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NICK FLYNN  Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France's Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000) and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio's "This American Life," and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include "field poet" and artistic collaborator on the film Darwin's Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston; he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere. The above paragraph comes from Nick Flynn's web page: www.nickflynn.org. The following interview is culled from several emails over the course of two weeks.
Wesley Gibson
February 2007 San Francisco, California MARY Magazine: I was going to send you three series of three questions, some of them very frivolous, and there still may be one or more frivolous questions, ultimately. I've been mulling it over and I think I want to start with the poetry since you started as a poet and I somehow assume that you still consider yourself primarily a poet. I'm only going to ask one question because it's a complicated question and it will ultimately lead to questions I want to ask about the memoir. So, here goes: Some Ether is mostly an autobiographical book. The rhythms of it strike me as being mostly in the service of the narrative. It also seems, in a way, like an elegiac and romantic book. By romantic, what I mean is that in "Fugue," for example, it's really a description of sex, but it's a description of sex in which the narrator hungers for something he wants from the sex that maybe, unexpectedly by the end, he gets. But it seems that even though it's very much a poem rooted in the carnal, the carnal feels faint to me, overwhelmed by the spiritual or emotional or psychological quest that is embodied by the carnal. |
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Nick Flynn: If I had to articulate it, I guess I'd say that I sometimes think of sex as a dangerous element, like the ocean, in that it is best to stand before it in awe and not expect that you can use it for anything but what it is. When you try to use sex to, say, be intimate, it usually backfires. It is hard enough to simply be present in the face of it, and to avoid being crushed beneath the waves, and to enjoy the ride.
MM: Let me elaborate with Blind Huber. It's a radically different book. It almost seems like it could have been written by a different poet. The rhythms, the words, the lines are very tight. It is a book, which, while it may ultimately describe the spiritual, is rigorously rooted in the physical world. And it is a merciless physical world of death and necessity, which may describe a kind of beauty, but it's a hard, unforgiving beauty. There doesn't seem to be a droplet of romanticism in it. NF: At certain points in the writing of Blind Huber, I was very influenced by the Victorian romantic notion of being able to name and understand the entire world, in order to be carried away on some ecstasy of meaning, but it just isn't my temperament. I seem to tend much more toward bewilderment than understanding, which is perhaps why I'm a poet. A writer like, say, Philip Roth, seems to believe that he can nail down the essence of a person in words, if given enough words, whereas I think the best we can do is circle around an unknowable center, describing as best we can how that person moves through the world and what that looks like. MM: Perhaps what I want to say is that instead of being a book of painful longing for things to be different, it tries to accept the world on its own brutal terms and to find the meaning and beauty in that. NF: I did find a lot of beauty and meaning in studying bees, in immersing myself in that culture, for the six years I wrote the book. And not just in the natural world, but in the world of those who studied bees before me, and their obsessive passion. And the metaphoric levels one can read into that passion, which leads me back to the body and its dangers. MM: As I was reading it, I was thinking of Louise Gluck and Ted Hughes. Gluck, in The Wild Iris, is looking for God in nature, but it is far from a comforting, nineteenth-century vision of nature. She seems to want to come to terms with and find salvation in a natural world that is violent and remorseless. Ditto for Hughes's early work. His greatness and originality is in his project of trying to accept and record and celebrate a natural world without anthropomorphizing it. These things, of course, tell us something about the brutality of our own animal natures. It seems to me that you are after something similar. NF: I don't really find the natural world all that brutal, compared with the brutality that we humans are able to manifest. Nature just is, and we are part of nature, and our knowledge comes from nature, but we also have this consciousness, which creates all sorts of projections and small-hearted actions at times, as well as acts of utter compassion. MM: Why the radical change of style and content and even concerns? NF: I think the concerns of Some Ether and Blind Huber are perhaps similar, only in Blind Huber there is this thin veneer of persona. This is perhaps the main difference, aside from the sparseness you mentioned earlier, as compared to the ranginess of Some Ether. The personas of Blind Huber allowed me a freedom to access messier emotional terrain, like small-heartedness, rage, pettiness. All of these are obviously projections and likely have nothing to do with bees. Gluck and Hughes were certainly present in the background, especially Hughes's Crow, for it is so clearly a mask talking. MM: Did this in any way lead you to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City? NF: I think of Suck City as a synthesis of both earlier books, at least in emotional resonance, in that the apparent clinical distance of Blind Huber meets the apparent throbbing heart of Some Ether. On closer inspection, though, Blind Huber may be a more emotionally present book than Some Ether, in that the narrator of Some Ether could be read as a bit emotionally disconnected, a bit or a lot damaged, and the narrators of Blind Huber are really struggling to accept the world as it is. And perhaps both those temperaments are present in Suck City, especially in that space of slippage between the (my) father and the son (me), and how their (our) lives are versions of the other. Does this make any sense, or are these the ravings of a lunatic? MM: Both. Did you write the memoir because you felt, to tell this story, that you needed a larger, more narrative form than poetry could provide? NF: When Suck City began, it had no form. I had no idea what it would become, what shape it would take, though it did seem it would need more narrative connective tissue than usually found in poetry. At certain junctures it really could have been anything—a play, a movie, a collection of poems. I still like to think of it as a hybrid of sorts, that I'm tricking people into reading poetry. Also, after writing Blind Huber, I found that I liked the tension and limitations inherent in dealing with nonfiction, that one is forced to wrestle with and create from the stuff at hand. MM: How did you write it? What I mean is that while it has great narrative coherence, it feels like it was written in fragments. Did you write it as out-of-sequence fragments? If so, how did you go about piecing it together? NF: Ah, yes, the fragments. It was a labor-intensive project, involving various timelines, graphs, scissors, and glue. At one point in Rome, where I spent two years finishing the book, I had to have a map to my apartment, a map to the hundreds of small piles that represented various beats in the narrative. I developed a great respect for the heavy lifting that you novelists have to do, carrying entire books around in their heads. As a poet I had to approach this task in small manageable fragments. And, as I mentioned earlier, then I had to go back and fill in the narrative connective tissue. Otherwise it would be all poetic fragments, and the result would be like eating too much cake. MM: I really like the odd parts of the book, like the Santas' play, which reads like American Beckett. It almost summarizes the emotional concerns and even some of the facts of the book. It interests me because it seems to, in some way, address how the stuff of life becomes the art of life. Why did you want to include these flights of fancy? NF: I'm really glad you like those parts; it means a lot coming from you. Not everyone does, and the Santa Lear part especially seems to be one of those lines where one side loves it, the other side finds it juvenile. Though I don't see what's so bad about being juvenile. I had hoped it to be a transformative moment in the narrative, the point of psychic breakdown without using those words, but having it enacted in a way where the world became undeniably weird. MM: One of the things that I like about Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is that I don't see it as a book of answers. Nothing, it seems to me, is resolved—not the relationship with the father, not coming to some sort of terms with the mother's suicide. (The whole idea of coming to terms with something like that, as if it could somehow be labeled and put on a shelf and then you sort of clap the dust of it from your hands has always struck me absurd.) I suppose the book's one answer, if you could call it that, is your own recovery. But you don't make a big deal of it and I only see it as a minor arc of the book. If you can articulate it, what are the possible meanings that you want the reader to take away with them from the book? NF: Maybe I'll call my next book The Book of Answers. I like the sound of it. But the problem with a book like Suck City—one of the problems is that in the seven years I worked on it, whatever answers might have presented themselves in various drafts proved, with time, to be false comfort. Even recovery, as anyone who has stuck it out for any length of time will tell you, does not guarantee anything like sanity or happiness. I didn't focus on it that much on the book because it seemed so many others had written about it already and, in the end, one addict is like another. That's the thing with addicts: We think our lives are wild (and I don't want to minimize the wild events that can come from a good long run), but in the end it is all of the same tenor, kind of one-note. It is only through unplugging from alcohol that I was able to find some compassion with my still-drunken father—a strange and beautiful paradox. MM: Is this book as much about homelessness as it is about anything else? NF: I thought so, but my editor would often write on my many drafts that she was growing weary of reading about the homeless, which I thought was odd, since I thought she'd bought a book about homelessness. But I eventually understood and toned it down some. I mean, we as a society have developed this blindness when it comes to the homeless. The homeless have become virtually invisible, like we're living in a in a sci-fi novel or something. So I thought that I should dole the homeless stuff out in small spoonfuls, so that the readers wouldn't choke on what is already difficult to see. MM: I can't resist this one personal question: What did your dad think when he read it? NF: I don't claim to know anything about my father's inner life, though I have been privileged to have occasional glimpses, or seemingly so, though it is likely merely my own projections. I handed him the book, reminded him that it was about how we met, that the title had come from something he'd said, and he seemed impressed, confused, proud, and defeated. The next time I saw him he pointed out that I'd gotten a few things wrong, that I'd written that he was not a very good car salesman, when in fact he was the number one car salesman in New England that year. I apologized, and we had a nice talk, writer to writer, about the unreliable narrator. By the next time I saw him he'd lost his reading glasses, and even though I offered to get him a new pair, I don't know if he ever finished the book. MM: If a memoir is, by necessity, self-examination, did you tell us the worst thing about yourself? If so, was it hard? If not, why not? NF: I didn't tell you the worst thing, the worst thing is __________, when I _________, and ended up _____________. Ah, another book idea: the memoir Mad Lib. In Suck City, I tried to be as honest about my own shortcomings and failings as possible, if only because I find it false when I read a memoir where the narrator is either a pure victim or a pure saint. I just don't believe anyone should carry those burdens. MM: And finally, a confession. Though you may not remember this, I was the one who put the dollar, mini-sized spray can of Aquanet in your mailbox at MacDowell, which I bought at the downtown Ames from those rows upon rows of plastic bins in which they had things for a dollar. Victoria Lancelotta and I went down there every night, and every night I bought some dollar thing. I gave it to you because I had a Colony crush on you, though I am now baffled as to how I thought the Aquanet might further my cause since (a) I put it there anonymously and (b) while Aquanet may have been some sort of aphrodisiac in the bouffant-inflated Sixties, it seems unlikely to inspire anything but bewilderment or perhaps nostalgia (my mother kept a can on her dresser by her Styrofoam heads of wigs) either then or now. NF: That was you? Why didn't you make a sloppy pass? It's likely I made a few in those weeks. That was an amazing time, and I'm glad you were there. I was riddled with anxiety most of the time and swam everyday in that pond miles away just to feel something that wasn't anxiety. I probably thought the Aquanet was a product of my subconscious: My mother also had a big can of it next to her Styrofoam wig heads—when I was ten I used to light a match to the spray and send a flame across the room. If I was a visual artist, I think my medium would be Aquanet and Styrofoam wig heads. But instead I write poems. |