cut a hole in the air." While writing the poems that became Some Ether, Flynn read King Lear, Beckett’s Endgame, and the poems of Emily Dickinson. Another poem, "Bag of Mice," came to him in a dream:
I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you’d written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.
I read the paper bag as a boy’s hovel, a diminutive version of the cardboard boxes his father slept in, on winter nights wrapping his body in Hefty bags and using duct tape to seal them closed. (There exists the connection with the Pine Street Inn’s former history as a firehouse, putting out many major fires in downtown Boston.) The mother’s suicide note burns the carbon letters in which it was composed. The frightened mice, like the author, become "wilder." This poem opens Some Ether; before it was published in the book, "Bag of Mice" appeared as a group of ten poems published by the Nation magazine as part of its "Discovery" award, announcing a new talent on the national scene.
Following college, Flynn, now thirty-one, began a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He knew poets lived in Provincetown, but he had met only a few. He had published a handful of poems at this point, including two in Ploughshares, a journal associated with Emerson College in Boston, where there were several poets on the faculty who also resided in Provincetown. Following his fellowship, Flynn attended graduate school at New York University and worked for nine years at Columbia University’s writing project, teaching poetry in the city’s public schools. His book A Note Slipped under the Door, coauthored with his colleague Shirley McPhillips (published in 2000 by Stenhouse), documents the methods the pair developed to teach embryonic writers how to access their own experience. The schools where he taught in Harlem and the Bronx had crumbling ceilings where the plaster fell on the pages of the students’ notebooks. Blocks of buildings appeared as rubble bombed in a foreign war. Some of the children lived in homeless shelters across the street from the school. Nick realized that one does not move to New York to escape the homeless.
Some schools had a large percentage of homeless students. "This was during the Clinton administration," Flynn said, "a time of prosperity. Yet books were scarce. In sections of Harlem, every other building was empty, without windows. I worked with these kids, who were incredible and beautiful. Just to teach poetry seemed like a radical act, and I felt privileged to work with them. Today the teaching that is pushed is a teaching for testing, aimed at getting the right answer. I was more involved with getting them to think about their lives as they were living them. That’s the poetry I showed them and encouraged them to write. I went to the same school in Harlem for seven years, working there about twenty days each year. I’d move around the city to other schools, but I had twenty days in this one school and I saw them go from kindergarten to leaving."
A first-grader, Anika, began a poem with a question: How come seagulls eat crabs and why can’t crabs eat seagulls? Anika learned to "develop an idea over time," Flynn said, beginning to add details: Birds flying in groups, birds eating bread and worms, birds in their nests feeding their baby birds. Incremental accumulation of detail, slowly absorbed like digestion, became the method that characterized Flynn’s own method of writing poetry. He was learning from his students how people access their own experience.
From his work with the homeless, Nick saw that the ones who came to the Pine Street Inn seemed the ones most able to care for themselves. A construction worker, a man whom Flynn saw sleeping on a park bench, his head resting on the pillow of his hard hat, always wore the same yellow hard hat when he came to the shelter, removing it only when he took long showers to cleanse the white plaster dust a reader feels seeps into every pore of his body. Flynn wanted to talk to him, but he said it was difficult to speak to a man when he was naked. This scene in the shower of the Pine Street Inn echoes another scene in Flynn’s book in which he visits his father in one of the boarding houses Jonathan also, from time to time, lived in. Son enters and father is bathing in the living room. Sits in a tin tub, drinks vodka from a silver chalice. Reminds son of King Lear, gone loony. Yet there is some theater lurking in the old man that comes across as respect by the author for his father.
Flynn estimates that about 80 percent of the homeless are "invisible" because they look like ordinary citizens. His father was invisible. He looked like a bohemian businessman, reading a newspaper during a lunchtime stroll in the Public Garden. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker about the homeless in a recent article, argued eloquently that it would be cheaper to give the chronic homeless a key to a paid-for apartment than to house them in shelters and pay for the legs that need replacement when a bus runs over them.
I visited the Pine Street Inn about the time Flynn was working there, though I did not know him then. I went to visit my brother, Paul, who had lived in Provincetown for a dozen years when I was his Social Security payee, in charge of allocating the checks the government gave him for being disabled with schizophrenia. When he left Provincetown and moved to Boston he went straight to the Pine Street Inn. I am convinced he did so because of the uncanny resemblance of the Inn’s Italian bell tower to the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, which was designed to replicate the famous tower in Sienna, one of the world’s best architectural examples of erecting a tower to signal where the civic heart was sheltered. Instead of the subtle pump of any person’s heart, they filled the pinnacle with a bronze bell, ringing it every half hour.
I went for a walk with my brother along Harrison Avenue, outside the Pine Street Inn, in the shadow of its tower. We came to a corner where we saw a homeless person reaching into a steel-mesh trash can. As we approached, the man pulled out a white Styrofoam tray of half-eaten Chinese food. He broke into a broad smile. As we passed, my brother said, "Hi, Louie." I never forgot that my brother knew the name of a bum who would have been otherwise invisible to me. I kept custody of my eyes, avoiding looking into Louie’s. A "parallel universe"—Nick’s description of his relation to his father while he worked at the shelter where his father was a guest—is routinely achieved in the conventions of theater, where the "fourth wall" exists so we can see the actors but they can’t see us. This device extends into real life as well—perhaps more than we imagine.
Some Ether is divided into four sections: "The Visible Woman," "Oceanic," "Devil Theory," and "Ether." These sections possess separate themes that overlap, intertwine, and coalesce as new experience.
The first section concerns Flynn’s mother. In one poem, she calls her children, Nick and Thaddeus, "curious monkeys." The description may easily have inspired Flynn’s dream about the "baby mice." Jody kept a gun hidden in a shoebox behind her lingerie in a closet, above the reach of her boys. Bullets are made of lead, and there is the suggestion here that the lead in a graphite pencil, forming letters on a burning paper bag, is another form of letting go. Her voice says in the poem:
The youngest
surprised me with a game,
held out his loose fists, begging
guess which hand, but both
were empty. Who taught him that?
The second section, "Oceanic," begins with an epigraph taken from a Coast Guard manual on lifesaving: "The ocean is always trying to find a way into your boat." There are many ways to die, and a sailor knows the value of a life raft most keenly when his boat sinks. Two poems in this section remind us of the value of breathing:
The trick:
hang lifelessly & breathe only air.
And:
I learn about quicksand, how the less you struggle the slower you sink.
"Devil Theory," the book’s third section, exposes one of the demons haunting the author, his father, the absent presence that fills his life when his mother disappears. Flynn’s father, a flimflam man, alcoholic and homeless, sends his son a photograph of himself ringing a bell in a Santa Claus costume, a black pot on a tripod beside him for Salvation Army donations. This picture is a key image; another image also recurs with the force of a bad dream:
The first time I saw him
sleeping on a bench, sunbleach and chill,
I watched him rise, stagger to the edge of the
river
& piss, his cock
wild in his hands.
For five years Flynn’s father lives outside, no roof but the vast sky. He, too, is a poet, and he declares that his misery is merely "grist for the mill." In one conversation he tells Nick, "Being a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger." The sidewalk is his stone mattress. In the following poem, Flynn quotes Tom Waits’s "playful song," but I hear a voice that sounds as if it were drowning in gallons of tears:
Don’t you know there ain’t no devil
there’s just God when he’s drunk.
The fourth section, "Ether," concludes this harrowing book. Einstein said we never discovered ether because "it is not there," Flynn mentions in a poem. The penultimate poem has Flynn’s mother’s hands holding his shoulders from behind, trying to steer him like a car. The last poem, "God Forgotten," combines an intimate moment in an apartment, the poet collapsing his fingers into the grasp of a lover, with the action outside as a man in a wheelchair crosses his legs. When his mother was alive, Nick said to her, Can you hear me?
She was younger than I am now, now she will always be younger.
The poems in Some Ether required a decade to complete. The book is a psychological achievement, a transformation of trauma into an act of grace. Living on his boat in Provincetown during the summer of ’91, Nick took a workshop in poetry from Alan Dugan at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro. He presented Dugan with an early version of one of the poems that eventually made it into Some Ether. Dugan took a glance at it and declared in the gravel voice of his guttural Brooklyn accent, "Oh, anutter dead mutter poem!" Flynn hadn’t realized that the particulars of his life were an established genre in poetry, some kind of elegy mourning the loss of someone loved.
Flynn was bemused by Dugan’s dismissal. But the next week Dugan took him aside and said that, reconsidering, some merit lurked in the poem, except that Nick seemed, he said, to have "a problem with time." Dugan, a student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, explained that "time is what keeps everything from happening all at once," but that Flynn had some impossible desire to present discrete experiences as if they were somehow simultaneous.
In an interview published in Provincetown Arts in 1990, I asked Alan Dugan if he felt old when he published his first book when he was thirty-nine, mentioning that Robert Frost had declared that a poet finds his voice around the time he is forty. Dugan bluntly told me that Frost was mostly nonsense, since a poet like Dylan Thomas was writing some of his best verse by the time he was seventeen. He mentioned that Keats died at twenty-five and that Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who wanted to make himself king over Henry VIII, was beheaded at age twenty-nine—but not before he wrote a huge amount of sonnets in the eleven years before his death. Howard, Dugan said, "established the sonnet by Englishing it. He was mature." I asked Dugan if it was accurate to describe him as a Brooklyn street kid who grew up in a family that did not respect poetry.
"Oh, no," Dugan replied. "My father recited popular poetry, like Kipling, or ‘The Shooting of Dan McGee’ by Robert Service, who wrote about ‘hunger not the belly kind that’s banished with bacon and beans, / but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that means.’ That’s one of the reasons I became a poet, to beat him." Dugan was driven to create what his father could only recite.
Dugan told me he felt guilty about this desire, but that he could not help himself since he lacked respect for his old man. This issue brings to mind a scene in Flynn’s memoir in which the newly published poet hands his father his first book. His father says, "I’ll be damned. My son has beaten me."
Over the years, many contemporary poets helped the young Flynn find his way, including Marie Howe, Carolyn Forché, Tony Hoagland, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Doty, and Fred Marchant, who worked closely with Flynn in the final revisions of the manuscript before it was accepted by Graywolf Press. Flynn knew many visual artists as well and, wanting to learn various artistic processes, participated in making collaborative collages that functioned like question-and-answer sessions with a trusted colleague. With the artist M.P. Landis, Flynn used the post office to transmit messages written on page-sized pieces of plywood, mailing responses back and forth until they found an image that satisfied them both. This collage technique became an aspect of his aesthetic. In Some Ether, some poems established themselves as what Flynn called "breakthrough" poems, where disparities came together with fresh resonance. One of these was "Splenectomy," in which, following his motorcycle crash, Flynn, badly bruised, attempted in an "adrenalin rush" to climb back on the machine. "I could walk. I felt fine," he told me. "That was the danger." At the hospital, doctors removed his spleen, but he lived to write about it.
Fred Marchant observed how Flynn’s "problem with time" could be resolved via his instinctive collage method if he only could attain another "purchase" on his difficult material. I asked Marchant to elaborate and he sent me this response: "I introduced into our conversation the metaphor of gaining a purchase, imagining that both of us were on a very steep and windy overhang, a very dangerous mountain. The mountain, of course, was composed out of the stories Nick was telling in Some Ether, stories of profound trauma, and recovery, of a sort. In fact, it was my sense of him surviving all that he was telling me about that made me think of a mountainside of material, and us—author and reader—trying to get some purchase or footing in order to survive. The poems do have that precipitous vertigo one feels looking down from a great height.
"Purchase not only meant a psychological handhold, but an artistic grip. As I recall the conversations, we talked mostly about his lineation, how he let his lines float into the reader’s hands, catching the sense that saved them from obscurity. Intersecting events and feelings sometimes feel like intrusive memories, but Nick’s genius is to respond to such intrusions through metaphor, irony, wit, with his own earned durability."
The Hive We Happen to Inhabit
Blind Huber, Flynn’s second collection of poetry, published in 2002 also by Graywolf, is entirely unlike Some Ether. Flynn started the book with the intent to keep writing the poems that ended up in Some Ether; he thought he had discovered his core subject in the turbulent history of his family. But he soon discovered this was not true. If the lesson of Some Ether was to put the "ethereal" elements of his life into coherent form, how could the journey of an individual poem enfold into the journey of the book? His ambition was to use the struggle he experienced writing his first book as a way to get a new purchase on the book as a structure in itself, as opposed to the individual structure of any one poem.
Flynn received a fellowship from the MacDowell artists’ colony in New Hampshire, and he used this time to venture beyond the sticky issues that enveloped him. He learned that bees travel miles from the hive, seeking flowers and clover unknown to other bees. Before leaving for the residency, at a dinner party, Flynn met a guest who spoke rhapsodically of bees, and he began to read about bees. He visited beekeepers, including Helen Miranda Wilson and Paul Tasha, friends who kept hives on Cape Cod. Each beekeeper seemed to possess knowledge based on personal experience with bees. Deep study and direct handling seemed the common denominator, and Flynn guessed that beekeeping was a little like poetry. "The knowledge," he said, "gets passed on from person to person."
Flynn read the writings of François Huber, the eighteenth-century beekeeper who kept records of bee behavior for fifty years. His letters became the foundation of modern knowledge of the honeybee. "Huber," Flynn told me, "did the deep work. He sat before the hive and meditated. He happened to be blind since childhood, the result of scarlet fever." The "advantage" of Huber’s disability was his obligation to develop a symbiotic relationship with his assistant, a man named Burnens, which deepened Huber’s knowledge because it mimicked the mutual interdependence of the queen bee, a virtual prisoner of the hive. A hive can be the home of 50,000 bees. The male drones have the sole purpose of impregnating the queen, then dying. The female workers fly twelve miles a day to gather from flowers what is needed to make honey and the protein-rich royal jelly that sustains the queen in producing her eggs.
Huber wrote his own reports, but more often in letters he commented on the published writings of the day’s leading scientists, admiring their findings but politely pointing out additions and corrections, which startled them. Increasingly, the experts visited the devoted amateur, the gentleman beekeeper who seemed to understand aspects of beekeeping that had eluded them. "Blindness," Flynn told me, "forced Huber to depend on others. But it goes beyond dependence. Blindness is only an aspect of being human. Blindness simply allowed him to expand the other aspects." Here we can make a connection between Flynn’s affection for Samuel Beckett, author of Endgame, in which the main character, blind and bound by his wheelchair, depends on his servant for his sight.
Huber, Burnens, and the bees speak in Flynn’s bee book, each within their limitations.
Blind Huber says: Opaque glow where my eyes should be. . . I sit in a body and think of a body, I picture / Burnens’s hands, my words / make them move. I say plunge them into the hive, / & his hands go in.
Burnens says: His words / move my hand, but I name / what is seen.
The queen bee says: When we sting // you scream. . . . the keeper’s fingers ranging over us. It’s not / how I want to die.
The drones say: We are made of waiting . . . we
. . . sicken ourselves on honey / we did nothing to produce.
The worker bees say: A drone / failed to follow . . . gorging himself on honey, // & ten of us surrounded him / held his mouth shut. . . . After this seven- / month slumber, honey-stupored / and warm, we unfold our / wings, shake off // the hive, set out for buckwheat / and the low flowers of spring. We work / ourselves ragged, each day // going out, to come back heavy / with nectar & pollen. . . . Nine / days in the field, then our wings / are shot.
Blind Huber says: I no longer know what’s outside my mind / & what is in. . . . I wonder about the queen, her mystery. . . . What are they doing now? I ask. Crawling over each other, / walking in circles, Burnens replies. . . . not one of my visitors, learned men of / science, not one // will notice what’s been taken, just a blind / man staring day after day into loud / air. . . . I point to the hive / & and they stare at my hand. . . . Burnens raises a finger, one / by one to my lips, sticky with the / harvest. I name each / clover, stargazer, swamp flower.
Burnens says: Who else / to make his words real? I wander room-to- / field, do his bidding. None of the / rooms connect, except by months.
Blind Huber, the book, connects the beehive to the human home, experienced as a sequence of discrete moments; it does this via analogy, but it does so with such withering irony that the analogy bleeds to death. Flynn in the hive, with its compacted stench, is perhaps referencing the "hot room" at the Pine Street Inn, where the clothes of the homeless are uniformly disinfected in temperatures exceeding 180 degrees. With his coworkers, he joked about sex in this chamber where the smell was so pungent, concentrated, and amplified into essence of sweat that everyone avoided an encounter. The mystery of unity is expanded, released, scattered to the winds, and its pieces are reduced to powder.
He Already Had Feet; He Needed to Find Shoes
Some mornings when Nick woke up on his boat in Provincetown harbor, the fog was so thick that he could not see land. A forlorn moan penetrated the atmosphere, the foghorn’s dirge groaning in E-flat. After his mother died, he cried every day for a year, and then the tears dried up. He quit drinking alcohol and took up with tea. He swam almost every day and got to know the location of every pool between Provincetown and New York City. He likes to do laps for half an hour, turning back and forth in the water, going from one end to the other. Lean and lithe, like a fish, his body seems able to snap with the force of a fish tail. His face is smooth and calm, his watery eyes are introspective. He is neither hungry nor happy. He could be curled on a buoy eddying on its mooring. After the publication of Some Ether, he received the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, which required that he spend a full year living outside the United States. The first thing he did was buy a sturdy pair of shoes. He visited Vietnam, Rome, and Africa.
Pity is an emotion. When we feel it for other people, the emotion is noble and we call it empathy or sympathy, a caring for the misfortune of others. This came to my mind as I brought up our new topic of discussion, how fathers create sons who are forced to make sense of their progenitors. I said, "When I did my interview with Stanley Kunitz for the Paris Review, I began with this question, ‘Is it an actual fact that your father killed himself in a public park some months before you were born?’"
"The Portrait," Flynn said. "Yes."
I described how Kunitz coughed, cleared his throat, and stuttered, "Ar, arr, arr." He recalled he didn’t know much about his father’s suicide. The event "floated" in the air of his childhood. When he was older, he went to City Hall, and the record showed that his father had ingested a certain poison. In Kunitz’s Collected Poems, the mystery of the father’s importance to the son is the subject of his greatest poems. I asked Flynn if he knew of Jason Shinder’s anthology of father-son poems, Divided Light. Shinder’s book was inspired by Kunitz’s conviction that the "lost father" was a significant theme for many poets, past and present. Dante wrote that he and Beatrice enter a pearl-like substance that encloses them, "Within itself, as water in a well / Receives, remaining whole, a ray of light."
"An important book, yes," he said.
The father in Kunitz’s poem has an inscrutable stone face. It turns implacably and unfeelingly toward the son, and that is your father, a nonspeaking noumenon, obliging you to reflect upon yourself. I believe that Flynn’s struggle with his father is the key reason Kunitz felt Flynn was so worthy of sponsorship. Kunitz believed that the first duty of the poet was to create the person who would write the poems. I asked, "Did you speak to Stanley about fathers and sons?"
"We did not talk directly about it, although I go to him with that knowledge. Encountering ‘The Portrait’ was a hugely liberating moment for me—to see how a central core lifetime issue can be distilled into a few lines, having each line turn with surprise. From one line to the next, you learn whole, new information, each line adding an element, increasing tension."
Often, when a person describes how they read another’s poem, they also describe the elements they are conscious of in their own poetry. Flynn adds incremental knowledge. His mother pulls the trigger of a revolver. She is shot. Where? In the chest. We want to know she didn’t shoot herself in the face. How does one teach poetry to young people? That was the question Flynn pondered in his teaching manual, A Note Slipped under the Door. Each chapter addresses an issue in writing. Describing how a poet fashions an image, Flynn introduced the chapter with a vignette about the green Corvair driven by his grandmother, his mother’s mother, who did a lot of the raising of young Nick and Thaddeus when their mother was working. "We spent a lot of time at her house," he said, "She was a wonderful eccentric alcoholic. We’d go to the dump in her car. Dirt accumulated in the backseat of the car. Things ended up growing. Plants, vines, watermelons. She threw the trash in the backseat, and we drove to the dump in a little sporty Corvair. The garbage leads to regeneration. It’s something of a Buddhist image and it’s also somewhat embarrassing. There is an invasion by nature, yet there is human thoughtlessness. The children see it." Flynn and his brother still speak of the image, but the image has not yet appeared in Nick’s poetry.
People use language to become powerful in their understanding, even if they are weak in relating the stories they have to tell. Somehow, the history of the race encodes the individual person’s growth. "The hive is very much like that," Flynn said.
Frozen Man
Continuing our conversation about Blind Huber, I asked Flynn if Huber was married, and he said he didn’t know. "I purposely did not research his life. He was blind, he studied a hive for fifty years, he had an assistant; he learned much of what we know about bees. Or relearned it. You feel the knowledge was already there, but was lost. That, too, is beautiful. Medicine now is catching up to what we’ve known for thousands of years. The shoes they found on the guy in 1991 who was frozen for thousands of years in the Alps, the Iceman, the hiking shoes on him are as good as any shoes made now. He was one of the oldest humans ever found, and he made his own shoes. You could climb Mount Everest in them, the shoes he was wearing. Poetry is very much about old knowledge, ancient knowledge that looks forward and back."
They found the frozen man in a bog in the Alps. And Flynn’s fascination with shoes came alive with the discovery. They were a type of snowshoe, with a wide oval network of wooden branches to dissipate the walker’s weight on the sinking snow; they had bearskin lowers, stuffed with soft Alpine meadow grasses, and deerskin uppers. Shoes that would carry a man up mountains and through time, connecting him to his own distant ancestry.
"God Forgotten," the last poem in Flynn’s first book, Some Ether, presents loved one with lover. Their fingers intertwine. Flynn said that it is a "collage poem, perhaps five attempts distilled into a single poem." His technique is to take images that don’t work and relocate them to where they belong. Image must grasp image. Embracing in the bedroom, Flynn’s lovers do not look out the window of their upstairs apartment, but the poet puts in the poem what is happening outside the window. A tree grows out of a sidewalk. There, below, a man in a wheelchair crosses his legs. We have two scenes, one inside, the other outside.
Flynn writes about the physical act of two people folding their fingers together: "I put my hand on yours and say show me and you begin slowly, steadily. I had a lot of images, pages, rewriting, restructuring, moving images around—almost like a filmmaker, a collagist, editing, juxtaposing one image next to another to see what happens in the space between them. ‘God Forgotten’ is one of those poems. I was able to take three different images from three different poems and weave them together."
Flynn is driven by the idea that it is the job of the artist to distill elements of the world into something that can fit into a container. The epigraph in Some Ether is from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "He already had the water, but he had to discover jars." I might respond, Nick already had the feet, but he had to discover shoes.
He does not walk around in robes and sandals. He was born in a predominately Irish Catholic town where there were a certain percentage of WASPs. His mother did not raise her children as Catholic. His mother’s father was of Protestant English ancestry. Thus, his family felt, somewhat, that they were outsiders in Scituate. But Flynn has a relationship with Catholicism and can trace the images that surrounded him as he grew up. "Seeing them," he said, "confuses me. I question them a lot."
Somehow Nick and I ended up talking about religion. I asked him about his spiritual feeling.
He said, "I feel there is great wonder in the world, great things we can’t understand, which we should stand in awe of. I don’t think mankind is at the top of the pile. I don’t think everything else is below us. Words are a great talismanic mystery. The power of naming is a huge abstraction that unifies the world. You have to find someone who has done it before. That’s why a Stanley, a Dugan, or a Mary Oliver animates Provincetown, a place where poetry can thrive. When I ended up here in the early eighties, I knew poets were here, even if I only read their poems. When I moved to Europe I tried to find Beckett in the cafés of Paris. I wanted to run into him because he was so important to me. Poetry feels very much like a guild system. Knowledge is passed on person to person. That’s why teaching is so important to poetry."
Flynn never met Shakespeare, never met Beckett, met Kunitz and Dugan, living guides; that was enough.

CHRISTOPHER BUSA is editor of Provincetown Arts.